Fall was also hunting season in the Catskills. Men wearing red plaid wool jackets and toting rifles headed into the forests to shoot deer. Posted signs tacked onto trees next to the road warned people to stay out of the woods lest they get shot by accident. I noticed that my father never joined the hunters. 

One evening, when I was around nine and playing outside toward dusk, a group of hunters traipsed across our front lawn. The men had dogs with them, and one began to mate with our mixed-breed male terrier, Spot. My parents heard the barking and came outside. I was aghast at the whole scene, sick with embarrassment at the sight of such a blatant display of animal sex right in front of my mother and father. 

The hunters laughed at the sight of the dogs cavorting and copulating. One of them asked my father, “Can you bring me a pail of water?” My dad brought the water. The hunter took the bucket and hurled the cold water over Spot and the other dog, disrupting their canine fornication. I guessed he didn’t want to deal with a litter of puppies. The men laughed, thanked my father for his help, and went on their way. The incident so rattled me that after the hunters left, I breached the usual barrier between my father and me and chanced a personal question by asking him why he didn’t go out deer hunting with the other men. 

“I would never hunt an animal,” he answered. “I know what it feels like to be hunted.” 

Years later, the memory of my father’s comment about hunting came back to me when he described the action in Warsaw in our recorded conversations.

“It was after the bombing,” he said. “Very heavy bombing, terrible bombing. It was a lot of casualties. Hunger, short of water, short of bread. It was miserable. It was a burning hot day in a very warm September. And the town was surrounded. 

“And we run away. We dispersed. … We ran into the fields. And as we started to run, we heard gunshots: Pop, pa-pa-pa-pop-pop, pa-pap. “