Pheasants

Pheasants are a recurring part of the rural setting in In Cold Blood, where their November hunting season draws sportsmen to western Kansas and brings firearms and hunting gear into the story’s approach to the Clutter murders. The birds also mark a sharp reversal: River Valley Farm, once a place for friendly hunting expeditions, becomes a house its visitors return to clean after the killings.

A November hunting season

Kansas pheasant season is described as a major November event, drawing sportsmen from adjoining states. Hunters cross the autumn plains in plaid hats, flushing and shooting at flights of grain-fed birds described as coppery. The season establishes hunting as an ordinary regional pastime, not an exceptional intrusion into rural life.

Five pheasant hunters from Oklahoma appear on Herbert William Clutter’s property. When they offer to pay for the right to hunt there, Herbert declines the money and invites them to take what they can. He then heads home to work, unaware that this will be his last day. The exchange places his openhanded familiarity with the land beside the strangers’ armed presence, without suggesting that the hunters have any connection to the later crime.

The hunting image in the intruders’ equipment

The pheasant motif recurs in the equipment Dick brings in the black 1949 Chevrolet sedan. Beside Perry’s old Gibson guitar lies a new twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, its stock engraved with a sportsman’s scene of pheasants in flight. A flashlight, fishing knife, leather gloves, and a hunting vest packed with shells complete the incongruous arrangement.

The engraved birds make the shotgun look like sporting equipment, and the vest supplies the same cover story: Dick proposes that they knock and say they have been hunting and lost their way. In the surrounding narrative, however, this familiar hunting appearance accompanies an armed approach to the Clutter home. The contrast gives the Pheasants’ ordinary place in local life a darker narrative function without making the birds themselves anything more than quarry and image.

A familiar pastime changed by the murders

On Monday, November 16, 1959, Andy Erhart and three of Herbert William Clutter’s close friends set out for River Valley Farm. In earlier years, the men had made the familiar trip to hunt Pheasants with their friend. This time they carried mops, pails, scrubbing brushes, rags, and strong detergents, and wore their oldest clothes: they had volunteered to clean rooms in the house where four members of the Clutter family had been murdered.

The men drove in silence along a route associated with welcome and sport. A highway patrolman waved them through the barricade at the farm entrance, and Alfred Stoecklein admitted them to the property. The return journey turns the old hunting association into a measure of what has changed: the farm remains the destination, but the friends arrive not to pursue Pheasants with Herbert, but to clean the aftermath of his family’s deaths.