Hunter’s Mother
by Patti See
From the Wayfarer Archive, Autumn 2014
In northwestern Wisconsin, where I’ve lived my whole life, there are more bars per capita than grocery stores and nearly everyone can complete the line “You might be a redneck if”. Hunting rituals, including the family hunting cabin, are not just a tradition, they are sacrosanct. As a kid, I tagged along with my dad and brothers when they went small game hunting. I didn’t have to get stuck carrying a bread bag full of dead squirrels too many times before I realized hunting wasn’t for me. My dad went to the same hunting cabin each year with friends. Once he forgot his gun and didn’t notice till two days into the trip. This became a running joke in our family—“don’t forget your gun”—though it confirmed what my mom guessed all along: Dad went to the cabin more for the food and drink and camaraderie than to shoot anything.
I grew up in a hunting family in a small town where it was commonplace to see deer carcasses hanging from garage rafters or clotheslines during and after the nine-day gun season. Still, when my thirteen-year-old son went on his first hunt, I tried not to obsess about my only child out in the woods with heavily-armed hunters. I told myself, His dad is in another tree stand, just a yell away. I purposely didn’t think “scream.” The tree-stand isn’t that far off the ground—like a tree house, I rationalized. He’s wearing a safety harness and covered in orange from head to toe. He’s never been a child to take chances. He’s a rule follower, a Boy Scout. He’ll be fine. Even though the other guys in the hunting cabin had names like Moose and Boone, they’re upright citizens or at least careful hunters. Only their hunting party was on this stretch of private land. I said this to myself about fifty times in the two days Alex was gone.
The “opening weekend” of 2004 was cold and rainy, and after the first day, Alex didn’t have much to tell. This was the first time my soon to be ex-husband ever hunted, an overdue rite of passage for any thirty-six-year-old Wisconsin man. After we separated, Alex’s father was even more focused on creating for our son the “All-American” boyhood that he never experienced himself. This meant going camping, fishing, and now, hunting.
Neither Alex nor his dad saw a deer. “I had to sit in the cold for ten hours,” Alex told me. “There was nothing to do.”
“Should have brought a book,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“And miss the deer!” he answered quickly. “I slept for awhile,” he said. “I dreamt there were camels everywhere, hiding behind trees, and I was going to shoot them.”
Locals call dreaming about the hunt a symptom of “deer fever.” I don’t know what to call Alex’s malady. I laughed when he described how he was creeping up on camels.
“So, did you like hunting?” I asked.
“It was alright,” he said. Later I found out that Alex got lost in the woods, his dad’s gun misfired, and the two of them drove into a culvert. Add the rain and wind, and I wouldn’t call the first day of their hunt “fun.”
When I heard about someone shooting deer hunters in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, like anyone with her own hunters in the north woods that day, I felt a fist in my stomach. I knew Alex and his dad were at least an hour’s drive from the town I’d seen on TV, but still. When I heard the name, Chai Soua Vang, my gut tightened. No longer just a hunter, but a “Hmong hunter.” In the Chippewa Valley where I live, Hmong clan names like Vang and Xiong outnumber Jones and Smith. They are my friends and neighbors, but in a place that is 92% Caucasian, unfortunately, they are still seen as the “other.” One online forum headline summed up disparaging perceptions of both sides: “Chai Soua Vang Opens Up On Redneck White Boy Hunters Laughing At Him And Calling Him A Chink.”
Vang shot eight other hunters; six of them died. As Americans, we have experienced mass shootings in shopping malls, a movie theater, high school and college campuses, a political rally, a Sikh temple, and most recently an elementary school. That such a thing could occur in a forest full of men with guns does not seem so far-fetched. This would never have happened to fishermen.
At the university where I teach, two students and one of my colleagues lost family members; a freshman lost his father and brother. I’m sure many of the forty-some Vang’s on campus were related to the shooter, though no news story covered them. The immediate backlash included “Killer” spray-painted on the homes of three Hmong families and a bumper sticker, “Save a Hunter. Shoot a Hmong,” available for sale—a take-off on the 1989 hate bumper sticker “Save a Walleye. Spear an Indian.” This is what made the news in November and December of 2004. I suspect that across Wisconsin and Minnesota there were countless other incidents in school hallways and hockey rinks or basketball courts, in college residence halls, and in bars.
On that same Sunday, Alex called me to announce that his first buck—first anything—was a ten-pointer. He talked for fifteen minutes, fourteen more than we had ever talked on the phone maybe in his life. He told me how he had the buck in his sites and fired. Just a click came out because he forgot the safety. How he fired again and the buck went down and got up. Then he fired till he had nothing left.
“Was it hard?” I asked. I meant emotionally, as in What did it feel like to kill your first living being, one bigger than a housefly?
He paused, “Well, the trigger stuck a little. That was a kind of hard.”
Experienced hunters talked him through field-dressing his deer, insistent that he do it himself. He told me he was up to his biceps in deer guts. On his first cut toward the windpipe, he sliced off his rubber glove. On the second cut, he sliced into his own pinky.
I gasped into the phone.
“Mom,” he said. “It was just a little cut.”
“So you and your first buck are blood brothers,” I said, trying to sound cool, something a hunter’s mother would say.
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess.” He told me the stench of his buck’s entrails was the worst he’d ever smelled in his life.
I did not mention to him the news reports of hunters being shot.
The next day when I saw Alex, home safe and cleaned up, his first deer story told many times over, he showed me his antlers, fleshy parts wrapped in napkins and plastic.
“You can see the blood and brains a little bit,” he said proudly. I knew he was trying to get a rise out of me, his vegetarian mother. I cringed. As a parent, this was not the first time I was torn between accepting what passes for traditional male bonding in our neck of the woods and outright disdain for what it takes to be a man in small-town Wisconsin. I knew that whether or not Alex continued to be a hunter, he would always remember his first buck and this rack of antlers would be mounted and displayed, perhaps a trophy my son kept for the rest of his life.
Alex asked, “Did you hear about the sniper who killed hunters?” This was an added drama he could not have imagined, more video game than hunter’s safety. Alex’s word choice—“sniper”—made it sound even more menacing. He, too, might have to sometime dodge bullets.
“Scary stuff,” I said.
Vang was hunting that Sunday afternoon with relatives. They’d driven about three hours to northern Wisconsin from St. Paul, since Minnesota’s deer hunting season was just ending. Vang shot a deer and got lost while tracking it. He stumbled upon a beat-up hunting stand high in a tree, and he climbed up to get the “lay of the land.” Like any hunter, he wanted to find and field dress his deer and get out of the woods before dark. He had a six-week-old baby and a new wife. After a long, cold day in the woods, he must have wanted nothing more than to be home. He hunted not for sport but for the fulfillment that comes from a man putting meat on his table.
This private land, in the tiny town of Meteor, was adjacent to public hunting land.
When the landowner discovered Vang in his tree stand, he asked this stranger to leave.
In that area there were previous reports of some Hmong hunters failing to follow fish and game regulations and not understanding the difference between hunting in public woods or on “posted” private land, perhaps a little bit like figuring out where not to swim on a public beach wedged between cabins.
Witnesses claim this shooting was never about race, though at least one of the landowner’s hunting party of fifteen called Vang “gook” and “chink” as he walked away from the tree stand. These are words Vang had surely heard many times before, but perhaps never from men with guns.
Thirty-six year old Vang was born in Laos, in the midst of the Vietnam War. His father was recruited to fight for the U.S., most likely in the jungles of his homeland or in Cambodia. Almost 50,000 Hmong men were enlisted by the CIA to fight the North Vietnamese and promised resettlement in the United States after the war. When the war ended, the Vang family escaped Laos and spent time in a Thai refugee camp before immigrating and settling in California when Vang was twelve years old. After high school, he served six years in the California National Guard, where he earned a sharpshooter weapons qualification badge and a Good Conduct medal for consecutive years of “honorable and faithful service.”
Like many of that first wave of Hmong immigrants, Vang eventually ended up in the Midwest. About 100,000 Hmong now live in Wisconsin and Minnesota. As immigrants, many Hmong-Americans’ citizenship status was “resident alien,” a designation that may conjure the image of a space alien: not the cuddly ET kind but the terrorizing beast Sigourney Weaver fought. In either case, an outsider who should go home or be destroyed.
At his trial, Vang testified he felt cornered when his path was blocked by men on all-terrain vehicles, and he feared for his life. Anyone who has seen a Rambo film or even Deliverance knows this scenario never ends well. Vang claimed one of the other hunters fired a shot first, and the bullet zipped past him. He was an American soldier, after all, and his training kicked in. Witnesses and Vang all agreed that he dropped to one knee, aimed, and opened fire at the group of the hunters. Six of them—five men and a woman—died; four were shot in the back. Whose weapon discharged first was never determined. After the shooting, Vang was still lost in the woods. He walked some distance and stumbled upon another hunter who gave him a ride to a Ranger Station. He was arrested there without incident.
Almost one year later, Alex and I sat in the living room watching Vang’s sentencing on live TV after all of the local stations preempted programming. He was found guilty of manslaughter by ten women and two men. I pointed out to my son that the “jury of his peers” was all white, and I said out loud what I considered each time more of the story unfolded: “Would any of it even happen if Vang were white?” This may have been my son’s first major lesson in how race impacts all of us. Alex and I are blonde, blue-eyed, educated, middle class—privileges which offer an immeasurable head start and an invisible cloak of protection.
As we watched Vang’s sentencing I realized that my fourteen-year-old son was discovering tragedies do not just happen in the world, they can occur in your world and part of being an adult means asking yourself, What would I do? A boy with a gun can open fire in your high school library. A plane can fly into your building while you’re eating breakfast. The Columbine shootings and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 are part of my son’s childhood, just as this mass shooting in the northwoods will always be. As a mother, I hope they taught him empathy not fear, compassion not hopelessness. Every senseless tragedy has victims and outside viewers who learn from someone else’s sorrow: everything can go to shit in an instant. Beware.
Alex’s dad and I had been divorced for about six weeks then, and I was still figuring out how I could guide my son if I didn’t have those spontaneous and often tender late-night moments when we might pass in the kitchen and talk. As Alex grew into a man, how could I teach him or at least prompt him to contemplate what it all means?
Vang was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, plus seventy years. After the trial, his elderly mother released a translated statement in which she offered condolences to the victims' families. “I share your grief,” said this hunter’s mother, “and will mourn your losses for the rest of my life.” I ached for her and the families—of the shooter and his victims—all who suffered tremendous loss.
A few weeks later, Alex was getting ready for his second hunting season. I asked if he was looking forward to it. “I guess,” he said.
“Aren’t you interested in going?”
“I like walking in the woods,” he said. “And I like being in the cabin. I even like carrying a gun. I just think the rest of it is sort of stupid.” He may not have been able to articulate more, but I knew this was what a benevolent man would say, one who might always help a stranger find his way. I experienced the sort of relief that only a hunter’s mother can understand.
Patti See’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Salon Magazine, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Developmental Education, The Wisconsin Academy Review, The Southwest Review, HipMama, as well as other magazines and anthologies. She is the co-author of Higher Learning: Reading and Writing About College, 3rd edition (Prentice Hall, 2012), with Bruce Taylor, and a poetry collection Love’s Bluff (Plainview Press, 2006). She also wrote the award-winning blog “Our Long Goodbye: One Family’s Experiences with Alzheimer’s Disease” She is a Distinguished Student Services Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
From the author: I have been writing “Hunter’s Mother,” for over nine years, since my son’s first hunting trip occurred the same weekend as a hunting tragedy that took six lives. A Hmong hunter got lost in the woods and was trespassing on private property. After being confronted by the white landowner and his hunting party, shots were fired. Eight hunters were shot; six were killed. As a person of privilege—white, middle-class, educated—I can understand how Vang’s experience in the north woods that November afternoon many years ago may have gone down differently had he been a white stranger lost on a white man’s land. I was silenced by that voice in my head which questioned, “As a white woman, what right do you have to write about Chai Soua Vang?” Is it enough that our stories intersect a little bit more than that of a motorist straining her neck to get a glimpse of the person trapped inside a fiery crash? This essay is about Vang, but also about me as a “hunter’s mother,” who must accept that her son makes his own choices about how to be a man.