Stories of the Hunt - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Alex Mindt

"Twelve!" My dad shouted. He was smiling, a proud father. To him it was a simple revision of the story, no less glorious--I was the son he had reared to be courageous in battle, as if I was genetic proof of his own indisputable bravery.

The voices grew louder at the mention of my age. A pen was placed in my hand. The old man behind the counter put his finger where it said signature. And for some reason I couldn't say anything, I couldn't stop any of it. As my hand moved across the paper, I saw my name scribbled out--Walter Berry--and I suddenly thought that the name was not mine, that it was a creation, a name of a character formed in someone's imagination, a character in a story perhaps, like those absurd hunting tales in Buck Macguire's Big Game Journal.

"Can you imagine, a twelve-year-old kid winning the big prize?" someone shouted. I was going to be a celebrity, they said. My picture in Field & Stream, write-ups in various papers. The youngest person to ever win a major hunting competition. They started taking pictures of me posed along side the deer. Some guy from the Spokane News Tribune told me to smile and relax. "Don't look so shocked!" The flash popped. "One more," he said.

My dad stood back, in the distance, smiling at me. It all happened so quickly that the truth never came out. What can you say with all of that excitement around you? If you do say anything, don't you spoil their fun, their desire to hope, to believe that the impossible is possible? But now I had learned of the irrevocable nature of stories, how they turn necessarily by their own design, formed by circumstance and longing.

As it turns out, someone came in later that day with a bigger buck and I got second place, and a prize of five hundred dollars cash. The same two men who untied the deer, tied him back onto the truck with a precision that I'm sure embarrassed my father.

After the awards ceremony in the Elks lodge, Dad and I pulled out onto Highway 2, and we glided, in silence, through the bleak countryside of eastern Washington, and I knew that his stories of the hunt would no longer be told and that I would have to get used to this silence and eventually we would have to learn to talk about other things. But as we headed into the apple orchards of the Columbia River basin, and as we passed over the swirling blue water, I was concocting my own stories--of how I spotted the buck in a clearing hundreds of yards away, how my rattle brought him to me, and how I looked down the barrel of my gun and calmly pulled the trigger--stories I would tell my friends at school the next day, my teachers, my mom, anyone who would listen.

Alex Mint's stories have appeared in Fiction and The Southern Review