Wilderness House Literary Review 4/4 — 1 — Kyle Hemmings Hunting Season 

You drop hand-formed rabbit pellets, oval-shaped, dark, along rub lines and bedding areas. You do what papa says. Lying down in soft grass, you wait for a lone buck to bed. The sky undresses itself, dons a nightgown of swirl, from the bottom up. Slow sundown. A sharing. Consider papa’s Interdiction: make your mark as a man or you are doe waiting to be hunted. Squatting, you make out the burly figure of your brother, cradling a .28 gauge in his lumberjack arms. Then disappears past a thick of red and white oak without mast. He will search for early scrapes from a mature buck, scrapes under a sweep of branches. Playing papa’s game. If he naps, papa will thrash and make him whimper. Such a strange pleasure papa derives from making men feel small as acorns. Your slow witted brother who is still a city virgin. You snuggle against your .20 gauge and swing your head, watching papa saunter in a northwesterly direction. Listening to his grunts and rattles upwind, watching him hold his human decoy--a head of medium sized antlers that will make a buck aggressive without fear of smack down. Papa loves to fake them out and soon he is gone too. That harbinger of all fake-out and doom to cruising bucks and coteries of sweet doe. You have this vision: a lone deer will remember your papa almost crawling through, but eventually succumbing to the smoke. The cabin on fire, his greasy heart and his careless matchsticks. That same deer, the one papa could not kill, limps in your backyard of chewed apples and leafless stem, night after night