When I got back to the cabin, he was already inside, the rifle half-disassembled. If I’d said 149 meters, or taken six steps instead of five, my father’s round would’ve passed through my stomach. The spray of ice shards hit my face so hard that I fell backwards, and I stared at the place where the bullet had obliterated the tiny piece of antler, poking maybe five centimeters above the snow, just between my feet. The shot rang like a bell in the frozen clearing that pocketed the cabin and the shed and our two fields. I counted five steps back toward him and stopped. I turned and faced the place I knew my father was, though you’d never be able to see him, not if you looked for a whole month. As I approached the fang, the sun hit the ice covering the old silver wood and made it sharp with light. “Go mark it, then,” he said, and moved the rifle from where it lay between us.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. My father turned his round, dull eyes to me. “One hundred forty-eight meters,” I said. He would aim only and exactly as I instructed. This was the shattered birch trunk that had split the year before last in a storm and now stood, jagged and lonely, at the edge of the far field. We’d been here for two hours, waiting while I looked and looked for the tip, which would be our target. We were on our stomachs in the snow, under the stand of trees where, in summer, our horse Teemu lowered his gray face in the shade. On the way back from his dawn hunt, my father had sliced the tip off a reindeer antler and placed it somewhere in the array of space and field behind our cabin. I breathed in and out, the air shallow in my chest. The fighting, which began in November 1939 and ended in a Russian victory in mid-March, was fiercest along Finland’s eastern border, in Karelia. Simo Häyhä, whose life this story imaginatively elaborates on, was a renowned sniper during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |