Cloud Hunter

You know what they say about people that gaze too long at the clouds? Or is that the sun? As with everything in my life that I become too obsessed with, I wanted to shoot the clouds. 

Those white, luminous particles floating in the heavens with no clear direction. They just go where the wind takes them. It’s downright disrespectful. I don’t like the implication that there’s something in nature without a clear form.

Sometimes they look like dinosaurs. Sometimes they look like Aunt Sally. Sometimes they look like a Joan Miro painting that makes me feel things I’d rather not go into. But they’re never quite the same from day to day.

I guess the impulse to hunt clouds came from an innate desire to tame the formless. I also wanted to see if clouds bleed.

They don’t, by the way. Just in case you were curious and felt too embarrassed to ask.

My uncle bought me my first cloud gun when I was nine. He said our family had a long history of cloud hunting. Though when I asked my mom about that history, she said she had no idea what he was talking about and that I should always ignore what Uncle Terry had to say, even if I heard it from someone else because I would never know if my uncle got to them first.

Though I started hunting  at such a young age, I didn’t in fact actually take down a cloud until I turned fifteen. They are surprisingly difficult to kill, despite crawling across the horizon at such a leisurely pace. Perhaps it is all that carbon they consume that gives them their inhuman ability to withstand bullets from us surface dwellers.

When I did take down my first cloud, though, it was a moment of celebration, at least between me and my uncle. The rest of my family didn’t believe that I shot down a cloud. Every friend I told snickered at the mention of the topic. One friend even asked if I had the cloud’s head mounted. I didn’t, but I had collected some of the cloud’s vapor in a mason jar before it evaporated as a memento. 

I decided to keep a mason jar of all the cloud vapor I’ve ever hunted down and shot. Whenever I show anyone my mason jars, though, they say they don’t see anything in there. The clouds like to hide and go translucent when caught. 

My real obsession is clouds that have rainbows coming out of them. I don’t know why, really. I’m sure some head shrink might be able to tell me, but I’ve never seen one. But I can’t help but take one look at a rainbow and want to shoot it in its dumb colors. 

Maybe it has something to do with not liking happiness. Or perhaps I’ve always wanted to capture that happiness in a jar so I could sell it on eBay. A jar of a rainbow corpse. I wonder what that would go for.

For whatever reason, though, my cloud hunting has had a pretty negative impact on my dating life, for whatever reason. I’ve stopped putting in on dating profiles that I hunt clouds. It doesn’t help attracting either the opposite or same sex. No one seems to want to be associated with someone that tracks down, shoots, and puts on display clouds.

At first I felt like I should be ashamed of it after the fourth girl broke up with me for the same reason. The constant going out each day to hunt. Never spending time together. Being generally distant. I fell into this deep depression. Never wanted to touch a cloud gun again. It hurt. Growing up, developing a passion for hunting such an elusive prey, bonding with one of the only people that seemed to ever understand me, my uncle. I didn’t eat consistently for weeks. I wandered around the city just staring directly at the ground, never once lifting my head to look up at the sky. I kept bumping into sign posts and people constantly.

It took months of self-reflection and really digging deep to come to grips with the fact that I’m proud to be a cloud hunter. It’s not something I should be ashamed of. I want to pass this passtime down to my kids and my grandkids and my great-grandkids and so on. I want to make an entire clan of little genetic replicants that go out and fight for their godgivenright to shoot down clouds.

Hell, maybe one day it’ll become a national pastime, like baseball once was.

I still don’t announce it at parties or to people I just met that I hunt clouds. I want to keep it a bit of a mystery. I try to only tell close friends and family, you know, people that I think will understand when they get to know me. I’m really a great person when people get to know me. I promise.

I don’t have some weird secret collection of dead kitten corpses hanging in my basement or some creepy shit like that. I’m a law abiding, God fearing, tax paying something or other that every weekend, weather permitting, goes out and shoots at clouds. 

I usually go to various isolated forests and abandoned parks and parts of the city that few people frequent to avoid questions. But when someone asks, I tell them I’m hunting some bird so it seems normal and on the up and up. I once had a bit of fun when some hippie asked near this nature trail I frequented by telling him I was shooting frisbees that flew across my eye line. When he said that he and his friends were the ones that were throwing the frisbees to one another and he’d appreciate it if I didn’t shoot at their frisbees, I told him I’d think about it and walked away. 

Despite that episode, though, I think I’m making improvements with my interactions with carbon-based bipedal hairless primates. I suppose it was a bit difficult getting along with people when my uncle passed. My mourning phase took me to some dark places. I got really passionate about my cloud hunting. A bit defensive. It probably read as off putting to some, especially romantic interests.

But like I said, I’m restraining myself to only going out hunting during the weekends. I don’t bring the topic up unless I know the person would be cool with it. Not to say I’ve met anyone that would be cool with it.

It’s a process. Baby steps, you know, towards improvement.

I think the clouds have grown to accept me as one of their own, if such a thing is possible. It’s like those people that hunt deer. They slowly become more and more like their prey. I guess so they better understand them. Though that never seems to matter much since those damn deer hunters keep jumping out in front of my car at night and just stare at me as I ram into them. That’s why I keep to the clouds. Seems significantly less dangerous for my person.

I suppose one day I’ll just start floating up without a tether and backstroke my way through the troposphere so that I might better hunt my game.