Every serial killer biography begins with a kid in the forest torturing squirrels.

When I was 13 and 14, I would go to the Poconos with my friend Eric, his older sister, and their parents. They had a house. We’d usually stay for two nights.

There was a lot for teenage boys to do there. They had two bikes — one mo-ped, one scooter — and Eric and I would put on our helmets and drive them up to the community pool, where Eric would launch into his cannonball from the diving board. Or we’d hit some balls on the tennis courts under the dome with the leaky roof. We’d always make a trip down to the equestrian school stables to feed carrots to the horses. Even though I now live near horse farms, it’s easy to remember just how exotic this was to a couple of boys from Queens who didn’t drive past horses every day.

Tennis and swimming were good enough, and feeding horses kept us busy for a half hour. Of course, for two 14-year-old boys, freed from parents, still years from having driver’s licenses, cruising on bikes at 20-25 miles per hour was close to heaven. Autonomy was wonderful. But what we really lived for in the Poconos were BB guns. Eric had two.

One was a rifle with a lever that had to be cranked each time to reload. The other was a semi-automatic pistol. I thought the handgun looked as real as could be. This was in the days before orange tips were placed on toy guns to keep cops from mistakenly shooting kids. Both were powered by CO2 cartridges. The handgun could fire more rapidly, but the rifle was easier to aim, so I got the handgun.

Maybe Eric wasn’t the safest friend to have. Once, back in Queens, when he was showing off the BB rifle to a friend and wanted to prove how powerful it was, he asked me if he could shoot me in the foot. I was wearing sneakers, but I still said no, and stepped back with the foot he had been aiming at. He shot me in the foot that hadn’t moved. Afterwards he swore that he thought I had put the foot forward, a brave volunteer. It had hurt like a mother and left a round black and blue, through the sneaker. Eric also liked to play with fire. His spiky hair and fanged smile spoke of trouble.

We thought we were hell on wheels, armed and searching for action up and down desolate Pocono roads. Once in a while a car would pass, but mostly it was just us, me in the white guest helmet, Eric in the sleek black model he’d gotten for his birthday. We shot at everything we could find. Cans. Signs. Trees. But we were warriors, and anyone could shoot at cans. Bigger game called.

Birds were hard to kill. Once or twice we might have tagged one that was lazing on an electrical wire, but it just flew away. We scoped out squirrels, parking our bikes on the side of the road and stalking them through the woods. Squirrels were faster than we were. And even if we managed to hit one, it was never with a fresh CO2 cartridge or from close range. They’d scamper off, bruised perhaps.

Chipmunks were another story. We found their home, once, and Eric got the idea to ambush them. He jammed a lit smoke bomb in one hole and we waited at the other hole, ready. It worked beautifully. We didn’t have a reason for shooting at them. They weren’t bothering anyone. But that didn’t matter. Maybe there was something primal going on — boys and hunting and all that. Maybe we were bad kids. Either way, we drove up and down the road and hunted.

When we headed into the woods after a squirrel, it was just another hunt. Eric must have spotted one. He fired into the distance. Glass shattered. Damn it! There was a house. I hadn’t seen a house. We were in someone’s backyard, thick with trees.

“Fuck!” Eric said.

“Who’s there?” came from the house. It was a man.

Holy shit. Someone was home. We’d shot out some guy’s window. He could have a gun. He could kill us. He could tell our parents.

Neither of us dared to look. Eric was behind his tree. I was behind mine. As long as we didn’t look, the guy at the house couldn’t see us. It was dense forest out here. We were still a decent distance from the house. We’d barely been close enough to see the thing through the trees.

“Who’s there?” He was angry.

There was rustling. He was coming our way.

Shit, shit, shit.

I looked to Eric. We both had our backs against the trees like characters in an action movie waiting for enemy fire to die down. Eric looked at me, and slowly, silently, cranked the lever to reload his rifle. Was he crazy? His eyes told me that whatever happened, we were in this together. I was still holding my gun. And my breath.

I tried to catch Eric’s eye. Please don’t do anything.

The man got closer.

And closer.

Then the rustling paused, reversed.

We were saved! The man had given up and returned to the house. I could hear his door closing. No hesitating — we ran so fast back to the bikes, my head pounded along with my heart. Even if he’d called the cops, we were gone and clear.

I don’t even remember, more than twenty years later, whether that was the last time we went marauding in the Poconos. You’d think it would have been enough to put an end to it. Either way, we soon grew older and apart, and I didn’t get invited to the Poconos, and for me the shooting stopped. I don’t know when it stopped for Eric, but he, too, as far as I know, turned out all right. He’s a chiropractor, I think, and a father. We haven’t been in touch for more than a decade.

I do wonder, from time to time, what would have happened if the homeowner had kept looking for us in the woods that day instead of going back into his house. There’s just no way to know how things might have escalated, how close we came to doing something terribly, irrevocably stupid.

About Scott Stein

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein //