Sitting over a plate of scrambled eggs with his orange hunting vest hugging his shoulders, the boy’s father told stories of the hunt. He showed how he sighted a deer in his rifle’s scope and pulled the trigger. The smell of sweat and leaves filled the kitchen as the father talked, and the child listened. The boy imagined his father chasing the animal, following its blood trail across the scattered leaves until cornering it somewhere in the forest. Then blam! A final shot to the head like he had been practicing with rubber bands on his stuffed animals.
“Maybe someday, Gregory,” his mom said. “Someday, your dad will take you hunting?”
The boy’s father looked off in the distance and shrugged each time the suggestion came up, and the boy watched him. Gregory dreamed of the day his father would shout hurrah, wallop him on the back, and point at the animal they had shot together. He held himself still listening for his response. But his father never committed to a hunting lesson. Instead, the man only heaved himself out of his chair for a shower and a nap.
“Come on, honey,” she coaxed his father one autumn day. She held his forearm affectionately against the table. “Isn’t it time you take him out? You can have him practice shooting something small by the stone piles. You don’t have to take him up into the mountains.”
Gregory’s father pressed his lips together, inhaled through his nose, and looked down at his son. The child straightened his shoulders and looked for lines of approval on his father’s face.
“Yeah, small things first. Target practice by the stone piles.”
The stone piles. The place sounded magical to the child, a place where dragons and wizards tangled. He spent afternoons daydreaming about them, cultivating trees and gardens in his mind, building a
