Fiction | Flash Fiction | Story | Scotland
What Does It Mean?
What comes around, goes around
I’m often asked what got me interested in conservation. Well, maybe not often, occasionally. I remember the day I knew I never wanted to hunt or kill any free-roaming animal. I’m not vegetarian, vegan, or fruitarian. I’m just a person who cannot kill a free-roaming animal.
It was a day at home, I was around ten years old and playing with the dogs in the chicken yard. Coming down the fell, chased by an unleashed dog, now one of mine, was a beautiful stag. It leapt the tall chicken wire fence and fell, gasping at my feet. I crouched there next to him, and his eyes were staring, wild fear in his large, dark eyes. This magnificent thing had been chased miles by the look of him. I sat with the stag for a few minutes, wondering if I should call Mum. After a few more minutes, he jumped up, looked around, sprang over the back fence, ran down the driveway, bounced across the road, onto the narrow beach, into the water, and began swimming.
There was a fishing boat out on the water. They saw the splash, and the stag’s antlers were tall out of the water. They started their outboard motor and brought the fishing boat close to the swimming stag. One man came onto the deck. I couldn’t make out what he was carrying; then I heard the shot. They dragged the stag, lifeless, into the boat.
I was never able to shoot anything so innocent and so helpless.
When Dad came home two days later, I told him what I’d seen. He was upset, not so much that these men had done this, which was terrible, but because it affected me. Dad was a good man and explained that what goes around comes around. I didn’t know what that meant. Two weeks later, I did.
A kerfuffle was happening in the town; the local folk were heading down to the harbor to see what all the fuss was about. Dad had moored his fishing boat and called the Coroner, also the town’s taxidermist when business was slow. The corpse was brought ashore. It was the man who had shot the stag.
Dad never talked of it again.
Harry Hogg was born in London, raised in Scotland and now lives between the United States and Britain.
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