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I hadn’t actually expected to find a live animal at the end of the chase, and certainly not one that was aware. Until that moment, the blood trail had been a game mechanic, a bit of inconvenience parceled out to players who lacked the skill and patience to score a clean kill. But the doe, silent and watchful on the ground, made everything a little too real. My hasty, lousy shot had inflicted a slowly crippling wound. Now, her race run and energy spent, it fell to me to dispatch her with the shot I should have taken a half-hour earlier.
I pointed my rifle at her head, but she was still looking at me. Unnerved, I gave it up and circled around behind her, but she craned her neck to watch me. Once I was out of her sight, I aimed the rifle again. Before I could fire, she placed her head down on the dirt and drifted off. I had not even managed to fulfill my responsibility to dispatch her mercifully. She had died of the terrible wound I had inflicted on her hip.
It occurred to me that The Hunter had passed judgment on me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it forced me to pass judgment on myself. If the simulated hunt was thrilling, and the simulated forest relaxing, then this animal’s simulated suffering was horrifying. I understood now that a successful hunt is not a binary state, where a deer is either killed or not. How I hunted and what kind of death I dispensed mattered more. A quick snapshot at a running target, far from being the feat of reflexes and marksmanship that I thought it was, turned out to be irresponsible and cruel. I was the worst stereotype of a hunter: a yahoo loose in the woods with a gun.
— The Escapist : Slow Death In a Shady Glen by Rob Zacny
