The Rifle by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page A

small brook and when the father came upon them, there was the track of a bear in the mud next to the brook and the dog had her hair up and the boy was looking at the green wall of the forest smelling, his nostrils flared and his eyes big, but he didn’t talk about what he’d seen or smelled until later that night in his crib.
    â€œBig dog,” he said, because he didn’t know yet how all words worked. “In woods—
biiig
dog . . .”
    When the couple moved to a different house—still in Colorado—there were more children about and he began to have friends other than the dog, and when he stopped hanging on her, the dog had become accustomed to the child being there all the time and stayed with him just the same. Many times the parents would look out the window to see the boy and a small friend playing with their toys in the sand at the side of the driveway and the Border collie sitting there, watching them intently, as if trying to help them play.
    One day some heavy equipment moved into the lot next to them, up the side of a hill, and began pushing out dirt to build a house. There was a small bulldozer and a backhoe and a large truck to haul them, and the boy seemed mesmerized, almost smitten with love for the heavy equipment. As soon as he awakened each morning he would run outside and sit on the edge of the property with the collie next to him and watch the men drive the machinery and push the earth.
    One morning one of the men came to the house and asked to use the phone to call a concrete truck to keep it from coming because they weren’t ready for it. He was a husky man with a tee shirt that barely covered his muscles and was indescribably, to the boy, wonderfully dirty. The man had seen Richard watching them work and he liked children—had two of his own—and he asked the boy’s mother if the boy could come up and ride the machinery.
    She hesitated at first but saw the excitement in Richard’s eyes and decided it would be all right if she went with him and stood to the side to make sure he was all right.
    The boy rode both the Cat and the backhoe, and the man let him pull one of the levers on the backhoe to dump the earth from the bucket, and that night when his father came home from work he tried to tell of the excitement of the day but it all jumbled in his mind and mouth and all he could manage was one sentence:
    â€œWhen I get big I want a bughoe.”
    And while he still could not formulate the words, he knew then that when he grew if he could just be a driver of heavy equipment and move earth and flatten mounds, there could and would be nothing finer. That Christmas, Santa—he still believed in Santa and would until he was nearly six and saw two Santas, one relieving the other in a shopping mall—brought him heavy metal toys, a truck and a backhoe that picked up dirt to dump in the truck, and for two complete summers he could be found at the edge of the driveway each day, the collie sitting next to him while he made roads, and this would last until he was taken to a dinosaur museum by his grandfather, who loved him so much it was nearly a visible glow. Then the boy wanted to be an archaeologist, which lasted until he was nine and took a flight in a light plane and decided to be a pilot, and that lasted until he saw a show on television—they did not have a television until the boy was ten—about underwater diving and then he wanted to be a scuba diver and that lasted until he rode a good horse and decided to go to a ranch in Montana and be a cowboy and that lasted until . . .
    He was much like his father, who worked hard all the time but moved from one thing to the next as he learned of them and was devoted and intensely loyal to each of the things as he did them before moving on to the next one.
    It was not until the boy was seven that the family moved to Missouri, where the father had a job offer building cabinets and wanted to