mourning dove

Mourning doves are central to Ben Givens’s earliest memory of hunting and to the moral unease that follows him into adulthood. First encountered as swift birds rising from the Columbia River to feed near the apple orchards, they become a measure of how his relationship to killing changes—from childhood instruction and regret to a later return to hunting after loss.

Childhood Hunting

When Ben was eight, his father took him to shoot mourning doves at the edge of the apple orchards. The birds flew up from the Columbia River in swift, shifting flocks in the pale morning light. His father taught him how to lead a bird and swing the gun smoothly, passing on the practical craft of hunting without discussing its moral difficulty.

Ben killed three doves with a .410. The encounter did not settle into uncomplicated pleasure: he watched the birds fall, later ate their small, dark breast meat, and felt vague regret. His mother opposed shooting birds for pleasure, distinguishing it from killing for food. After watching Ben eat in silence, she came over to touch his cheek, then returned to the sink and scrubbed the pan for him. The scene holds the family’s disagreement alongside an understated gesture of care.

A Recurring Moral Hesitation

As an adult, Ben remembers that the moment before a bird flushes is when he hesitates to take its life. The hesitation reaches back to those childhood hunts beside his father and persists even though shooting had become easier during his teenage years. Skill and doubt coexist: the lessons that taught Ben how to shoot did not remove his sense that something about the act was amiss.

Hunting After Loss

After the war, Ben stopped hunting and fishing; he was finished with killing. Following Rachel Givens’s death, however, he took up killing again as a substitute life. During the two autumns before the scene in the Columbia River breaks, he had returned to childhood pastimes: shooting small birds in canyons and sage country, as well as hunting geese and mallards. The mourning dove memory thus belongs to a larger pattern in which hunting changes meaning across Ben’s life, while the old hesitation remains part of it.

Narrative Significance

The doves connect learned technique to a moral question the family never resolves through argument. Ben’s father offers the skill of aiming; his mother objects to pleasure in killing; Ben’s own regret emerges through what he does after the hunt and through his lasting hesitation. Their recurrence in his memory makes the birds more than a record of childhood: they mark the persistence of a conflict between the practiced act of hunting and Ben’s discomfort with taking life.