Prey

By Rachel O’Neill

HIGHLY COMMENDED in January Competition

 ‘Come on! Just a bit further.’’ Mother grabbed my arm and half-pulled, half-pushed me across the forest floor into the woods that fringed our village.

 She stopped in a small clearing, cocking her head, listening. A huntsman’s horn sounded far off.

 ‘Can we go home? Please.’ I whined, my legs tired, and whipped by brambles. ‘Shush’, not angry, but anxious. She looked around and then up, into the branches. Did she want us to climb the tree? How? There was no way I’d be able to scale the smooth grey trunks.

 Dismissing that idea, she thought, her face tight with fear.  ‘ This way’. I followed as fast as I could. We were in the very depths of the forest, a small light filtered through the autumn leaves. She was listening again. I knew now to be quiet.

 We followed a small stream to a part of the wood I didn’t know. ‘There!’, Mum pointed, keeping her voice low. I saw a tree with its trunk split, hollowed out. ‘In there’. She pushed me into the gap, stood back and, realising I was all too visible, she swiftly gathered storm-fallen branches and squeezed in after me. I took small, shallow breaths. Mother piled up the branches to screen us. But screen us from what?  Wolves and bears would be able to smell us before they saw us.

 ‘Silly’, mother tried to calm me. ‘There are no wolves or bears. The huntsmen have killed them all.’  ‘Then why are we here?’ She saw that, though I was only eight, I needed to know the truth. ‘The men. They didn’t want to lay down their rifles and crossbows and abandon their sport’.’ But why are we hiding, mother?’  ‘The men passed a new law.’ She said, holding me tightly and whispering, ‘This season, they are are permitted to hunt…’ ‘Hunt what?’ I prompted. ‘Women’, she said.

Judge’s Comments: I thought this was a neat little story with great pace, which drew me in immediately and sustained intrigue right to the whiplash of that final word. A whole world is conjured in so few words. A mother has to find a place to hide in a wood with her young daughter, but hide from what? This is the unanswered question that hangs over the whole thing, weaving the thread that pulls the reader through successfully. The writer teases the reader with mentions of huntsmen, then the hint that all the usual prey have been killed – leading this reader to assume it was a case of ‘these two are being hunted for some reason – what have they done?’ – before the punch of the reveal in that final word. And then I get the awful realisation that hunting means to hunt to the death. It was not a twist in the tail in the negative sense, but a surprise all the same, and I asked to be surprised. Really nicely done. I can see a novel growing out of this scenario…!