Blood Trail - C. J. Box [48]
He made it a point to find and hold sets of eyes until the viewer had no quarter and was forced to look away, conceding Moore’s superior focus and passion. His voice was deep and raspy, his words dramatic, if well rehearsed, Sheridan thought. She recognized much of the exact wording from his website.
“I’m not saying there aren’t still a few places on this earth where hunting is necessary, for remote tribes in remote places. But in this day and age, where technology has made it possible to feed us all without our having to go out and get our hands bloody, hunting is an anachronism. Can anyone in this room tell me why there are men in the richest country on the face of the earth who find it necessary to take a gun they shouldn’t be allowed to have in the first place and go out into our nature—that’s right, it belongs to all of us—and kill an innocent animal with a high-powered rifle simply for the twisted fun of it? How would you like it if somebody killed your pet dogs and cats, or your little sisters or brothers . . . simply because they loved doing it? It’s the same thing, believe me.”
Sheridan stopped sketching, realizing she had been idly working on a scene of a falcon dropping from the sky to hit a rabbit. Trying not to draw attention to herself, she moved her arm over the drawing so no one could see it.
As Klamath Moore went on, Sheridan found herself looking at the woman with him, who she assumed was his wife. The woman sat on a chair next to Mrs. Whaling’s desk with her hands in her lap, her eyes on Moore. She was beautiful, with high cheekbones, obsidian eyes, and long dark hair parted in the middle. She wore jeans and a loose chambray shirt over a white top and little makeup because it wasn’t necessary. Sheridan guessed she was Native, and she had a kind of calm serenity about her that was soothing to behold. She’d not said a word, but her presence seemed to bolster Moore’s message in a way that was hard to explain. As her man spoke, she would occasionally look down into the stroller next to her and brush her sleeping baby’s apple-red cheeks with the back of her fingers. Sheridan resented Klamath more—and her teacher—for not introducing the woman and baby as well.
“Hunting is a dying activity in the United States, I’m happy to say,” Moore said, “but it isn’t dying fast enough. Most studies say less than five percent of Americans hunt. That’s around fifteen million hunters. Around here, I’d guess the percentage is much higher, maybe thirty percent? Fifty percent? Too damned many, that’s for sure. But whatever the number, these so-called sportsmen kill over two hundred million birds and animals every year. Two hundred million! That includes four million deer, two hundred thousand elk, twenty million pheasants, and over twenty-five thousand bears. Think about this kind of slaughter on a mass scale—it’s horrendous! My mission in this life is to hasten the overdue death of blood sports and to raise awareness about what it really is, what it really does. I firmly believe that every time a rich man pulls the trigger and an animal dies, we as human beings die just a little bit as well. In nature, predators kill only the sick and weak. But hunters kill the biggest, healthiest, and strongest in the herd, which plays hell with the balance of nature. We will never achieve moral greatness until this practice is abolished.”
From behind Sheridan, a male voice mumbled, “What bullshit.” It was Jason Kiner. Jason’s father, like Sheridan’s, was a game warden. Sheridan had fought with Jason the year before but they’d mended fences, just like their fathers had. Sheridan still wasn’t sure she liked him, but she felt a growing kinship with him as Moore went on because he, like her, felt their fathers were being attacked here in their classroom.
“Ah,” Moore said, stopping and raising a stubby finger in the air. “I hear some dissent. That’s okay, that’s okay. I encourage it. It’s the American way and I’m all for the American way. And I expect it, here in the heart of what I like to call the Barbaric States. Do you know what a barbarian