In last month’s column, I wrote about the art of crafting the fictional outdoor story. This was partly a way to encourage aspiring writers to submit entries to the Northwoods Sporting Journal’s new outdoor writing contest. In addition, it was an introduction to my own personal attempt at a short story.
Remember, according to the experts, a short story must do three things: 1) start in a situation, 2) advance to a predicament, and 3) end with a ‘wow’. My story, entitled “Last Hunt”, starts in a situation. In introduces two old friends who parted ways, and describes some of their experiences together. The situation is provided below in part one of three. In the coming months I’ll advance the story to a predicament and try to end it with a ‘wow’.
The last person Fred Barnes expected to hear from when he picked up the phone was his old pal Gene Burdette. It was with a somber voice on the other end of the line that Gene spoke with.
“Fred……..I’m sorry. I know it’s been too long. Fred……….I want to go hunting.”
An appearance of a smile formed in the corner of Fred’s lips. He’d been waiting for a long time to hear those words.
“It’s good to hear yah voice, Gene. How soon can you make it up? Friday? Yeah, Friday sounds good. Come up to the house when you get here. Yup, same place as before, just up the road from Chase Brook over to the top of the hill. See you soon Gene………and Gene” he said with a pause, “it’s really good to hear from ya.”
Fred walked across the dimly lit hallway to the biggest closet in the house. He pulled out his old lever action .32 special and a gun cleaning kit, then sat down at the kitchen table to clean the rifle and think.
Fred and Gene had been best friends since they were little kids. They grew up on the same dead-end road just down from the small lumber mill where both of their fathers worked. Surrounded by northern Maine timber, lakes, rivers and beaver flowages, the two boys spent countless hours hiking around in the woods, and learning to hunt, fish and trap. They went to elementary and high school together, shot their first whitetail bucks together, and learned to trap muskrat and beaver from the old time mountain man who lived in a little log cabin down the road.
But after high school, things changed. The timber market was good back in those days, and Fred went to work in the woods, cutting trees that would make their way to the mill where his dad sawed them into boards used to build houses. Fred built himself a nice little house on some property near his childhood home and settled down. He continued to hunt, fish and trap the woodlands, and guided hunters during deer and bear seasons.
Gene took a different path after high school. Though he loved the woodlands as much as his buddy Fred, Gene wanted to get out and see more of the world. A year after high school, his parents moved to Boston, and Gene went with them. He wanted to find a better way to make a living than what northern Maine had to offer. He went to business school in Boston, found employment as a financial manager, and settled down in a suburban home with his wife and two kids.
As he began to polish the old rifle with a clean rag, Fred thought back to those early days when he went off to work and Gene left town. It wasn’t that they meant to drift apart, it just sort of happened. They called each other on the phone every so often those first couple of years, but there wasn’t much to talk about. Gene always wanted to hear how the hunting and fishing was, and Fred would tell him, but when the conversation invariably shifted to other topics, they didn’t really have much in common any more. Fred would often write Gene, urging him to come up to Maine for early bird season, or to hunt bucks during the rut, but there would always be something going on with Gene’s job that he couldn’t get away from. So they’d just kind of stopped talking to each other. That had been over twenty years ago.
The week went by quickly enough. Fred had a few days off coming to him, so he took the time to scout for deer in anticipation of he and Gene’s reunion hunt. One crisp fall day in the middle of the week, he took a hike beyond the back fields behind his house and into the cedar swamp along Chase Brook, the place where years ago the two young hunters had filled their first deer tags. Beyond the swamp and across the brook, Silver Ridge stretched upward several hundred yards and ended in a steep drop-off to the neighboring drainage of Beaver Brook. Along the base of Beaver Brook was an old logging road that Fred had helped build during his first year working in the woods.
It was the top of Silver Ridge where he and Gene, as high schoolers, had shared their last hunt together, though they didn’t know it at the time. As he reached the top of the ridge, memories of that last hunt came flooding back to his mind. He and Gene had been sitting in a clump of bushes near the ridgetop one late-season afternoon, rattling a set of antlers for hours in hopes to lure in a rutting whitetail buck. They hadn’t rattled in one buck that day, but two, though they didn’t know of the fact until it was too late. When they stood up near the end of the day to retreat in defeat, they jumped the two monster whitetails. It was too late to take aim as the old bucks quietly bounded away like two old ghosts. Fred shook his head and laughed softly to himself. He remembered the frustration he and Gene had shared that day. Though they hadn’t killed the bucks, looking back, the memory was just as real.
Fred made the two mile hike back to the house with ease. He’d seen little deer sign on the scouting trip, but hadn’t really expected to see much. Deer numbers weren’t what they used to be when he and Gene hunted together. Regardless of the lack of sign, the ridge was a good a place as any for he and Gene to hunt this weekend. He knew the few deer that roamed this area and he knew their habits. Most importantly, he knew how to hunt them. He returned home to catch up on chores and prepare for his old friend’s visit.
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