Kaya Dierks
Grades 11-12 Winner

The Hunted
The second week in July, after a month of bearing painful and silent witness to my teenage idleness, Dad finally snapped and confronted me during Tuesday night dinner. He threw down his fork and glared at me over the potato casserole, and I knew then that I was really in for it.
“You’re fifteen, Jack,” Dad hissed, tight-lipped. “And I’m not letting you live in this house a day past twenty.”
Dad went on to outline my many failings: my mediocre grades; my poor posture; my bad table manners, my untied shoelaces; my music taste, which he called “classless”; my disinterest in political news; my propensity for spending long hours staring at the T.V.; my seemingly baseless discomfort around steak knives; and, most pressingly and most damningly, my possession of a vague and overarching personality defect that he defined abstractly as a lack of manly willpower. I had not, in essence, cultivated the life skills that he might have reasonably expected by this point. I was not, he claimed, going to survive the “real world.”
“You are going to end up starving on the streets,” Dad said, disgusted. Then he wrinkled his nose. “Or become one of the gays.”
After his Tuesday night rant my father maintained a tense silence for the next two days, and watched, disapproving, as I continued to slump my shoulders, forget to tie my shoelaces, and generally hang around the house like the useless and stupid waste of space I was admittedly becoming.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. I simply did not know how to make myself useful. I simply did not have the tools to forge my own masculinity. Dad decided that he needed to fix me at once.
The solution came to him on Friday. For one week, he proposed, we would camp out He- Man-style at Real Whitetail Outfitters, this grungy forest park four hours outside Houston. He would teach me how to hunt deer. I would sleep on the dirt. And somewhere between the dirt and the deer I would supposedly undergo a rapturous, Earth-shattering epiphany.
“Trust me,” he grunted, squashing four duffel bags full of camping equipment into the trunk of our grey pickup. He was grinning like a maniac. “This is exactly – exactly what you need.”
Dad was a man who found great comfort in physical movement. He had been a linebacker all through high school and college and claimed he only missed the NFL because of reverse racism perpetrated against white players. And even after his muscles liquefied and he threw out his back carrying a television upstairs, he still clung to all his old physical urgencies. His guns were his most important possession, and he maintained them obsessively. They all stood thin and tall in a cabinet in the basement, stacked on top of one another like metal rib- bones.
We left the next morning, at the crack of dawn. It was a seven-hour drive. Dad reasoned that we would arrive at the campground close to noon if we left the house by six o’clock.
It was still dark outside when we climbed into the car. Dad started the engine, turned on the radio, and then fell quiet. He drove quickly, his hands jittery at the wheel, like we had somewhere to be. I stared out the window and I watched suburban houses clip past me in small, shadowed bits until everything started to mush together.
We spent the next four hours driving on the highway in silence. We passed strip malls and gas stations and then more strip malls. I slumped in my seat with my forehead pressed

unattractively against the glass of the window. At twelve, we stopped for lunch, and I ate a greasy takeout burger over the dashboard.
Some hours later, Dad signaled, and we finally exited the highway down a ramp. We passed onto a thin artery road that widened out into a four-lane street, and then he turned right. The streets started narrowing again and then turned to dirt.
Dad parked the car in a muddy pull-out and cut the engine. He rested his hands on the

wheel.


“Okay.” Dad looked at me. “We’re here.” “Alright,” I said.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I looked out of the window. We were really in the honest-to-God middle of nowhere. The

overgrowth stretched beyond us, sloppy and green. The only thing the whole place looked good for was maybe stashing a corpse.
“Jack,” Dad said. I looked at him. He was grinning, I realized, but his smile had a little bit of an edge. I got the sense that he expected something from me, and, for whatever reason, I was withholding it.
“Uh,” I hesitated. “It’s, uh. Different.”
Dad paused for a moment. His lips twitched downward. Then he opened the car door. He unbuckled himself and unfolded out of his seat. He stretched his bad back. Then he leaned down to look at me.
“Get out of the car,” he huffed.
We spent the rest of the afternoon setting up camp. We had to carry our supplies a half mile North. We dumped them on a flat patch in the dirt – sleeping bags, Sierra bullets, bottled water.
Then we pitched the tent. Dad showed me how to maneuver the stakes. He demonstrated, pushing one neatly into the dry dirt so that only its metal keyhole head stood above the ground. I took a few and attempted to stumble on them. I was awful and inept at the whole process, and my stakes ended up in a staggered, drunken line. Dad frowned as he watched my pathetic fumblings.
“God,” he sighed tersely. “You’re useless at this.”
After the tent was clumsily pitched Dad made dinner. He dumped two cans of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup and one can of baked beans into a metal pot, which he placed over a small gas burner. After five minutes, he grew impatient and he cut the flame. He poured the glutinous, lukewarm slop back into the empty Campbell’s cans and passed one to me. I ate the stuff with my teeth pressed up against the metal rim. When we finished dinner, Dad designated a spot five feet away from our tent as a dump site, where we would throw our leftovers and trash and also piss and spit out toothpaste.
From six to seven o’clock he cleaned his guns. I sat across from him and watched him work. He had large fat hands, big enough he could balance a watermelon comfortably on his palm. But he handled the gun gingerly, like it was some kind of strange, shy creature.
Then it was finally time for me to learn to shoot. Dad gave me his favorite gun, newly cleaned, his baby, this walnut American Standard Rifle he bought at auction when he was nineteen. I had never held a gun before. He put it in my hands, and I sort of cradled it. It was cold and heavy but not entirely unpleasant.
He maneuvered me into position and then began to instruct. “It’s simple,” Dad said. “Hold it tight, then point and shoot.”

I brought the gun up so it hovered at my shoulder, and I guided the barrel so I could see a tree a few paces away in the sight.
“Watch for kickback,” he said.
I looked at the tree. Its bark was peeling in wet, fibrous clumps like wads of dark hair. I pointed, and then I pulled the trigger. It was like the gun exhaled. In the space of a second the walnut butt bucked into my shoulder and the bullet thwacked into the tree. It hit the dead center of the trunk and sank deep and bloodless into the rotten wood.
Beside me, Dad made a small noise. I turned to him. He was looking at the bullet in the tree. Then he turned to me, expressionless.
“Christ,” he said. “You’re a natural.”
He said this quietly, but I could hear his satisfaction. It was like I had finally given him what he was owed. In my fifteen years of life I had never been a natural at anything, and I was shocked by my own competence. But my father had already expected it for years. He had expected it from the moment we arrived at this place. After everything was said and done, it was nothing more than an inheritance.
I looked at Dad. His face was set passively, but pleasantly. And when he turned away, I realized that this, this moment right here in the forest, was the closest I – the slow, sad, disappointing son – had ever come to earning my father’s approval. I swallowed and felt this new knowledge run through me like a small, abrupt blade.
//
We woke up the next morning, early. We had slept in the tent in tissue-paper sleeping bags, backs pressed against the ground. I was numb. It was something like five or six o’clock. Dad unraveled himself from his sleeping bag and crawled to the front of the tent. He unzipped the tent and made his way outside. I followed him, first stumbling out of my sleeping bag, then forcing my feet into my damp shoes.
It was freezing cold, and the sky was dim. Everything was dark around us. I pressed my fingers into my palms. Beside me, Dad carefully cracked his back.
Today we would go hunting. For breakfast we ate undercooked instant oatmeal flavored like apple. Then we brushed our teeth and spat into the dump site. We washed our faces with Walmart bottled water. By the time the sun came up, we were ready to leave. We each took one of the duffel bags we had packed yesterday. Then Dad gave me a camo jacket to wear. It was old, from back when he was a teenager, and it pooled loose over my chest like a dress. I could smell his old sweat in its stiff collar.
“You ready to go shoot some deer?” Dad asked, then chuckled. He spat a wad of toothpaste, foamy and leftover, into the dirt.
I didn’t even have to think. I knew right then that I would shoot a deer dead. I would shoot it competently and completely, and it would bleed out somewhere in this overgrown and anonymous place. I knew it with an absolute, unblinking certainty.
We spent the first hour of our morning trekking through the forest with our duffels slung across our backs. Dad led the way. He already knew the routes from his own trips. We were searching for a deer to stalk. We had to walk cross-wind, so they wouldn’t sniff us out.
Suddenly, Dad stopped walking, and I bumped into his back. “Don’t move,” he hissed quietly into my ear.
I followed his gaze into the underbrush, and there they were. Two twiggy, jittery deer, brown and knock-kneed. They stood flapping their ears in a small clearing ten paces away. Dad and I walked to them quietly and very slowly. We had to take a minute pause between steps. I

could hear Dad swallowing his breath. He was ruthlessly excited. Standing next to him, I could feel his bloodlust.
I took slow, careful steps towards the deer until Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “Stop here,” he hissed, quiet.
I guessed he was telling me that I was close enough to shoot. I carefully pulled the walnut American Standard out of the duffel and rested it on my knee.
“She’s all yours,” Dad said to me, his breath right up against my ear.
I hesitated. There were two. I didn’t know which one of her to kill. I wondered if the choice was supposed to be obvious. Crouching, I positioned the gun on my shoulder. I could see them both in my sight, twitchy alive things. And they were both exactly the same, except that one would soon be dead.
I swallowed. “Wait—” I whispered. “What?” Dad hissed.
“Which one?” I asked, suddenly helpless. “Which one do I shoot?” “It doesn’t matter,” he replied, irritated. “Just choose.”
I paused for another half-second. Dad exhaled out of his nose, quick. He narrowed his
eyes.
“The hell are you waiting for,” he hissed. He had become anxious now. He needed to see
it. “Divine intervention?”
I looked back at the deer. One of them, the skinnier one, twitched minutely, and without another thought, I shot it right in its head. Then I loosened my grip on the gun.
The bullet had hit the deer square between its glossy black eyes. For a moment it just wobbled. Blood dripped into its eyelashes. Then the deer quietly fell. The identical partner had long since scampered away, and now the animal was alone. The deer bled into the underbrush, bullet lost somewhere in its soft brain tissues.
Without speaking, Dad and I walked over to the corpse. By the time we reached the clearing, the deer was already dead. The animal lay ungracefully, legs tangled together. There was clumpy dried blood on its forehead, blackberry jam, from where the bullet had squeezed into its skull. I looked at the deer – fat knees, snarled hair. I had really killed this creature.
Dad paused, studying the animal’s sad, limp body. He poked his toe into the deer’s distended belly.
“Next time, Jack, go for the heart,” he said, half-amused. He was calm again, now that the hunt was finally over. “Don’t shoot the damn thing in its head. Christ.”
I looked at Dad. He was standing over the deer corpse and contemplating how we would go about field dressing it. I supposed that there would be a next time, and I would kill another deer. We would go out again, Dad and I, and we would stalk and hunt and shoot, and another deer would bleed out silently in this forest.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
“Okay, what?” Dad asked, distracted. He squatted over the deer, maneuvering it so that it lay on its spine, belly-up.
“Okay,” I said again. “Next time, I’ll, uh. Shoot the chest.”
Dad turned and looked at me with an expression that bordered on satisfaction. It was like a weird cousin of approval. I looked back at him. I felt my own face work to mirror his, my lips twitching upwards. And when Dad stood up to get his duffel, knees crunching, I suddenly realized that I was almost as tall as him. The only thing that separated us was maybe an inch and

a half. In three months – less, even – we would be the same height. The thought disturbed me nearly as much as it excited me.
Dad bent down and retrieved a sharp, sturdy knife from the duffel. Then he knelt over the deer carcass. He looked at me.
“Jack,” he said. “Come here.”
He offered me the butt end of the knife, and I twitched. I carefully grasped the handle. I held the knife awkwardly, blade turned out. I was a little afraid I might accidentally push it into my chest.
Dad watched me maneuver the blade. He pressed his lips together, unimpressed, and he jerked his head to the deer corpse.
“Cut the stomach,” he said.
I paused. I looked down at the deer’s lumpy belly. “You want me to...” I trailed off, quiet.
Dad exhaled out of his nose, short and tight. “Cut the deer, Jack,” he said, in a slow, annoyed voice like he was dealing with an idiot child. “That’s how you remove the entrails.”
I looked down. The deer’s stomach was white and brown, with little furs. I willed myself to move. But I just couldn’t do it. It was one thing to pull a trigger from ten feet away. It was another entirely to squat down and gut a corpse. I paused, gripping the knife, and then I looked up at Dad helplessly.
“Jesus,” Dad spat. “Just give me that.”
Dad grabbed the knife out of my hand. He went to the corpse and squatted beside it.
Without even a moment’s hesitation, he stuck the knife in the deer’s chest and then ripped down, gutting it from its neck to its groin. The deer’s flesh opened for him, revealing pearly insides.
Quickly he dipped his hands inside the animal. He pulled out organs one by one, these fatty bulbous things, and tossed them carelessly aside. They lay in wet clumps in the dirt.
After a few minutes the deer was fully field dressed. Dad looked up at me.
“Now,” he said, his hands slimy with blood. He chuckled, sharp. “Was that really so
hard?”
Dad sat back on his haunches and wiped blood from his hands to his jeans. He picked up
the knife and wiped it clean too. Then he stood up. The deer lay slick and mutilated. Its skeleton was loosely held together by flabby strips of skin and stretched-out meat.
Dad turned to me, tucking the knife back in the duffel. He zipped our bags and slung one over his shoulder. There was deer blood matted into his hair.
He jerked his head to me, sharp. “Get the legs,” he said curtly.
Dad walked to the deer’s head and gripped it by the elbows. I grabbed my duffel, then walked over to the deer’s backside. I locked my fingers around its knees. Dad and I hoisted the corpse up off the ground. We stumbled out of the clearing, taking big, lumbering steps. When we moved, the deer’s dead body swung side to side like some kind of perverted hammock.
The camp was three miles West of the clearing. We trudged back slowly and painfully. The deer was one hundred pounds of deadweight. My arms burned and Dad grit his teeth as his back flared up. The sky was gray and gummy above the forest. All around us, the air was fat with moisture.
We had been walking for twenty minutes when the first drop fell. It fell onto my hair and rolled down my neck. More drops followed. Dad frowned up at the sky. As the rain continued

without pause, Dad slowly realized that it was not going to stop. He clutched the deer by its haunches and looked to me.
“Hurry up,” he hissed, eyes wide and white.
But we were already too late. The rain came swift and cold. In five minutes, the trickle developed into a full downpour. Rain beat down on us and the deer corpse. Soon we were all utterly drenched. I felt drops of water slide down my bare back and tuck into the seam of my underwear. I couldn’t feel my nose. Between our splayed fingers, the deer was a wet, sludgy dead thing. The deer meat had rotted quickly in the deluge. The whole animal was now a truly revolting creature.
We waded through sloppy mud. Dad trudged, taking wide, slippery steps. Our sneakers were each coated in a pound of brown sludge. Dad cursed and panted. I looked down at the deer. Its eyes were nearly rolling out of its skull, bulging white things.
“Christ,” Dad whispered suddenly, the word pressed through his teeth. He paused. “Jesus
Christ.”
We finally stood before our campground. It was a mess. For a moment we both hesitated, hovering in the rain, clutching a dead deer and taking in the carnage that lay before us. Our tent had slipped into the dirt and collapsed like a punctured lung. Our gear was scattered or buried in the mud. This was no longer a place we could live.
“Jack,” Dad said. He turned to me. “Hold the deer.” I paused. He thrust the deer corpse into my chest. “I—” I stuttered, incoherent.
Dad narrowed his eyes. “Hold the damn deer,” he said again.
He spoke shortly and almost violently. I didn’t know what to say. I let Dad thrust the whole corpse onto me. I leaned back with the weight. I held the carcass awkwardly, its legs slipping into the mud. It was too heavy. Dad, now free of his half of the deer, sprinted awkwardly to the tent. He pulled at the stakes, pushing them in with the butt of his shoe. He shook the poles.
“God dam– shit!” Dad exclaimed as the tent sighed and folded into itself. He fiddled with it desperately and manically. But the tent was already dead, gone. Even from where I stood, I could see that.
“Shit!” he said again, louder. I stood still and soundless. Dad released the tent and kicked it into the dirt. He ground his heel into the spikes until I heard something snap. The tent’s spine finally collapsed into the mulch. Then Dad turned to me slowly, panting. We faced one another.
“Jack!” he hissed. Dad had a terrifying look in his eye. His hair ran into his face. I looked back at him helplessly with my arms full of dead animal. “These – goddamn – stakes!”
Ruthlessly Dad dug his fingers into the sludge and pulled a stake out of the mud. He stood panting with the stake in his hand, muddy, point out. He waved it at me like it was some kind of proof.
By this point, I could feel the muscles in my arms ripping to ribbons from balancing the deer’s bulk.
“How many times?” Dad said each word carefully and sharply, like he was measuring its length. “How many damn times did I tell you about – these – goddamn – stakes?”
I readjusted the deer, re-contorted it. I still didn’t know what he wanted me to say. The deer really was too heavy. It smelled like what it was, rotted dead flesh. Its blood lay splattered across my neck, all mixed in with rain and sweat.
Dad threw the stake violently into the ground. It stuck in the dirt.

“Now look what you did!” he bellowed into the rain, gesturing wildly at the tent.
He was gone, betrayed, lost somewhere in the mulch. And I, stuck in this Godawful downpour with a gutted, dead deer, was forced to watch my plywood father bend and break.
“Look what you did!” he said again.
I looked at the tent, collapsed and ruined. I looked at Dad, bloody and furious. Then I looked down at the deer. I couldn’t carry it anymore. I knew that much. It was nothing more than physical reality. I felt my arms wobble, and the deer slipped out of my grip. Just like that – slipped – and then it fell to the mud. Its body broke into the ground, head rolling into fatty shoulders. I looked up helplessly. For one small and terrifying moment, Dad and I stood silently. The deer sunk, useless, into the mulch.
Then Dad moved quickly. I blinked and he was in front of me. He stood soundlessly. I swallowed. Then I felt something blunt thwack into the bridge of my nose. My chin quickly flopped to my chest like my head was on a hinge. I felt my hands come clumsily to my face.
With my head down, I was facing the deer. Its hind legs were twisted around its neck. Its body was just a wet open curve. It was truly broken now. I looked at it, and then I tasted my own blood. It spilled slickly from my nose onto my lips. Slowly, I pulled my hands away from my face, and blood dribbled down my chin. Red drops splattered across the deer’s disfigured coat.
They split in the rain like food dye in water. I looked at them like they were something foreign.
Across from me, Dad was still and silent. My nose throbbed like a bad headache. Now blood had pooled between my gums. There was just too much of it. And somewhere in the forest, another deer, exactly the same as the one that lay mutilated under me, was running somewhere, eating grass. And if the rain hadn’t started, Dad and I would probably have been hunting it down right now. But instead we stood here, slick and silent. I swallowed, and I felt blood slide into my throat.
I looked up and I met Dad’s eyes. He stood silently in the rain, drops sliding from his hair
down his cheeks. He watched me bleed.
//
After that we packed up quickly. We shoved what we could into muddy, haphazard sacks. Twenty minutes later we were walking back to the car, dragging our supplies. The rain beat down on us.
As for the deer, we left it to the mulch. The miserable creature was too foul and too inconvenient to bring along. By the time we left the campground its fats were already starting to liquefy. Soon, I knew, the flies and mud would consume it.
We finally made it to the car. Dad fished the keys out of his back pocket with one hand and unlocked the vehicle. He stumbled to the trunk and pulled it open. Clumsily, we pushed our dirty bags into the back. Then we climbed in. Dad turned on the engine and the dashboard blinked to life. He jacked the heat all the way up. For a moment we both sat, soaked to the bone, as the heater started to purr. My jeans were wet cloth on my legs. My nose throbbed again. Rain splattered violently across the windshield.
Dad turned on the wipers and started to drive. We drove away from the campsite. I held the sleeve of my jacket to my nose to catch its warm new blood. Every few minutes, Dad threw quick, tense glances in my direction.
At some point the dirt roads widened and thickened. Then we were on the highway. After thirty minutes, Dad spoke.
“Look,” he said, gruff. “This whole thing...” He sighed.

“You understand,” he said. He paused. “Right?” I looked back at him.
“Yeah,” I said.
Dad studied me like he was afraid I might be lying. I stared back at him blankly. “Good,” he said, jerky, after a minute. “Good.”
Then Dad slowly swallowed and gazed back out at the highway. He looked almost relieved. For the next two minutes I watched him drive. He gripped the wheel lazily. The rain was calmer now. It was almost idyllic.
“You’re a good kid, Jack,” Dad said, sudden and quiet.
He turned to me, and his lips twitched upwards, timid. When I started to grin back at him, he smiled for real, softly and a little crookedly. There was something sincere and almost forgiving in his brown eyes. I felt warm. This, I imagined, was nothing more or less than the silent, fond look of a father to his son.