The Rifle by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

ended again, the rifle lying on the nails waiting for the future except for one thing more.
    Except for the boy.

The Boy
    It is necessary to know this boy.
    Born on a crisp fall morning, on October 13, he had some small sickness that made him keep getting ear infections. He seemed to be born pulling at his ear and running a fever, and his parents nearly died of worry when he developed fevers from the ear infection and had to be soaked in a tub of cool water to bring his temperature down to keep the convulsions away during the first two years of his life. Even then he was quiet and rarely cried unless there was a good reason, like the enormous needles they used for giving him shots to bring the fevers down from the ear infections.
    Richard, they named him—Richard Allen Mesington, his first two names after his mother’s father, who had never had a son and always wanted one. He was fourteen.
    Richard had not always lived in Missouri. He’d been born in Colorado, where his parents lived while his father worked at construction, building houses to sell to the rich people who no longer wanted to live in the cities and moved to the mountains.
    For his first six years he lived in a little town named Willow in the mountains west of Denver while his father worked on houses that looked like they belonged in the Swiss Alps.
    His childhood was strange for a time because the couple had a small Border collie named Sissy and the boy bonded to the Border collie more than he did to the parents.
    Sissy became his baby-sitter and in some ways his mother, and the boy spent many days in the summer wandering around their house clutching the shoulder fur on the collie while she led him to inspect things that dogs inspect—smelly places, interesting holes in the ground, scents on the wind.
    He began to think dog in those days and sometimes, even until he was four, if he was in the yard and smelled a new odor or one that might be from a good taste, he would stop and turn his head to catch the smell on the wind the way a dog does it, trying to see in the direction of the odor, using the smell like a beacon. He, of course, could not smell as well as Sissy but he didn’t know that, and when she would stop to smell he would try as well, tottering alongside the dog, moving his nose this way and that to catch the smell.
    What made it all stranger was the dog did not truly like the boy. She had been with the couple for two years before the birth of the boy and was jealous of the attention they gave to the child. Often when he had his ear infections and they would go to him in his crib at night, Sissy would stand in their way and try to use her shoulder to keep them from the boy so they would pay attention to her instead.
    She would come to love the boy when he was older and she understood that he was simply an extension of the couple, come to love him so much she would have laid down her life for him, but not early, not when he was young. She tolerated the boy along her side, clutching at her hair, and sometimes growled lowly at him when he grabbed too hard and even lifted her lip to him now and then when he was too rough—though she would never, ever bite him—and without thinking led him out of the yard and into the surrounding forest several times.
    These little trips terrified the parents, even though Sissy never took him over a hundred yards and he was never gone for over ten minutes. They lived outside of town in the mountains, on the edge of pine forests, and Sissy loved to explore and naturally pulled Richard along until he grew tired and stopped, holding hard to her fur and stopping her. The parents always found them that way, the boy standing or sitting, tired but quiet, not crying, looking at the woods around them with the dog standing next to him, Sissy not liking it, wanting to be free but caught by the bond of obligation that connects dogs—and especially collies—to humans.
    Once she had taken him along a