~ x-post of my Writing Battle short fiction stories; here is the third and final of this series, a 1000-word story about an attentive hunter seeking vengeance for a slain animal friend…
“Miriam” is a relatively simple tale about the power of nature. Below you will find my intro & trio of parameters — Genre: REVENGE | Character: HUNTER | Object: BINOCULARS // 1,000 words or less.
Dylan intro: a story about two hunters.
Miriam
Xavier glared through the binoculars, scanning the horizon for his mark, a wolf, one as white as a whale and as scarred as a daemon.
He’d positioned at the key ledge of the evergreen region’s north-facing cliff, where the pines crowded and edged off a look down into the expansive Emerald Valley below. The old hunter could see the vast varieties of trees. Pines, spruces, cedars, hemlocks. They shaded a healthy congregation of deer, herding and migrating, moving from creek to creek across February. From out of the leaves of a nearby Douglas-fir, a flock of robins scattered far into the overcast noonday glow.
Xavier edged over from his prone position at the cliffside to adjust the sights on his Remington 700 XCR Long-Range Tactical sniper rifle. He’d be looking at a six-hundred-meter shot, at least. A trained sniper, the fifty-nine-year-old shooter had not attempted a daring shot like this since back in Iraq. Different wolves, younger eyes.
Squirrels chirped and rushed over his head, dancing the branches of a red alder, providing a momentary distraction.
Xavier thought of Miriam again. Against his will. Flashes of her face kept reeling back from inside his consciousness. A swift wind froze his first and only tear. His eyes bore the freeze while the remainder of his layered form lay in absolute warmth. Thermals and jackets covered all; his Oboz Sawtooth boots had even had his feet sweating. A balaclava protected his mouth, alongside a bushy beard. Xavier re-scanned the binocular view, trying to keep images of Miriam from his memory.
Eight hundred pounds. Chocolate skin. Perfect milk. She was his most prized girl.
Dead. Ripped to shreds inside her pen by a daemon in the night.
“I too have been a daemon,” Xavier whispered. “From time to time.”
The hunter moved an eye from binoc to rifle scope, again laying down a thorough overwatch upon the valley. His eyes were drawn to the southern creek, where a herd of deer rested. Three bucks, four does, two fawns. They drank and basked in a small slice of pleasant glade. Sunrays beamed down to warm their spines and twinkle the waters. For a long moment, the old man was drawn into a reverie of better days. Childhood work in the morn, milking Betsy. Birdsong beyond the barn, the echoes of sisters’ laughter. The dog barking, father yelling at something, maybe mom…
Xavier shook his head and looked back through the binoculars, scanning the surrounding tree line. Away from his eye, all the deer turned their heads northward. The brush rattled and then they were off. A pack of six wolves chased the herd. Grey and black. Undersized, all young save for one. The deer bounded to the east and the hunters followed in swift pursuit.
Xavier quickly rolled over, settling his position with his hands on the rifle and eye down the scope.
No apparent snow-white one. Perhaps the shade marred them. The hunter trailed his barrel through the trunks where the predators dogged their prey; he watched all six wolves pass through the sunlight, on their way to running down one fawn and one doe at the breaching of a creek. One buck came back around to defend the wife and was jawed at by all six. They upended him and clamped down on every quadrant of the mighty beast, beginning to rend him apart.
Xavier fired two .308 caliber bullets in short succession, one into the skull of the largest wolf and another into the heart of the ripped elk, already flowing long strands of red into the running water.
The remainder of the deer ran on, farther into the forest. The wolves scattered at the shot and death of their alpha. Xavier looked down at the two dead creatures, plus the two others left along the path before. He quickly turned his scope back to the hunted doe and fawn, trigger finger primed to hit the other wolves as they came back for their kills.
Something blocked his scope. A small face. Xavier raised his head and saw a squirrel perched across the length of his rifle. Bushy tail brushed against his nose. The old sniper reared back to sneeze. The squirrel leaped off his rifle and away from the cliff, soon scratching up the nearby trunk of a western white pine. Xavier further loaded and then let loose his mighty sneeze, lurching his body sidelong. The scope of his rifle came off, one of the screws loose, and dropped into a soily crack in the earth.
“Dammit!” Xavier swore.
His hand brushed against the dry land, trying to reach down. Ant mound crumpled over his knuckles; ants crawled onto his fingerless gloves. He beat his hand against the earth. He heard a flurry of chirping and then felt a small thatch of feet rest upon his back. Xavier turned himself over, where a trio of Vaux’s swifts had landed from their flights. The birds made catty chirps as they took off, dodging their dusky feathers free of his chopping hands. Stings at the tips of his fingers summoned another swear on the edges of Xavier’s lips. He sat up and turned around to re-situate himself, clap his hands free of the ants.
But a presence in the wood before him turned his curse to silence.
A white silhouette. Scarred seemingly by the ages. One red eye, many mountainous teeth, and one craterous socket. The creature stood at the edge of the treeline, paws padding the break in the grass where the earth became stone. There was no sound in the world save for the wolf’s steely growl, steadily loosing free from its hellmouth.
Xavier turned to grasp his rifle and the beast rushed him hard and fast.
With only the iron sights to guide him, and two bullets left in his magazine, the sniper again saw Miriam. ~
Thresholds of Transformation 