Letter from Patrick O’grady
John Walker’s Letter – October 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Ed and Martha,
I was taken aback by the vehemence of John Walker’s personal attack on Hal Walter in response to Hal’s “Killer Coyote” column in the August issue of Colorado Central. Why are so many people who profess to revere wildness so eager to declare a jihad against anyone who worships nature at a slightly different altar?
I trust that Mr. Walker’s sermon was delivered orally, or telepathically, rather than as toxic inks tattooing the dried flesh of murdered trees. If not, his diatribe carries with it a whiff of hypocrisy, a stink far ranker than that of honest gunpowder.
Unless Mr. Walker lives in a cave, derives his sustenance from a solar panel set atop his skull, and travels solely by shank’s mare — naked save for a gauze mask to ensure he inhales neither bacteria nor bug — he is farting a good deal higher than his ass when he chastises Hal for using technology to alter his environment; in this instance, by taking a shot at one of several coyotes that killed a fawn near his house.
Hal, like the coyote, is a lifelong hunter. But while Walker paints him as a cruel god of gunpowder, I know him to be a careful rifleman who would rather stalk packaged beef in Safeway than risk a dicey shot that might wound an animal. Even his firing at the coyote stemmed not from simple bloodlust, as Mr. Walker would have it, but from a quixotic impulse to avenge a dead fawn and a wounded spaniel.
Mr. Walker, on the other hand, seems to have no compunctions about taking a cheap, ill-considered shot from his moral high ground. Hal may have missed his coyote, but Mr. Walker was well off the mark, too.
Fortunately for everyone within range, he was only shooting off his mouth, and it was of a pretty small caliber.
Regards,
Patrick O’Grady
Westcliffe