Hunter and Wolf

Jonas hunted with his hands. He would stalk his quarry like a stealthy predator and fall upon it without warning. He often used a bow or a pike, but preferred the closeness of a knife. The feeling of the skin and muscle tearing while warm blood poured over his fingers. He relished physical struggle with another creature - the feeling of strength peaking as an animal attempted to cling to life and then the peaceful calm that followed.

The buck was small, especially for the summer. Its rack was unimpressive and asymmetrical, but Jonas wasn't hunting for pride or prize. He was hunting for food and survival.

He readied his bow, took aim and released the arrow. It missed its mark and struck the buck in the side. The deer immediately fled, a streak of ruddy brown accented by the bright white of its upturned tail. The man pulled a large hunting knife from his belt and followed the path the deer had taken.

Few had seen him hunt. He rarely respected the stringent regulations and licensing the government enforced.

What he did respect was life.

Had they watched him, Jonas knew most people would say the way he hunted was cruel. Sadistic. Heartless. Slitting the throat of an animal or goring it with a sharpened stick. Anyone who killed an animal that way was barbaric and uncivilized. Hunting with guns was cleaner, quicker, and safer. Jonas thought they had it all backwards. It was other hunters who were cruel. They were the ones who refused to respect the animals they killed.

When Jonas used his bow he had to draw with all his strength for the arrow to be effective. His arrows were handmade, requiring great skill to use with any accuracy. The strike itself was silent. When he used a pike or his knife, he put his body at risk of physical harm depending on the type of animal he was pursuing. He did not simply kill an animal, he challenged them the way any predator did. He pitted his strength, skill and patience against their own while respecting his surroundings. Hunters who used guns did not. The guns shattered the silence, interrupting the ecosystem of the prey they hunted. They killed from a distance, decreasing the risk to themselves as well as the physical effort required. It was not an equal trade.

As for the physical act of taking a life - the impact was lost when all you had to do was pull a trigger. It was different than feeling the muscle you were tearing into fight back against your blade. It was different when you were close enough to inhale the air from a creature's last breath. Of course, this was likely some of the appeal of modern hunting. Not having to be so close to death. Not having to comprehend the gravity of ending a being's existence. This was the height of cruelty to Jonas, the epitome of disrespect.

Sudden gunfire in the distance drew Jonas' attention. His head wheeled in its direction. He stood up from searching the ground for evidence of the deer's passing. Even injured, it moved quickly. Jonas took note of the direction of the shot, for his safety, and continued his hunt.

As he ran barefoot through the undergrowth, his body intent on the chase as if it were instinct, his mind - his human consciousness - wandered.

When he was a boy, he had lived in the self-proclaimed "civilized" world. He attended school for 7 short years before dropping out to help support his windowed mother. It wasn't an uncommon story in the days after the war.

When he was 6, the teacher had read them Little Red Riding Hood. The story was one of the few school lessons that had kept a permanent residence in his memory.

The story had confused him. He couldn't understand why the author had bothered making the villain a wolf at all. It dressed in human clothes. It spoke human words. It acted like a human, scheming and manipulating the girl instead of eating her up at their first meeting. And the hunter. He had saved the child but instead of killing the wolf outright, like any hunter Jonas knew, he left him to die with a belly full of rocks.

Jonas' young mind obsessed over these inconsistencies. His teacher's only answer was that it was just a fairy story and not to talk to strangers or disobey his parents.

He began to suspect that people were scared of being the villain and so cast the wolf instead. But ordinary wolves couldn't be evil. Even when they killed, they were just predators - there was no moral in that. So, to make it truly evil, they made the wolf more human.

Jonas had decided to live his life doing the opposite. Removing the human qualities that made him a villain. Stripping himself to the wolf.

But he could never understand the hunter. Even after his mother died and Jonas moved away - living off of the grid as best he could, even when it meant bending the laws - no matter how long he thought, he never understood why he didn't just kill the wolf. Why he left him to suffer and die. He just knew he wanted no part of it.

The deer had finally tired. As if in offering, it dropped to the ground in a clearing just ahead. It waited for him, and so Jonas cleared his mind of the past - of little girls and wolves and hunters- and he rushed to end the chase.

As he burst through the final branches, knife raised, his gut exploded in pain, forcing him to fall backward. A shot rang through the golden-green stillness of the clearing. The deer, who had welcomed death a moment earlier, used its last reserves of strength to flee this alien noise. This incomprehensible danger.

As Jonas lay on the soft earth, he heard human voices.

"Oh my God. Holy shit. No. No," the voice was young and female, "That was a person. Dad, that was a fucking human being!"

His vision was blurring, but he saw two figures stand over him. The first was a teenage girl - long blond hair tied tightly behind her head. Her bright hunting vest was jarring against the muted colours of the forest behind her.

The other was an older man - dark hair, greying around his temples. He held a shot gun in his hand and stared down at the human body, sprawled and bleeding on the ground.

As Jonas lay dying, his belly full of buckshot, he stared into the man's eyes and wondered why a hunter would be so afraid of watching an animal die.