The Occasional Unlucky Frog

I was only eight years old when I got my very own Red Ryder® BB gun for Christmas. Many would say that eight years old was way too young for a boy to have a BB gun, and my mother would strongly agree; but somehow I managed to convince her that I was mature enough to have one. We were living near Ashland, Oregon, at the Jackson Hot Springs RV Park, named as such because the hot springs fed right into the swimming pool. It was paradise on earth for a young boy, even with the smell of sulfur on the air. We were surrounded by woods with a small creek running through it, which then fed into a river on the other side of the highway. There was an abundance of wildlife to experience with plenty of salamanders and frogs by the creek, and, of course, birds - a lot of birds. And now I had my very own BB gun.  

As expected, I got all the usual lectures concerning gun safety. Don’t point it at people, don’t shoot people and don’t shoot other people’s stuff. And, being eight years old, I, of course, completely and utterly ignored whatever mom had to say. I was a real big boy now. I could shoot cans, protect my family and even hunt wild animals. I also had my very best friend Roy to play with. Roy had gotten a BB gun for Christmas, also. What could be better?

Roy was most definitely the better behaved of the two of us, as I was the proverbial “bad boy” at the time. Roy and I would go out with our rifles and shoot all kinds of things. We had paper targets, of course, and back then soda came in glass bottles - a bonus. With lots of practice we both got pretty good at shooting inanimate objects, and, as we got better, the inanimate targets started to lose their attraction. Soon we were shooting other stuff, such as the trains going by on the other side of the highway and the leaves in the trees.  Really we just started shooting at whatever got in our way or we thought would make a cool sound. One day we found a dead porcupine, and I can’t even begin to count how many BB’s we shot into that poor animal’s carcass. Of course it was down by the creek and we started shooting at things in the water. Floating sticks made for great moving targets and then the occasional unlucky frog would cross our sights. We never did manage to hit a frog as they were too small and too fast for our meager skills, but it was much more exciting if the targets were moving.

Then came the fateful day when Roy and I were walking along and I spotted a bird in a tree. She was just sitting there, and I had never tried to shoot a bird and neither had Roy. Roy didn’t know if it was such a good idea to shoot the bird, but I, silver-tongued devil that I was, talked him into trying, by convincing him that he really wasn’t that good of a shot and would probably miss her anyway.  Roy took aim, squeezed the trigger and killed that bird with one shot. She dropped dead right at our feet. Now neither Roy nor I had ever actually killed anything before with our guns. We had, like other normal boys, killed plenty of bugs, and I had caught and killed some fish, but this was different and we both knew it. We poked the bird with our gun barrels and she didn’t move. She was dead. Roy burst into tears after seeing what he had done and ran home. 

Not long after that Roy’s, mother had a conversation with my mother about what a terrible thing I had talked her son into doing and how we weren’t to play together anymore. And it was not very much longer after that that my mother and I had a little heart-to-heart talk about what is right and wrong.  I know she felt pressured into giving me that gun and I did lose it for a while. But I also lost a friend that day. To this day I feel responsible for talking him into doing something he didn’t want to do and that he most definitely did not feel right doing. I look back now and find that not only did I sometimes bow to my peers, but that I put pressure on my friends and family too. I often find myself wondering how Roy’s life turned out and if he learned to stand up for what he believed was right that fateful day at a little trailer park just outside of Ashland Oregon.