HIS LAST SHOT by Alphonse de Lamartine

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal. · Jan 6, 1904

HIS LAST SHOT.

By Alphonse de Lamartine

[Translated from Lamartine.]

A harmless, happy roebuck bounded joyously over the wild thyme on the verge of the wood. Now and then I could see him above the heather, pricking his ears, butting in play, warming his dewy flanks in the rising sun, and browsing on the young shoots, in his innocent revel of solitude and safety.

I am a sportsman's son and spent my boyhood with my father's gamekeepers. I had never thought about the brutal instinct that leads man to find amusement in slaughter, and to destroy without necessity, justice, pity, or right, animals who might equally claim to hunt and slay him if they were as ruthless, well-armed and savage in their pleasure as he is in his. My dog was on the alert, my gun pointed, the deer right ahead. I did feel a certain hesitation and remorse at cutting short such a life—such joy and innocence in a creature that had never harmed me, and that delighted in the same sunshine, the same dew, the same morning freshness, that I did; created by the same Providence, perhaps endowed in a different degree with the same thought and sensibility, perhaps bound in the same ties of affection and relationship—looking for his brother, waiting for his mother, his mate, his little one. But Nature's recoil from murder was overborne by the mechanical instinct of habit. I fired. The roebuck fell, his shoulder broken by the shot, and his blood reddening the turf on which he vainly struggled in his agony.

When the smoke dispersed I approached, pale, and shuddering at my misdeed. The poor, lovely creature was not dead. It looked at me, its head sunk on the grass, its eyes swimming in tears. Never shall I forget that look, to which amazement, suffering, and untimely death seemed to give a human depth of feeling quite as intelligible as words—for the eye has its language, and most of all when about to close forever. That look said distinctly, with a heart-rending reproach for my wanton cruelty, "What are you? I do not know you; I never offended you. Perhaps I should have loved you. Why have you struck me with death? Why have you snatched from me my share of sky and breeze, of light, and joy, and life? What will become of my mother, my mate, my fawn, waiting for me in the brake, to see only these torn tufts of hair, and these drops of blood on the heather? Is there not up above an avenger for me and a judge for you?"

This is literally what the eyes of the wounded deer seemed to say. I understood and reproached myself as if it had spoken with a voice. "Put an end to me now," it seemed to say, too, by the grief in its eyes and the helpless shiver in its limbs. I would have given anything to undo what I had done. Alas! the most merciful close to my pitiless work was to shoot my poor victim once more, and so put it out of its misery. Then I flung the gun away, and in truth shed tears of which I am not ashamed. My dog knew something of my meaning; he did not stir, but laid beside me sad and abashed, as if he mourned with me, and the victim of this cruel, wanton sacrifice.

I abandoned forever the brutal pleasure of murder, the sportsman's savage despotism which, without need, right, or pity, takes away the life that he can not restore. I swore to myself never again to cut short, in my caprice, an hour of sunshine enjoyed by these denizens of the woods, and by the birds of heaven, who taste, like us, the transient ecstasy of light, and the more or less vague consciousness of existence under the same sky as ourselves.