13th August, 2005 —

I intrude into strangers’ homes every day. Of course, being an installer of home theater products, I am generally doing this by invitation.

Most people and their houses are fairly unremarkable, but occasionally we set foot into a dwelling which ever thereafter takes its place in a sort of Hall of Infamy amid our recollections. For example, last week there was “Hell House”, which featured no air conditioning and only a battered old box fan which didn’t work, and became so unbearably hot during the course of our work that one of the installers had to be taken home due to heat exhaustion and dehydration! Ironically, the owner of the house was an HVAC (air conditioning) technician.

This week ushered us into a home in the country town of Newton, NH that promised good times from the moment we spotted the plastic dummy of a deer standing majestically in the back yard, severed head lying at its feet. But that was only the beginning.

What we set foot into was a wild animal abattoir. Upon entering the rustic parqueted living room in which we were to work, we were greeted by a gruesome senate of at least fifteen deer, whose lifeless heads had convened to oversee the family activities. They were joined by a somber assembly of fish, foxes, badgers, and even squirrels. Various animal rugs snarled up at us. In one corner, a diorama had been carefully staged where a stuffed fox posed triumphantly over the prone corpse of a fuzzy grey squirrel, as though to lay blame on the fox for the squirrel’s demise. Brian glanced about and quoted Ace Ventura: “This is a lovely room of death!”

Inspecting a lamp that stood innocently upon a side table, I discovered that it had been made of severed deer feet, very light in color, cloven hooves splayed at the four compass points to support its weight. The hostess casually informed me that the former owner of those legs was the very same who had possessed one of the heads that presided over the room. She went on to mention that it had been an albino deer and added nonchalantly, “I guess they’re very, very rare.” Apparently their gut reaction upon first encountering such a wondrous and unique creature was, “SHOOT IT!”

There was more. To complete the installation we needed access to the basement, where we discovered the murky and cramped Murder Room. On the left wall, makeshift plywood shelves had been stocked with dozens of small boxes of bullets, shells and enough other assorted munitions to stage an invasion on an adjacent town. To the right, a long countertop was scattered with a garish array of tools with sharp blades and serrated edges, calcified from long use. And directly opposite the door hung a fresh batch of pelts from assorted woodland beasts, in varying stages of gutting, cleaning and preservation. I made my ceiling access in that room brief.

As little mercy as they granted to cute forest creatures, our hosts were not unkind to their human guests. Mrs. Slaughterhouse ordered a trio of pizzas for her daughters and to share with us. The pizza was tasty, but as she stood beaming at us while we ate, I could not ignore that morbid congress of disembodied fauna holding session over our lunch, and found myself unable to finish.

I just cannot assign these activities to the category of sportsmanship. Sport has to have some risk factor for the participants. If these people were hunting velociraptors, or some other creature willing and fully capable of dispatching the human hunter with the same cruelty, then I’d be entertained. As it stands though, I don’t really believe these folks are in it for the thrill of the hunt so much as the act of taking life without consequences to themselves.

The whole day turned into a pretty strange experience. And I won’t even comment on the smiling daughter who naively offered to “show us her guns”.