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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Death of a Hunter
By Charles T Whipple
As a soldier, Jimbo had mowed down countless scores of enemy troops
with car-jack machinegun fire. As a red chief, he'd brought home frogs
and slow-swimming carp with his homemade cedar bow and cattail arrows.
But Christmas 1949 brought a new dimension to Jimbo's life-a genuine
Daisy Red Ryder BB air rifle and a coonskin hat made of real rabbit
fur. Even the tail looked right.
Frontiersman and mighty hunter Jimbo Crockett surveyed the land from
beneath the fur of his coonskin hat. Patches of snow lay in the
northern shade of junipers and pinyons, looking like white shadows. A
red slash of bare clay showed off to his right, and stipples of green
struggled up through the brown of last year's grama grass. Jimbo placed
each foot with care, moving in silence toward the bunch of Utah juniper
that stood between the old outhouse and the new raw pine granary.
The hunter paused at the snow north of the trees. Tracks. Two dots and
two dashes per set, like the Morse code that Boy Scouts learned. Sign
that a jackrabbit had passed in the night. Jimbo crouched, peering
beneath the trees with sharp blue eyes. Sometimes rabbits hid in the
roots of these old trees. But not today.
Skirting the snow with the stealth only a true hunter achieves, Jimbo
made his way past the granary and on to the cow pen. As he approached,
three sparrows that had been feeding on undigested grain in the manure
flitted to the pinyons back of the pen.
Game.
The hunter's eyes narrowed. He hunched over and slithered around the
cow pen away from the trees. He'd approach from the other side, catch
the prey unaware.
Keeping the pen between himself and the trees, Jimbo circled. Back of
the pen, he knelt and slowly cocked his genuine Red Ryder BB gun,
taking care to stifle the click with his coat. He grinned. Jimbo
Crockett. Mighty hunter. About to make his first kill with Betsy, his
trusty rifle.
Crockett avoided a fresh cow pie as he crept toward the pinyons.
Reaching the corner of the pen, he peered around, using only his right
eye and keeping low to the ground so the birds wouldn't see. There. One
in the tree nearest the pen, two farther away. A chancy shot, but worth
taking, the hunter decided.
Jimbo thought the range looked like about twenty-five feet. He held the
Red Ryder rifle high, taking bead on the little brown and gray bird.
Pfft.
Looking down the barrel, he could see the copper-coated BB arc toward
the sparrow and plunge into its unsuspecting breast. The bird fell to
the ground and Jimbo ran to claim his prize.
The sparrow lay on its side, wings fluttering. The BB had carved a hole
just below the bird's neck. Blood leaked and splattered when the bird
moved. Jimbo stood the rifle against the pen and picked the bird up
with both hands. It wagged its head back and forth. The tiny wings beat
a faint tattoo. The bird lay warm in his hand, and he felt it struggle.
Its bright eyes pleaded, but the hunter could do nothing. The struggles
diminished. The eyes lost their brilliance. The bird died.
James Jenkins buried the sparrow at the foot of the pinyon tree. He
emptied the BBs from the magazine of his Red Ryder rifle and flung them
away, not watching where they landed. He dragged his feet back to the
house. His eyes burned and his breath caught. He put the Red Ryder
rifle out of sight in the very back of the clothes closet. Jimbo
Crockett, mighty hunter, was dead.
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