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Synopsis
Ralph s vivid descriptions of hunting with his family in Pennsylvania are interwoven with humorous accounts of working in the taxidermist's shop in the basement.
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About the Author
Ralph has two passions in life writing and the outdoors. He has been publishing articles and stories in magazines since he was 17. Many of those articles became the basis for The Taxidermist s Son. In 2000 and 2003 he won the American Scholastic Press Association Award for Best Short Story. In 2004 he received Honorable Mention in Fiction at the Santa Barbara Writer s Conference. Recent work has appeared in Bowhunter, Fur-Fish-Game, The Literary Review, Living the Country Life, North Dakota Quarterly, Ohio Valley Outdoors, and Words of Wisdom. For the summer 2005, he is the Writer In Residence of Sanborn, Iowa.Ralph lives in Herman, PA, where he attended Butler County Community College and received an Associate s Degree in 2001. Most of his spare time is spent harassing trout or hunting for stories.
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"It's funny how it works," Dad said. A smile tweaked his lips. "Last time you got all the birds."
He held a grouse in each hand, moving them up and down as if weighing the birds on a mental scale, but we both knew triumph could not be measured in pounds. It could only be measured by the satisfaction you get from pursuing what you love.
He slid the birds into his game pouch and picked up the side by side. We stood there for a silent moment, looking at the sky and then turning and looking down the valley once more. It was a wide, desolate place -- a wasteland, of sorts. You could hear the treetops rustle as the wind spread across the valley toward us.
"Why do they call it Maple Furnace?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," Dad replied.
I tried to imagine the answer. My thoughts drifted from everything to coal mining to lumbering. And then I pictured all those maple trees in October, when the leaves were changing colors and fall was coming on. Everything would be so bright red and when the wind blew, the leaves would undulate like the tip of a flame.
"Well," Dad said.
I nodded. "Yep."
We headed cross-country at a brisk pace. We crossed a flat, dropped down into the valley and hit the old fire road where we had eaten our lunch hours before. Had it really been five hours since lunch? Thinking back over the day's hunt, all the hours blended together, without beginning or end. Everything that happened, the hits and the misses, transpired in this little world without the frames of time. They simply existed, boundless.
The snow continued falling. You could see our boot prints from the afternoon, and then the prints from the morning. As we walked the road, our tracks from earlier that day became more and more faint, until they were erased entirely.
True, no birds for me that day. But I felt a certain peace in the solitude of those woods, walking in an evening quickly becoming night. The small battles of the day, both the mental and the physical, formed in my mind. And I was reminded that victory is not always boisterous and loud. It can be as quiet as footsteps in soft fallen snow. It can be as silent as the light slanting down through the trees of Maple Furnace.
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