The Hearts of Animals

Every year I make a pilgrimage to the one place on earth that for me encapsulates the raw beauty and power of life itself. I make a hunting trek to the fertile soils of the Okavango, in Botswana. There on the edge of the Kalahari, I am treated to some of the most vibrant displays of pure natural beauty on earth. And while it might be hard to justify the central purpose of these adventures to the denizens of coffee shops and opium dens that populate this liberal dishrag of a blog, let’s unsack the felines and shed some light on the truth.

I am a game hunter of a very particular and controversial order. For years we have had to hide beneath a cloak of near invisibility, and while our existence has been fabled in the annals of liberal hysteria, in this particular case, the alarm was sounded around an actual reality.

I am a heart eater.

This is an age-old practice that consists of hunting game in the traditional method. In other words, we shoot them, with guns. I won’t bore you with my Hemingway tales of man versus beast. You know the drill. It’s the following bit that gets panties in wads and hearts to palpitate (cardiac pun intended).

The trick (and it is what gives the element of actual sport to this practice) is to shoot the animal in such a way that the animal is brought down but still alive. Once you overtake the beast you must act quickly. You take your knife, and with a quick motion, remove the heart of the animal while it is still beating. Then, right on the spot, you consume the animal’s heart directly in front of it, eye to eye.

That, my friends, is mortal sport. That, dear readers, is vital expression in black and white, no middling to muck up your day, and you are a man with the soul of a god when you consume the heart of an animal before it.

None of you latte swilling, turtleneck wearing, scooter rolling pussies will ever get this, but that’s why you live in a computer lab and I fuck supermodels.

So on this particular trip, on this my final journey to the center of the world of men, the following is written as it happened, and if my story comes from behind the veil of immortality, and therefore proves the existence of a being that resides in infinite glory, then fuck you. You’ll get yours.

I sat in the Fish Eagle Bar. I was relaxing after a particularly fruitful hunt. The blood of a lion dried on my cheeks as I sat and enjoyed a cold beer. I sat alone for a spell until a guy sits down next to me.

I nod hello, and he asks me how the hunt went, and follows, “Well, I assume from the look of your face.”

“Well, indeed.”

We end up striking up a conversation about game, about local hunting regulations, about sport, politics, family, you name it, and after several more rounds, we are talking about whatever we like. Loudly.

So it comes up that both of us hail from Houston, Texas. Since this fellow is a music fan much like myself (and much like you folks), I decide to talk local turkey with him. I tell him that I think it’s funny that when you consider the idea that what I am doing in Africa has a certain unintentional affinity with a certain local Houston musician and my own personal favorite artist of all time, Hearts of Animals.

As my poor luck would have it, before I can even get out the last word in the band name the man is on me, his beer mug smashed flat against my nose. He has the jump on me. In other circumstances, and with less beer in me, I would have been at the ready for such an attack, but I am old and slow and my guard has lowered with time and I am moments from the end. This man, enraged beyond measure, is bashing me repeatedly in the face with his mug. I am splattered with my own blood, stupidly noticing the blood of a third animal on my vest, and listening dumbly to the sounds of bone splintering beneath flesh.

The lights are dimming as this man, reduced to a savage, relinquishes my flame for all eternity, as I lay helpless on the floor.

In my final seconds I fade into oblivion as I watch the man pull out a knife, plunging it into my chest cavity. I am beyond pain, beyond fear, simply another spectator watching the horror show. As he holds my heart before me, biting into it with savage ferocity, I wonder if this is how it is for the animals I have left on the marshy shores of Eagle Lake.

And it is over.

After my corpse has been dragged to the park to reenter the cycle that feeds this timeless land, the man sits back down at the bar and addresses the tender.

“Could you believe that motherfucker? Hearts of Animals? Seriously?”

The tender, “what is wrong with that guy? How gay could he possibly be?”

“Oh, it’s not even about being gay,” says the man, “he’s just a total fag. Hearts of Animals, how could anyone be such a total fag?”

And then, in walks Ramon.