On a particularly sweltering summer
day, the mid-July kind with ninety percent humidity that makes your clothes
stick in the most uncomfortable way, I watched a seven year old girl turn from
a sweet angel to a savage killer in about three seconds. I was working as a
counselor at an outdoor camp called Miss Betty’s, a job which included
following around elementary-school-age children and making sure that they
didn’t terminally injure themselves as elementary-school-age children are prone
to do. Some activities that didn’t usually apply to me, as a counselor of
second-grade girls, were hunting, fishing, or any kind of animal-killing in
general, which was fine because I was a pacifist vegan with little tolerance
for gore. So while the wild boys ravaged the woods for small mammals to dissect
and fish to fillet, my mild-mannered campers and I made clay pots and
friendship bracelets.
As a counselor I wasn’t supposed to
have favourites,but I
had especially warm feelings towards a particularly precious cherub named Lucy.
Lucy was the sweetest, cutest little girl imaginable, usually donning at least
two pink articles of clothing.
There were a variety of small
animals (mice, rabbits, etc.) available at camp to be held by the children, and
of all the animals Lucy’s favourite was a grumpy guinea pig named Pepper. Pepper
was a particularly ugly Abyssinian guinea pig, approaching the ripe old age of
four years and looking every minute of it. His coat was peppered with bald
patches, and his nails were curled in overgrown coils. Nevertheless, Lucy loved this unpleasant
creature despite the number of scars on my fingers, which grew every time I
tried to extract him from his hutch.
Lucy was sitting criss-cross
applesauce on the ground, probably dirtying her bright pink shorts, holding the
placid Pepper in her lap and singing to him, as she was accustomed to doing,
when she noticed a particularly harmless garter snake slithering through the
grass about five feet away. Garter snakes are very common and sightings were
neither rare not exciting, but either because the snake sighting brought about
Lucy’s fierce maternal instincts in an attempt to protect her beloved rodent
friend or because the small girl was overpowered by a ferocious snake-hating
demon from the depths of the underworld, Lucy disposed of the reptile as
violently as possible. Within a matter of seconds Lucy had found a suitable
stick for bashing, and began beating the snake violently. I stood aghast as
this adorable child in pigtails and pink shorts hammered the innocent garter
snake into a bloody pulp. With each hit, bits of snake innards flew, peppering
Lucy’s shirt with flecks of gore. Pepper sat completely unaffected as snake
bits spattered the ground around him while the image burned itself into my
brain. Never again will I doubt the ability of even the most timid of creatures
to turn into a wild killing machine.
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