Author’s note: ‘The Last Whistle in the Meadow’ is a richly layered, atmospheric short story that explores memory, isolation, and the ineffable bond between man, land, and beast. Told in a meditative tone with impressionistic detail, the narrative orbits around Rahman Kak, an enigmatic, solitary herder who commands an almost mythic reverence in a Kashmiri village for his uncanny control over cattle and the rhythms of rural life.

At its core, the story is not just about pastoral rituals or rural routines—it’s an elegy for a vanishing world and a meditation on habit, loss, and quiet resistance. Rahman Kak emerges as a figure rooted in the landscape, as gnarled and weathered as the willow trees that surround the meadow. He represents an older order, one in which human and animal instincts are synchronized through unspoken ritual. The recurring motif of his whistle—low, uncanny, almost supernatural—serves as a symbol of this mysterious bond and lends the story an almost magical realist hue.

Violence simmers beneath the surface throughout. The meadow, behind the mosque, becomes a silent arena of ritual combat—not between men, but bulls, whose primal clashes reflect the unvoiced tensions of the community. The villagers, complicit spectators, seem to hunger for spectacle, for distraction, for drama—until it spills over, literally, into blood and broken trees. The story critiques this desensitization through the metaphor of the “orchard bleeding”—a moment where nature suffers because of human indulgence.

Behind the village mosque lay a forgotten wedge of land. To one side, the road curled like a drowsy serpent; to another, the mosque’s whitewashed walls stood sentinel, their peeling paint whispering of decades past. And on the third side, the apple orchard hunched, its gnarled branches heavy with fruit that glowed like stolen embers in the dawn light.  

This was no ordinary patch of earth.  

Every morning, as dew retreated from the blades of grass, the villagers came. They drove their cattle forward—great, snorting beasts with flared nostrils and restless hooves—until the air thickened with dust and the scent of warm hide. Then, the gathering began. Old men with tobacco-stained teeth, wide-eyed children balanced on hips, women with their shawls pulled tight—all lined the road like spectators at some ancient, bloodless coliseum. And the bulls, sensing the audience, obeyed some primal script. They clashed, their horns locking with a crack that echoed off the mosque’s walls. Sometimes, a stray hoof sent a bystander sprawling; sometimes, a furious charge splintered the orchard’s fence, sending apples thudding to the ground.  

And then, just as the chaos threatened to swallow the morning, he appeared. Rahman Kak.  No one knew when he had first begun this ritual, just as no one dared ask why the cattle obeyed him. He emerged from his hut—a crooked silhouette against the rising sun—his face carved into a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. In his right hand, a stick, notched and polished by years of use, swung like a pendulum. Some claimed he had whittled it himself, shaping it with the same knife he used to cut meat into small pieces. Others swore it was something older, something found.  

Then came the whistle.  

Not the shrill call of a shepherd, but something lower, stranger—a sound that slithered between the beasts’ ears. The bulls stilled. The cows lowered their heads. Even the dust seemed to settle, as if the earth itself held its breath. And with that, Rahman Kak would turn, his stick tapping against his thigh, and lead the herd away—toward the meadow, toward the mist, toward whatever secrets the grass hid from the rest of them.  

The villagers would scatter then, murmuring. But no one ever followed.  

Rahman Kak was in his early sixties—or so he claimed one evening, as we sat beneath the gnarled arms of the ancient willow nursery that stood like a silent guardian at the edge of the grass meadow. The trees here were old souls, their leaves murmuring secrets in the wind, and it seemed fitting that he would choose this place to occasionally unspool a rare scrap of his past. Not that he ever gave much. Even his age felt like a concession, tossed out carelessly, like a bone to a dog.  

He was a man of rigid uniformity. Through the sweltering summers, he wore the same ash-coloured Salwar Kameez, its fabric daubed with the stains of years—mud, sweat, and something darker, something that might have been blood. On his head perched a discoloured white cap, its edges frayed, its fabric sun-bleached to the pallor of old bones. It never left him. Not in the noonday heat, not in the lashing rains, not even—villagers whispered—in sleep. Had anyone ever seen him without it? No. And those who dared to imagine what lay beneath found their thoughts skittering away, uneasy.  

Time had not been kind to him. It had carved three deep furrows into his forehead, trenches where the dust settled like an old curse. On scorching afternoons, you could see it, the grime mixing with his sweat, trickling down in slow, dirty rivulets, as if the earth itself were weeping through him. His body was a paradox: thin, wiry, yet humming with a restless energy that defied his brittle frame. His eyes, small and perpetually wet, seemed to retreat deeper into their sockets with each passing year, as though they were afraid of what they had seen.  

And his face—ah, his face. If you told me, you had seen him smile, I would call you a liar. His cheeks were barren, his mouth a slash of weathered leather. The villagers knew him for his temper, for the way he would square off against anyone—man, woman, even the imam’s eldest son—over some perceived slight involving the cattle. His shoulders would hitch backward, his drooping head snapping up with sudden, venomous pride. Then came the stick—always the stick—lifted and balanced across his shoulders like the yoke of some invisible burden. His words would follow, a torrent of guttural, spiteful syllables, half-lost in the rasp of his breath. No one could decipher them, not at first. It was only at the end, when his voice would fray into something raw and weary, that the meaning would claw its way to the surface:  

“You think I’m a school-bus driver?” he’d snarl, the stick trembling in his grip. “That I should drop your cattle at your doorstep like spoiled children? You can’t even manage two beasts, and I—I have the whole herd to answer for.”

And just like that, the fight would drain out of him. His shoulders would slump, his head would bow again, and he would turn away—back to the cattle, back to the meadow, back to whatever silent understanding he had with the land that the rest of us could never share.  

Every morning, behind the mosque, the earth remembered violence.

It began with a shift in the air—a restless snort, a hoof scraping dirt like a blade being drawn. Then two bulls would lock eyes, their massive flanks trembling with coiled fury. When they collided, the impact shuddered through the crowd like an electric current. The villagers erupted—curses, whistles, laughter—a cacophony that only fed the beasts’ frenzy. The dust would rise in ochre clouds, the spectators’ faces contorted into masks of glee, their voices raw as the bulls rammed horns, their muscles glistening with sweat and defiance.  

Then came the day the orchard bled.  

The fight spilled beyond the trampled circle, the bulls crashing through the frail fence like it was parchment. Apples rained down, their flesh bursting against the soil. A woman, her hands still caked with earth from tending the saplings, let loose a scream that cut through the chaos. She cursed the crowd, the owners, the very bloodline of the beasts, her voice a serrated edge of grief. But the villagers only grinned wider. What were a few broken trees to them? The spectacle was worth the cost.  

Only Rahman Kak could unravel the madness.  

A single whistle—low, dissonant, more vibration than sound—and the bulls froze as if yanked by invisible chains. Their rage dissolved like smoke in the wind. The herd, moments ago a seething mass, now stood eerily still, ears twitching toward that sound. Even the dust seemed to settle in reverence.  

Then he would emerge—or rather, the dust would release him. Some days, the swirling grit swallowed him whole, leaving only the faint outline of his stick, a scythe cutting through the haze. The stench of dung and heat never seemed to cling to him; it was as if the particles themselves feared to invade his lungs. Had the dust fossilized inside him over the years? I wondered. Did his veins run with silt instead of blood?  

His rituals were unvarying. Under the willow trees, their branches trailing like skeletal fingers, he’d take his lunch—always alone, always in silence. But first, he’d lead the herd to the stream that ribboned the meadow’s edge. The cattle drank with an almost ceremonial slowness, as though the water carried whispers only they could hear.  

And it was there, in the dappled shade of those ancient willows, that I first spoke to him. The air smelled of damp bark and something older—something like patience, or perhaps resignation. He didn’t smile at my greeting. He only stared, his teary eyes reflecting the leaves above, as if he’d already seen this moment, and every moment after, and found them all equally fleeting.  

When the weight of the world grew too heavy, I would slip away to the willow nursery, a book clutched under my arm like a talisman. There, even the most corrosive philosophies—Cioran’s bile against existence, his elegies for a godless universe—softened into something almost tender, as if the land itself whispered counterarguments through the sighing leaves. The meadow became a self-contained cosmos, the distant hills pressing close like protective shoulders. Time dissolved. The breeze was a perpetual murmur, threading through the willows’ restless branches, a sound so constant it seemed the trees were breathing.  

Birds were the only calendar the place acknowledged. Winter’s grip might lock the stream in ice, but never silenced them—their songs simply changed key, trading summer’s bright trills for the sparse, crystalline notes of survival. Over fifteen years, I’d memorized the willows not just by sight, but by touch: the gnarled one near the stream whose bark split like an old man’s knuckles; the young sapling that bent as if listening. When loneliness gnawed at me, I’d recite to them—Lear’s ravings into the storm, Whitman’s barbaric yawps—and their leaves would shiver in response, a standing ovation of shadows.  

Then came the day Rahman Kak spoke.

The sun hung white-hot overhead, the meadow shimmering like a mirage. His wife arrived as always, her spine curved under the wicker basket balanced on her head. She served his lunch beneath the willows—flatbread, a smear of curd, the clay bowl emptied in one practiced tilt of his throat. I watched from my usual perch, a dog-eared copy of German Idealism splayed across my knees (a relic scavenged from Srinagar’s Sunday Market, its pages smelling of damp and disregard). When she retreated to gather firewood, I seized my chance.  

“Do they ever speak back?” I asked, nodding to the willows.  

Rahman Kak’s head snapped up. His bones seemed to shift under his skin, quick as a snake’s musculature. For a man so gaunt, his energy was unnerving—a live wire barely insulated by flesh. He studied me with those sunken, liquid eyes, and for a heartbeat, I feared I’d crossed into some unmarked territory. Then he wiped the curd from his beard with a slow, deliberate swipe.  

“You hear them too,” he said. Not a question. An indictment.  

The air between us thickened. Somewhere in the branches above, a bird let out a cry like a laugh.  

“This place has an amazing ambience.” My voice sounded too loud against the willow’s whispering leaves. “It would be so gratifying to pray here, away from the villagers. Tell me, Rahman Kak—do you ever pray beneath these trees?”

The hookah gurgled between his knees as he leaned back against the willow’s ribs, its bark etching grooves into his spine. “No.” A blunt word, sharp as the snap of a twig. “Too many things crowd my mind. Or perhaps—” he puffed, the tobacco’s ember flaring crimson, “—I’ve simply grown accustomed to absence.” 

Thick smoke unfurled from his lips, curling into the dappled light like phantom prayers. His eyes—small, black, glinting with some indefinable victory—never left the burning bowl. It was as if he’d long ago scorched away all capacity for self-reproach.

“When one knows a thing is good,” I ventured, “shouldn’t he strive to change? Even habits can be unlearned.” The words tasted hollow. The willow above us shuddered, as if amused.

Rahman Kak exhaled slowly. “Prayer is good. Like water. Like air.” His calloused fingers traced the hookah’s stem. “But to make a thing your lifelong companion? That requires habit. And habit—” his teeth flashed in something not quite a smile, “—is the cruellest jailer of all. It takes a catastrophe to break its chains.”

“You mean… only a tragedy could make you pray?”

For the first time, his gaze flickered—not with sorrow, but with the cold precision of a man who’d measured his own abyss. “What greater tragedy remains for me?” The hookah bubbled, a wet sound like distant weeping. “Only her death. My wife. If she goes first, the silence at lunchtime will kill me faster than hunger.” 

He tilted his face toward the branches, where sunlight and shadow waged their eternal war. “Better we die together. Right here. No graves, no separation—just the willows to cover our bones.”

The horror of it should have wrung tears, cries, fists against the earth. But Rahman Kak merely tapped the hookah’s ashes onto the roots, as if feeding the tree his regrets. His tone was that of a man discussing crop rotation. 

Yet in that moment, I understood: his love was fiercer than faith, deeper than devotion. And it terrified him. 

“I heard you had quite the shouting match with Karim Kak last evening,” I said, steering the conversation toward safer ground—if village feuds could ever be called safe. “What sparked it this time?”  

Rahman Kak’s lips curled around the hookah’s mouthpiece, sucking in a long, seething drag before answering. “See, boy, my life is a parade of petty tragedies—none worth changing my habits for. But the greatest tragedy of all?” He exhaled smoke like a dragon dispensing wisdom. “The bottomless stupidity of these villagers. They treat me like some school-bus driver, expecting me to deliver their precious cows to their doorsteps. Yesterday, Karim’s cow trampled his neighbour’s turnips, and who gets the blame? Me. That man’s a gifted idiot. If angels descended to teach him, he’d argue with them about the colour of their wings.” He barked a laugh, the sound rough as a saw on wood. “The calves in my herd have more sense than him.” 

His lampooning was a performance—boisterous, venomous, yet strangely joyful. It was as if he relished the absurdity of his tormentors.  

“But this village stubbornness—it’s a habit too, isn’t it?” I pressed. “Doesn’t it take something catastrophic to break collective stupidity?”  

“Nothing will break them,” he said, waving a gnarled hand. “Their minds are like warped timber—no carpenter could straighten them. You know the saying: A dog’s tail stays crooked, even if you bury it in gold.” Then, with sudden sharpness, he curled his finger into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The herd, which had begun to stray, froze as if yanked by invisible reins.  

“But the cattle obey you like soldiers,” I marvelled. “Have you ever… taught them this way?” 

A slow, knowing grin spread across his face—the first real smile I’d ever seen from him. “Ah. Now that’s a story.” He leaned back, the willow’s shadow striping his weathered skin. “But I don’t know if you’ve the patience for old men’s tales.”  

“Try me,” I said, shifting closer. “I’m listening.”  

He nodded toward the far edge of the meadow, where a towering wall of poplars stood sentinel. “See those trees? They weren’t there when I first brought cattle to this meadow decades ago. Beyond them lies another field—larger than this one—where the next village’s herd grazed. A narrow canal marked the boundary, and for years, neither herd crossed it. Their caretaker would bring his animals to our stream at noon to drink, and for years, it was peace. Then one day…”  

His voice dropped, and the air itself seemed to lean in.

“Then came the unlucky day.” Rahman Kak’s voice dropped to a gravelly whisper. “A bull—black as a storm cloud, horns like scimitars—charged into my herd. Not for territory. Not for dominance. For her.”  

His knuckles whitened around the hookah stem. “He’d caught the scent of a cow in heat, and madness took him. My cattle scattered like leaves in a gale. I ran after him, my stick cracking against his spine—thwack! —like striking iron. When I finally drove him off, he turned. Looked at me.”

Rahman Kak’s eyes glazed over, seeing it again. “No animal’s gaze should hold that much hate. It was human. Demonic.”  

“The next morning,” he continued, “he came for me.” 

A dry laugh escaped him. “I was young then—fast as a hare. But that bull? He was vengeance on hooves. I barely reached the willows in time. Clung to the branches like a sinner to prayer as he raged below.” His fingers mimicked the bull’s horns, gouging the air. “Tore up the earth like he wanted to uproot the very tree. And that… that became our ritual.”  

The hookah’s ember pulsed as he inhaled, painting his face in hellish light. “Every. Damned. Day. That caretaker laughed—said the bull had ‘spirit.’ Spirit!” He spat the word like poison. “I stopped sleeping. Lay awake, sharpening sticks, plotting. A noose? Too slow. Poison? Coward’s way. Then—”  

He leaned forward, the willow’s shadow slicing across his face. “—I remembered the old story. The one about the djinn who haunted these meadows long ago. They say he took the form of a bull when the moon was dark.”  

A chill skittered down my spine. “You don’t believe that… do you?”  

Rahman Kak’s smile was a blade. “Belief doesn’t matter. Only survival. So, I made a plan.”  

“That night, the idea came to me—clear and sharp as a knife,” Rahman Kak said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial growl. “The next morning, I enlisted a band of cricket-playing boys to haul a river-smoothed boulder to the willow. It took all of us—grunting, heaving—to wedge it between the branches, a sleeping vengeance waiting to fall.”  

His eyes gleamed with the memory as he mimed the act, fingers splaying open. “When the bull came, I let him rage beneath me, let him gouge the earth like a fool. Then—” He brought his fist down in a swift arc. “The rock fell. A thud like the sky splitting. His horns—those cursed crescents—shattered like clay. For a heartbeat, he swayed, dazed. Then he fled, not like a beast, but like a thing unmoored from this world.” 

A guttural laugh burst from him—short, sharp, more bark than mirth. He seized his stick and drove it into the earth, once, twice, as if hammering the bull’s defeat into the soil. The hookah’s coals flared as he prepared it anew, the smoke twisting into the willow’s leaves like escaping spirits. The gurgle-gurgle of the waterpipe filled the silence, a sound that always made me wonder: How could lungs that breathed such darkness still house such life? 

“The next day?” He exhaled, triumphant. “That demon hid his face in the herd. When I stepped close, he ran—like a coward, like a man.” His grin was a sickle-moon. “Animals learn. But villagers? Their minds are rot.” 

He stood abruptly, hookah still dangling from his lips, his spine unfolding like a rusted hinge.  

“You smoke too much,” I blurted as he turned to leave.  

He paused, glancing back. “Worried about my lungs, eh?” A chuckle. “Every puff of smoke is met by a thousand breaths of this meadow’s air. Balance, boy. Like all things—” He tapped his temple. “—it’s habit.”  Then he was gone, his figure dissolving into the golden haze, an old Kashmiri tune trailing behind him—words half-swallowed by the wind, as if the land itself refused to let them go.  

*********

Years unspooled like a fraying rope. I won admission to university, and the willow forest—with its dappled light and whispering leaves—slipped from my daily rhythm. Occasionally, in the sterile buzz of lecture halls, I’d wonder: Was Rahman Kak still herding cattle beneath those same trees? Did his hookah smoke still curl into the branches like unanswered prayers? A friend assured me he lived, though age had gnawed at him. “Thinner. More bent. But the stick still swings,” he said.  

Then, in my second semester, the call came.  

Autumn had painted the meadows gold when my brother’s voice crackled through the phone: “Rahman Kak is dead. Found in the woods.” The line hissed with static, or perhaps my own held breath. I left campus without a word, the bus ride home a blur of tunnelled vision.  

The village had already gathered. Men washed his body behind the mosque, their hands moving with ritual gentleness over the sunken ribs, the furrowed forehead now smoothed of its storms. But it was the cattle that undid me—their lowing that day was a sound I’d never heard: not hunger, not fear, but grief. Some refused to graze. Others vanished into the forest shadows and didn’t return by moonrise, as if they’d gone to mourn in ways we couldn’t fathom.  

Time, indifferent, marched on. I earned my master’s degree, traded ink-stained notebooks for a teacher’s chalkboard. Meanwhile, Kashmir fractured. The air thickened with rumours—boys crossing borders to clutch rifles, midnight raids dragging sons from their beds, the Ikhwan’s boots kicking in doors. In the schoolyard where I taught, children played hopscotch over cracks shaped like gun barrels. At night, mothers counted heads at dinner tables, their silence louder than the curfew’s sirens.  

And through it all, I’d catch myself staring past the classroom window, toward the distant haze where the willows once stood. Rahman Kak’s stories had died with him, not with a bang, but with the slow suffocation of a people too besieged to listen. His stick, his hookah, his bull’s revenge—all swallowed by an age where even the land seemed to hold its breath, waiting for a deliverance that never came.  

Two more years. The conflict had teeth now.

It gnawed through everything—homes, orchards, the very bones of the village. The Ikhwanis ruled like feral kings, their guns rewriting laws written in the soil for centuries. No one dared approach the willows anymore; their once-sacred shade now sheltered only the click of rifle bolts and the acrid stench of boot-polish and fear.  

Then came the morning they felled them.  

I woke to the news like a gut-punch: The willows—every last one—cut down by Ikhwani saws and axes, sold for lumber or firewood or some petty warlord’s vanity. A witness described the meadow afterwards—naked, shivering, the stumps oozing sap like open wounds. The earth, they said, looked betrayed.  

Years later, the army came. 

They erected a fortress where Rahman Kak once whistled his cattle home—watchtowers of corrugated iron, coils of concertina wire blooming like razor-flowered vines. The meadow, where children once sent cricket balls sailing into the golden light, now bore the tread of combat boots and the sour tang of gun oil.  

Last month, I persuaded a friend to go with me.  

We walked the familiar path, my mind thick with ghosts—the whisper of leaves, Rahman Kak’s hookah bubbling, the thwack of his stick against the bull’s spine. But when we crested the hill, the sight stole my breath: A wasteland.

The land itself seemed to recoil from the barracks’ iron grip. Where the great willow nursery once stood, only hard-packed dirt remained, studded with the pale scars of roots ripped untimely from the earth.  

Then—movement. A soldier burst from a bunker, his beard wild as a thicket, rifle levelled. “No cricket here anymore,” he barked, as if the very idea of joy were contraband.  

We turned back. Behind us, the wind scoured the empty meadow, carrying nothing—no birdsong, no laughter, no stories—just the dull clang of a gate swinging shut on a past that no longer belonged to us.  

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.

You can find more of Dr Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Paul’s camouflage uniform blended in with the dead leaves that had accumulated around the base of the tree, making him nearly invisible. The only sign of his presence was the bipod and a short section of rifle barrel protruding from the leaf litter covering him. Paul held the rifle stock snug against his right shoulder and cheek, finger resting lightly on the trigger. He waited, relaxed and watchful.

A man in a forest pattern uniform stepped from behind a thick clump of brambles to Paul’s front. The man paused and looked about, wary and alert. Scanning. Listening. To Paul, the man acted as if he knew he was being watched.

Paul put the scope’s crosshairs on the man, saw the flag on the man’s uniform that identified him; an enemy soldier, a scout sent ahead to assess what was in the forest. Paul estimated the distance between them at no more than 200 meters; an easy shot, a piece of cake for a newly trained sniper like Paul.

As Paul put pressure on the trigger, the details of his first deer hunt, still sharp and clear after fifteen years, flashed through his mind. He remembered everything about that hunt; his failure, Uncle Ellis’ scorn, and the humiliation that consumed him afterward.

“I’m buying you a deer tag the day you turn twelve,” Paul’s Uncle Ellis said a few weeks before Paul’s twelfth birthday. “That’s my present to you. You’ll be legal then, boy, and you and me are going hunting.” Uncle Ellis tipped his head toward Paul’s father. “That is, if it’s all right with your old man,” he added with a smile.

The three of them were sitting at the kitchen table in Paul’s house, the two men drinking coffee. “It’s all right with me,” Paul’s father said. “But it’s up to the boy.” Both men grinned and looked at Paul. They knew what his answer would be.

“Then it’s all set,” Uncle Ellis said. “Deer season opens the first Saturday in November. Going to bag you a big buck. Your first kill. Mount that buck’s head on your bedroom wall. Something you can be proud of. The first thing you see when you wake up in the morning and say, That’s my deer. I killed it.” Uncle Ellis grinned at Paul.

Paul smiled, pleased to be with men he respected and loved.

“We sit here,” Uncle Ellis said, pointing at the remains of a tree that had fallen many years ago. They sat on the downed tree, peering into the leafless forest, waiting for their quarry to appear. Small, puffy white clouds formed in the cold air with every breath they exhaled, then winked out as quickly as they appeared. Neither of them said anything. After a while Paul started kicking at the deep leaf litter covering the forest floor. The leaves rustled like small dry bones being shaken in a tin cup.

Sensing Paul’s flagging enthusiasm, Uncle Ellis said, “There’s a salt block in that little clearing in front of us. You can’t see the block. The grass is too high. The deer can smell it, though. They have a hunger for that salt. We got to be patient and wait for them. They’re going to show. They always do.”

“Did you put the salt block there?” asked Paul.

“I sure did.”

“Isn’t that baiting? It’s not allowed. What if you get caught?”

Uncle Ellis laughed. “Who’s going to know I put it there? Are you going to rat me out?”

“No, I would never do that.”

“I know that, boy. We got to be quiet now. Stop kicking those leaves. If the deer hear us, they’ll shy away and you won’t get a shot. They’re skittish this time of year. Animals can sense when they’re being hunted.”

They sat quietly after that, peering into the leafless forest. Waiting. Paul’s feet began to get cold. He felt the chill creep up his legs and rise to his knees. He started to shiver and wondered how much longer he could sit on the downed tree without having to get up and move around to fight off the cold seeping into his body.

Uncle Ellis jabbed an elbow into Paul’s ribs and whispered, “Off to the left. See that buck? He’s heading for the salt block. That’s your deer. You’re gonna take him.”

Paul saw the deer, seventy-five meters away, walking slowly toward the clearing where Uncle Ellis said the salt block lay hidden in the dry grass.

“Now,” whispered Uncle Ellis and elbowed Paul again. The deer stopped. Its ears twitched at the sound of Uncle Ellis’ voice.

Paul stood, raised his rifle, put the scope’s crosshairs on the deer’s front shoulder, then lowered his rifle.

“Shoot!” hissed Uncle Ellis. The deer remained still then turned its head toward them, searching for the source of the noise. Paul shouldered his rifle again, sighted on the deer then lowered his rifle.

“Shoot it!” shouted Uncle Ellis.

Paul raised his rifle a third time but the deer, startled by the sound of Uncle Ellis’ voice, was bounding away from them, its up-raised tail waving like a victory flag. Paul watched the deer disappear into the leafless forest.

“Boy, what happened to you? That was a perfect shot.” Uncle Ellis shook his head, bewildered by Paul’s failure to shoot the deer. “Why didn’t you shoot?” When Paul didn’t say anything, Uncle Ellis said, “We got to go home. No use hanging around anymore. The deer know we’re here. They’re spooked. They’ll keep away now.”

“Worst case of buck fever I ever saw,” Uncle Ellis said to Paul’s father later that day. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, the two men drinking coffee. Uncle Ellis drummed his fingers on the table and looked at the boy. Paul sat with his head down, not looking at either man.

Uncle Ellis shook his head. “That deer stood there, big as you please, begging to get shot, but the boy froze up and that was that. He let that deer walk away. Was a fine buck, too. Had a great rack on him. Would have made a grand first kill.” Uncle Ellis drank more coffee, grinned, put his hand on Paul’s head and mussed Paul’s hair. “I’m going out tomorrow. I know where to bag me a big buck with a fine set of antlers.” Uncle Ellis stood and looked down at Paul. “You’re not cut out to be a hunter, boy. To be a hunter, you got to be able to kill something. You got to be able to pull the trigger.”

After Uncle Ellis left, Paul and his father remained at the table. Paul’s father put his hand on Paul’s arm and said quietly, “It’s all right.” They sat at the table and neither one said anything more for some time.

Finally, Paul looked up and said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I really wanted to shoot that deer. I really did. I raised my rifle and had it in my scope, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. I don’t know why.”

“Sometimes these things happen, son. I know you feel terrible right now. I know you do and there isn’t anything I can say to make it better, but it will get better, Paul. It will.”

“My mouth went all dry and I couldn’t even swallow. I just stood there, holding my rifle and not doing anything.” Paul squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep the tears from coming out. “Uncle Ellis thinks I’m a loser. I let him down. I know I did.” Paul turned a stricken face toward his father. “I failed, Dad. I blew it. I’ll never be a hunter like Uncle Ellis.”

Paul kept the scope’s crosshairs on the enemy soldier. The man held his rifle at an angle across the front of his body. Leaning slightly forward, the man started walking in Paul’s direction, slowly, deliberately, as if every step required an enormous amount of effort and determination. Then the man stopped. Paul wondered if he had alerted the man by making a noise, by rustling the leaves or by making an imperceptible movement. No, not possible. He hadn’t made any noise, hadn’t moved. The man continued looking toward the tree where Paul lay hidden in the leaf litter. As if sensing something wrong, the man turned and started to go back the way he had come.

Not this time, Paul thought. “This one is for you, Uncle Ellis,” Paul whispered as he pulled the trigger.

Robert P. Bishop, an army veteran and former teacher, holds a Master’s in Biology and lives in Tucson, Arizona. His short fiction has appeared in Active Muse, Bright Flash Literary Review, CommuterLit, Fleas on the Dog, Friday Flash Fiction, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, The Literary Hatchet, Lunate Fiction, Scarlet Leaf Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine and elsewhere.

You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.

For the past three years, I have kept telling Hua that we are never in the limelight in this world of red dust, not even for a fraction of a second. The only exception was the vague possibility that certain readers of my love poetry may have recognized my relationship with her as extramarital, but they would probably take it as an inspiring romance rather than condemn it as a moral crime.

Each time I asked Hua about her worries, she said what she was most afraid of was our affair being found out by her husband, my wife, or anyone else who happened to know both of us.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Your most deeply-rooted fear is no other than the loss of your ‘face’ when people know of your unfaithfulness. To me, this is part of the human nature, but to you, infidelity, as people call it, is morally wrong and thus socially fatal, especially in old age.”

“Whatever you have to say,” Hua has told me again and again, “I just cannot stop worrying, not even for a single day.”

To help deflate her hidden fear, I assured her that nobody around us had actually paid any attention to our emotional lives. While all our mutual acquaintances in China were English illiterates or had no access to my English writings, my family and friends outside of China never showed any interest in what I had written and published.

“So long as we kept our relationship strictly under the rug and always acted like two old zhiqing comrades, the cat will never be out of the bag,” I said.

“How about Za?” Hua asked. “As your former fiancée now living in Holland, she must’ve been your most loyal fun.”

“I doubt she’d be so nosy as to search for me online.”

“Put in her shoes, I would, out of curiosity, if not of concern.”

“Sooner or later, you could tell this by yourself,” I replied. Having paid a visit to Za’s mother and had a long chat with the couple several nights before, I was sure that Za hadn’t the slightest idea about what had been going on between Hua and me in recent years.

The opportunity propped up when Za invited me for a dinner with her husband Wei and a couple of our mutual friends shortly after I moved to a rented room in Songzi. To show my appreciation of their kind offer, I insisted that I treat the couple to the famous local hotpot of the Du rooster instead.

Around eleven thirty on October 17, Pan arrived at the restaurant first, then followed by Za, Wei, Hua and Wang in sequence. Once seated around the table in a small but cozy private dinning room, we began to enjoy the local gourmet foods, chatting and laughing excitedly.

It was the most special party I had ever hosted or attended. For one thing, all the attendants had a close relationship with me. While Za was once engaged with me, her husband Wei had been not only one of Hua’s unprofessed admirers but my closest associate in the Mayuhe Youth Station, who succeeded me as the youth leader after I left the farm for university.

As the host, I started by thanking everyone for coming. After proposing a toast to our own health and longevity, I declared the Za couple as my main guests, while Pan, my best zhiqing friend, and Wang, Wei’s relative, were our main “accompanying guests,” as the local custom would have for every dinner party like this one. On the surface, I put much emphasis on my gratitude to Wei for his friendly support while working at the Mayuhe Youth Station, as well as for his effort to fulfill my wish to hold a grand gathering to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of its establishment. But in the depth I hoped to extend my ‘regret’ to Za, the only attendant who was not from our Mayuhe station, for having broken up with her in 1981 because I found it neither viable nor desirable to live a married life with her in Wuhan back then. Though I said nothing to this effect, I had mentioned this to her on several occasions. This regretful feeling she and I were ready to understand without having to exchange a single conspiratorial glance. During a Tête-à-tête, I once told her that if I had married her, I would have been able to enjoy much more spousal love and support. In return, she had admitted to me in a proud tone that each time when asked how she would compare Wei and me as her man, she would say, “Either’s fine to me!’

As for Hua, I re-introduced her to the party as my newly found relative. Hearing this, Za felt quite surprised, while Pan asked, “How’re you actually related?”

“Hua’s mother’s mother and mine came from the same Zhang family living beside the high school in Jieheshi, the townlet between Songzi and Weishui Scenic Park,” I explained. “But because all our grandparents died long ago, I’m not sure if I’m her uncle by blood.”

“Or I’m Ming’s aunt,” Hua corrected me in a teasing voice.

“So you’re distant relatives,” Wang pointed out, “just like Wei and me.”

Since our parental families originated from the same small place, it was not surprising that we were somehow related, but we all wished to have discovered our relatedness sooner.

As we kept eating, drinking and talking, Za appeared to be particularly high-spirited and asked me if I and my wife had already retired in Vancouver and when we two would visit Europe as tourists. Realizing this as an excellent opportunity to sound out if Za had any updated knowledge about my literary endeavors or, rather, if she happened to know my true relationship with Hua through my English writings published online, I asked her if she knew I had been busy writing not only poetry but fiction during the past few years.

“So, you’re writing novels now?” Za asked in a voice carrying a strong note of amazement. “All I know is, you have published a lot of poetry.”

“Have you read any of my writings online?” I asked further. In so doing, I hoped that Hua would get an answer for herself about whether Za was aware of our affair, since she was the only person among all our mutual acquaintances that might happen to know our secret through my publications in English, which were readily accessible online to anyone who could google outside of China.

“Nah. Except when doing some online reading in Chinese, I seldom turned on my computer. You know how poor my English is,” Za replied, more to Hua’s satisfaction than to mine.

“Our English is not good enough to read any literature,” Wei confirmed, “though we two do have a quite good working knowledge of Dutch.”

“Way to go!” Hua exclaimed. “Having lived in Melbourne for so many years, I’m still an English illiterate.”

From Hua’s response, I knew she was more than delighted to realize that neither Za nor Wei was capable of discovering our infidelity even if they had had such intentions. Seeing how relieved she was from her great fear, I had a strong whim to pinch her right thigh under the table. Dressed in black in mourning for her late mother, Hua looked particularly decorous and graceful today. Since her husband joined her for her mother’s funeral, I hadn’t been able even to take a walk with her, much less enjoy intimacies of any kind. However, probably because she wanted to avoid any suspicion, she deliberately sat much closer to Wang, her neighbor on her left side, thus making it impossible for me to reach her without being noticed by Pan, who sat right beside me.

When we turned our attention to one another’s family situations, we congratulated the Za couple on the success of their outstanding son, a highly accomplished young surgeon in Rotterdam, who married a beautiful Dutch girl and had three sons within five years.

Beaming with smiles, Za told us several anecdotes about how she had brought up his son. Each time she recalled something to her own credit, she would look at Wei’s response. Her carefulness and sensitivity reminded me of Kang, our mutual friend’s comment, “Za doesn’t have much status at home, because she earns little money in Holland.”

Though I fully understood that everyone’s social status was determined by their economic basis, there should be equality within the family. In Za’s case, her relationship with Wei was based apparently on money instead of love. A marriage of convenience in the first place, I thought.

When we began to see Pan’s family photos on his cellphone, we all felt amazed at how well his wife carried her years and how she had become an online influencer in her own right. More impressive were his daughter and grandchildren who looked much more handsome than he was. Though he was both ugly and poor as he himself had often said, his wife and daughter thought highly, and took good care, of him. This fact made me feel particularly envious, resentful and puzzled at the same time. In comparison with him, Ping and even Wei, I had been striving really hard to bring wealth and fame to my family and, as a father and husband, I had done my very best to protect and look after them, but I never felt respected, much less cared for, within my own family.

No matter what, by the time we stood up and got ready to leave the restaurant, my old flames must both have come to their conclusion that the jig is not up yet.

Author’s note: This prose work is inspired by Helena Qi Hong (祁红) 

Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry judge for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022, his debut novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.  

You can find more of Yuan’s work here on Ink Pantry.