In my country, not having taken a life was some kind of stain that needed to be wiped clean, like still being a virgin at 18.
Sadly, I was both. So for my 18th birthday my dad bought me a big game hunt, complete with beaters and bearers and pith-helmeted trackers.
We went into the bush and had a week-long hunt, and then our servants cut off the heads of the game I’d killed and gave them to me, for me to have stuffed and mounted I mean, but really I’d shot at them and missed so my dad and the tracker guide finished the job, but I got the heads anyway because it was my coming of age and we pretended that I’d shot all these men myself.
And the next week they set a trap and caught a woman for me, too, a virgin like me, actually, a real treat. <<END>>
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