Stories of the Hunt - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Alex Mindt

This is the magazine I subscribed to when I was a kid. It had a circulation of maybe five hundred and sometimes it came three months late. But it had everything I wanted, and I never threw out a copy. It all ended though, in the spring of my sixth grade year. Buck Macguire was thrown in jail for several unpaid traffic tickets and some child pornography he'd partaken in when he was younger. He tried to publish the magazine from his prison cell in Pocatello, but it was futile, and I had to learn to be satisfied with Field & Stream.

Eventually, after several arguments--one ending with my clad slamming the garage door--my mother somehow convinced him to take me to what was actually called "The Northwest WhiteTailed Deer Hunting Competition."

"For one weekend, residents of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington will convene just North of Spokane, in the town appropriately called Deer Park, to partake in the biggest shoot-off on the West Coast," it said on the cream-colored brochure.

It was still a month off, but I prepared, shooting as much as I could, and then cleaning my new gun--a Savage, bolt-action rifle my dad had bought for me. "The bolt-action rifle," Buck Macguire wrote, "is more rugged and simple than other rifles, and it is the most accurate rifle on the market." On this he was right. I never shot better than with that rifle. Dad would make me stand far away, or crouch behind trees, and I could still hit the Coke cans. Dad shot a lot too, but he never seemed to get any better. "Here," he said once. "Give me that gun of yours." He took my gun and started firing at the stump, hitting only one can out of five. "Jesus," he said. "It's getting dark. Let's get home."

My dad worked for Boeing, which, in those days, meant he'd work a few months and then get laid off and then get rehired and so on and so forth. So he'd be there some days when I came home from school. My mother worked in a dentist office, answering the phone and scribbling on a calendar. One day after school, I found my gun laid out on my bedroom floor, in pieces.

"Shit," my dad said. "Like a deer in head lights, that's what you look like." He was leaning against the door frame with a beer in his hand.

I looked at the mess of little gadgets and screws and was amazed at all the things inside a rifle. From the outside it looks simple and basic, but like most things, rifles are deceiving.

"I tell you what, Walt, you put that back together by next weekend and you can go with me."

"But mom said "

"That you were going. That it's a done deal. Well, I've been thinking about that."

For some reason my dad didn't want me to go with him. But I was too determined to give up, and for the next three days I spent every free minute putting that rifle back together. To my dad's dismay, I had it back in working order two days before we were to leave on our trip. I brought the gun into the living room and set it in his lap. "What's this?" he said.

I'm done," I said. "I cleaned every piece, too. It works better now than it ever has."