David Landrum

First Blood

I didn’t tell Daddy I lost my virginity. What girl would? I’ve just turned seventeen. If he suspected, it would be a disaster. I don’t mean he would go after my boyfriend. He’s not so crazy as to do something like that. But if he knew, it would shatter the Illusion. This is why I have been so careful to conceal what happened at my boyfriend’s place two months ago.

My Daddy is a world-renowned professional hunter with a show that has been on television since I was six. I am his only child—Daddy’s little girl—and I have been a regular on the show from age ten.

I charm the socks off the TV audience. He knows this and so do his producers. Three or four times a season, he will have his sweet little golden-haired, blue-eyed daughter on the show. I’ll dress up in hunting gear and go out, carrying my rifle, to bag a rabbit, squirrel, or deer. He will smile and dote on me. I show no hesitation to shoot, kill, field dress, and skin—and then eat—the animals we shoot. The people who watch his show love it.

The Illusion, as I call it, is that I am his sweet, pure little girl and he is the patriarch who protects me; and even though I’m a vestal virgin (as the Illusion has it), I still kill animals. I pick them off, nod with satisfaction when we stand over our kill, and grin with pride as the three of us (Mother joins us for the last segment of the show) sit down to dine on our kill. Commentators say my presence assures young people, and girls in particular, that hunting is okay.

I get fan mail. As I’ve crossed the line from girlhood to womanhood, the fan mail has increased dramatically. Letters come from hunting families saying I have inspired their daughters and from girls who go who say I am someone they can point to when friends rag on them because they hunt. I get a marriage proposal now, the occasional angry letter from animal rights activists, and creepy stalker letters too. Since I came to maturity, my Dad and his producers are exploiting me in a new way.

I’m fairly good-looking. My Dad plays this up, just as he played up my innocence when I was a little girl. In the new revised version of me, I am his Diana—his huntress, chaste and fair, under his protection. If I am attractive, his TV behavior suggests, I am also off-limits. The mighty hunter protects and shelters his obedient, pure-hearted child.

Alicia, the member of his production staff assigned to me, understands this and plays up the image she and the others have created for me whenever she gets the chance. A few months ago, Dad and I were on Letterman. I had planned to wear jeans and a flannel shirt, but Alicia interdicted me.

“Not jeans. You need to wear this.”

She handed me a denim miniskirt.

I wear short skirts and dresses, but I had thought I should put on what I usually did when I went hunting with Daddy on the show.

“If you look a little more sexy,” she smiled, “it will be good. Let’s startle the audience. I’ll bet you get more fan mail after this.”

I did get more fan mail—a lot more. I was on my Dad’s TV show twice after that. The first time I wore what I usually wear, jeans, but in the second show, Alicia put me in a short skirt.

No one, not even the most lovely woman hunter, hunts in a skirt. In the woods there are brambles, stickers, burrs, thistle, scrub brush—all sort of things to scratch you up. And they did scratch me up as the crew filmed Daddy and me tracking down a wild turkey. When I watched the segment afterwards I noticed that every shot of me was a full shot so people see my legs. They were making me look sexy so that the image of my father as my august protector would resonate more dramatically. Everyone loved it. Everyone but me.

I decided it was time to leave girlhood, even if the adults in my life continued the Illusion. Joel and I planned it carefully. I went to his house when his parents were away. A friend I trusted promised she would cover for me by saying I was with her if my parents suspected anything.

Things were a little more difficult than what I had imagined. My membrane was thick and Joel could not penetrate it. He kept trying, though, and it finally gave. It hurt and there was a lot of blood. Despite that, I still smile when I think of how self-pleased he looked once he succeeded and how, though I was aching and bleeding, I felt rewarded as well. I had crossed the line.

I bled for three days. I was nervous, afraid my Mom would suspect something. I told her my period had come early. When I didn’t seem to be healing, I thought I might have to go to the doctor, but finally the blood stanched. Three days later my period did come. I healed up. I was not pregnant. Joel and I had pulled it off and we still sleep together whenever we can. Not long after I did it for the first time, Daddy said he was taking me along for a program he was filming in Russia.

He planned to spend a couple of months over there and get enough material to do a whole season on hunting in Russia. He took me out of school for a week so the two of us could film the first segment together—a segment on boar hunting.

We flew out, changed planes in San Francisco, and embarked on a twelve-hour flight to Vladivostok. From there, he, Mother and I headed in a small aircraft to Siberia, where we set up headquarters. We hobnobbed with Russians and a couple of American diplomats from the area. As always, I stood around, smiled, hung on Daddy’s arm, and posed with my mother. The production crew filmed me in front of a fireplace in a minidress looking innocent/sexy, acting out the image they had created for me. At night I talked to Joel on by short-wave radio, carefully because my parents and the rest of the television crew were near-by.

Siberia is beautiful. The stars blazed in the sky like I had never seen stars. Northern lights flashed in explosions of red and green over the dark, old-growth forest all around our hunting lodge. In the cold but calm and sunny morning, we bundled up and went out to hunt wild boar.

I am a good hunter. Daddy has taught me well and I like to hunt and can become quite the predator once I get into it. We split up. A film crew, attendants, and a couple of Russian guides came with me.

At first we did not have a lot of luck. A little before noon, though, we saw tracks and scats. We moved toward where we thought it might be hiding. I had walked toward a thicket of undergrowth. Suddenly the boar burst from its place of concealment and charged me.

Scary. Boars are one of the most dangerous animals on earth. They are fast and come at the inside of your thigh with their tusks. They slash open your femoral artery and you bleed to death in minutes.

But years of hunting have given me instantaneous reactions and steady nerves. I leveled my rifle and got him between the eyes, dropping him two feet away.

The filming crew got extraordinary footage of the charge, my unflinching and immediate reaction, the kill, and my unafraid, satisfied look when I knew the animal was dead. The sun lit up the frigid winter landscape where the boar lie, blood from his death-wound soaking the snow, the pines rising green, massive, and silent all around us. Alicia, who had come for the trip, stood shivering but cheering. The Russian guides gesticulated and babbled in their own language, marveling, I assume, over what a great shot I had just pulled off. Alicia said this was absolutely the best segment we had ever filmed.

She radioed my Dad, who had had no luck on his end of the hunt. He arrived a half hour later. The camera crew played the clips for him and recorded footage of him congratulating me—more of the Illusion here—the patriarch, proud of his courageous virgin daughter. I smiled inwardly. However much he, Alicia, and all the others wanted to perpetuate the Illusion, I was past it. It no longer applied to me no matter how much they exploited its false limb for the TV show.

Daddy talked into the camera and gave the narration of what would happen next. Alicia had wrapped Mother and me in a battery-powered thermal blanket. We stood together under the shield of warmth and held hands as Daddy talked about the ceremony of first blood. From the most ancient times, when a hunter, usually a young man, made his first major kill, the older hunters initiated him into the fellowship of maturity by smearing his face with the blood of the animal he had taken down. It was a ceremony, he noted, that went back thousands of years.

“Not a young man today,” he said, beaming proudly, “but a brave, tough, fearless young woman.”

He called me over. As I stood in the bright Siberian noon, ancient forest and hundreds of miles of frozen tundra all around me, he bent down, sliced one of the boar’s ears, and let its blood run on to his fingers. He came over to me and spread it on my cheeks and forehead. I tried to look solemn and happy at the same time. The camera lens extended, which I knew meant they were going to a close-up shot. I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder and he put his arm around me and squeezed my arm just above my elbow.

First blood. Once this went on the air, the audience would be enraptured. But none of them would know about the blood that came before.