The Huntress
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I could not do it. I could not shoot the doe. It just stood there. The perfect target. Waiting for me to shoot it. I saw that even while resting, it was tense. This animal was prey; if not to man, then some other predator. It could only survive by wariness and the ability to flee. Somehow that made it all the more pitiful. And those little flickering movements of its head, of its ears, and its feet ready to spring. All of that made me think of its brain and its nerves, and its blood and its muscle. As I watched it through the scope of the rifle that is what I saw. It was a living thing. I could not shoot it.

“Take the shot,” my father said, for the third time.

My left hand shifted on the stock, but my right hand stayed unmoved, index finger on the trigger guard. The trigger was too dangerous. The rifle might fire.

I had shot at hundreds of targets. It seemed that my father had put a gun in my hand as soon as I had dropped my last rattle. That is how things were in my family. The three sons of Gus Barnett, my brothers and me. Born to hunt. I could shoot targets. I could not kill a living thing.

“Take the shot.” Now it was a whispered snarl. My father was not used to giving an instruction twice, let alone four times.

Adjust the grip. Make sure you have stability. Steady the barrel. But I know this. I am a good shot. Better than my brothers maybe. But I could not do it. I could not shoot the doe.

“I can’t. I’m sorry Dad. I can’t”. It seemed like a whisper, but the doe heard it as a shout. It sprung and darted from the clearing, at a bounce. My brother Keith brought his own rifle to his shoulder, but it was too late.

I could not turn around. There was silence, but I knew that my father was seething.

“I have had it with you,” he said. “If you cannot man up and do what you have to do, then you are not a man at all. Do you hear me Walt? You are not a man. Not until you make a kill. You are not a child anymore, so I guess that makes you a girl. Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. She’s a girl.” Trust Keith to say that. Dan remained silent.

“We’re taking you home because that’s where girls belong,” Dad said. “With their mamas; doing the washing, and the cooking and the cleaning. Doing their hair.”

He reached out and pulled the long hair sticking out the back of my cap. Dad never liked long hair. He had worn a buzz ever since he was in the Corps. But he never said anything about Keith’s rat-tail.

We trudged back to the truck parked 2 miles down the hill. Nobody said anything. I felt that I had done the right thing letting that animal live, but still I was ashamed.

We would not be empty-handed. Dan had shot a buck and it was in the truck. If we had been looking for food that would be enough. But then we went looking for a kill. Something for me to kill. But I could not do it.

“You can ride with the meat,” my father said. They would be talking about me all the way home. I sat in the back with the dead buck. I stroked the soft hair on its hide. This was once a living thing like the doe. Now it was just meat. Although I had seen hundreds of dead animals, on that day it seemed sad. On that day I had decided that I would not kill, and I would suffer whatever the consequences of that might be.

We hung the buck in the garage with a plastic basin underneath. My mother came out to see what we had. She preferred chicken.

“That is the last time that I take Walter hunting,” my father said to her. “In fact, that is that last time I will refer to him as Walter. He’s Wendy now. Make sure she is properly presented for dinner. She can help you cook.”

“You need to give him a chance,” my mother said. “Not every boy is cut out for hunting,”

“My boys are,” replied my father. “My sons are hunters. It looks like I now have a daughter.”

Mom looked at me. She had never crossed my father – ever. But she was looking at me for how to deal with this. I knew the look. She needed my help.

“I can be Wendy, Mom,” I said. My brother Keith clapped his hands a few times, slowly.

You have to understand what it was like in our home to understand what followed. My father rules our family with an iron fist. That is not to say that he ever struck his wife, our mother, or even his sons – not often anyway. We all knew where we stood with him. We did what we were told, or what was expected of us. I guess that I thought so long as I was Wendy he would not have so many expectations of me. I could do that for a while, until he calmed down.

A dress doesn’t turn a boy into a girl. Not straight away anyway.

My mother sewed and she put together something for me to wear. My father was not happy with the colorful pants and frilly tee-shirt. He wanted me in a dress. So that is what I wore. It was one of my mother’s dresses taken in to fit my slimmer frame, but in the months to come my mother was to make dresses that were more stylish and youthful. But for now, that would do to satisfy my father.

I wore an apron too, as the mark of what my duties were. I was to help my mother around the house. I was not to go outside. I could cook and clean, and fetch for my father and my brothers. I had to learn to sew and to knit, and Mom even gave me some embroidery to do. Those would be my pastimes now. If I wanted to watch sport on TV it would be from the kitchen while the boys were on the couch and my father in his special armchair.

I was allowed to dress as a boy for school, but I needed to come straight home and get changed. Nobody at school would have known about me if my brother Keith had not constantly referred to me as Wendy. I just did my best to laugh it off and put on a macho act, but deep down I knew that all of this was changing me.

The only physical change was that my father would not allow me to have my hair cut. It was longish to start with, but it got much longer. Long hair on a guy can work, but because I always needed to look as girlish as possible at home, it was always clean and sometimes in braids so that at school it looked glossy and wavy. Dragging it into a pony tail did not seem enough to disguise the fact that it was Wendy hair.

But there were changes in my interests too. Because I was no longer playing with my brothers, I seemed to lose ability in sporting activities. Because I was not watching sport I was out of touch and unable to talk with my friends about it.

I had become involved more in domestic things and my mother and I spent time talking about clothes and style, so I became an observer of the girls in my school. I use the word deliberately, because although guys my age were starting to leer at the most developed girls, I was not looking at them sexually at all. I know that now.

Wearing dresses at home did not turn me into a girl, but they sure started to make me think like one.

I ended up being called a fag and being beaten up by some guys at school. I took it like a man. My brother Keith just watched, but it was my brother Dan who dragged some guys off me and took me home.

“You should have fought back.” That was all my father said.

My mother was very upset. “Let him go back to being your son,” she pleaded with my father.

He gave me one more chance. I knew what I had to do. All I had to do was pull the trigger and my problems would be over. But I could not do it.

All the way back down the mountain I cried. That just disgusted my father even more. But when I got back home and I had my dress back on, I felt Ok. In fact, I felt good. It was a new dress with a patterned fabric and a fullish skirt. I put my hair up and I went into the kitchen to help my Mom. She held me tight. I think that she was glad that it was Wendy who had come back down the mountain.

This was a few years ago, and my hometown was not a forward-thinking place, so home schooling was an option. In fact, there were isolated communities all around so our high school had resources for home schooling. It meant that I never had to wear boy’s clothes again.

I flourished, learning at my own pace. My brothers only ever used our family PC for games, but I used it to learn during the day. One important thing that I learnt was that if I wanted to become a girl for good, I could. I am not saying that is what I wanted back then, but I learned about how it could be done, and how I could take drugs to keep my options open; drugs that could be obtained online.

I was able to get a PayPal account and to win some games and competitions to get some money into that account. I showed Mom how we could order fabric and haberdashery, but also shoes and accessories on line. Some of the stuff that we bought was impractical, so we kept it secret from my father. During the day we had fun being high fashion ladies.

I think those days being mother and daughter were some of the happiest days of my life. But those days were to come to a crashing end, in what was without doubt, the very worst night of my life. That was the Sunday night that my father raped me.

He blamed me. He said that I had become pretty. Too pretty. I was bringing him a beer and he was saying that his sons were old enough to have one too, but not me. I was a girl. Girls do not drink beer.

I was wearing a floral dress that my mother and I had made together. I had been playing with the curling wand and my hair was looking good, and I was even wearing a little makeup – just a little to go with the outfit. I knew I looked good because that was how I looked out of habit in those days. I was not “leading him on” as he said.

I went to my room to get ready for bed and he came in.

“You have little titties,” he shouted. I was partly undressed and he could see the effect of the mail-order hormones on my young body.

“Well, this is how you wanted me to be - remember?” I shot back. “It was your idea that I should be a girl, not mine.”

What happened next is too horrible to describe. How could a father do that to any child of his – girl or boy? I thought that I would never recover, but I did.

My mother was a huge help. She was closer to me than anybody else in the world. I had come to realize just how badly I had treated her as a son, probably because I now saw the way my brothers took her for granted. And I now knew that the man that she had sworn to be with was even more of a monster than I thought he was before.

The following day, we left our home. Mom and I packed our things and we left. I had money. We had skills. We could make it work, and we did.

No matter how badly she had been treated by them, leaving Keith and Dan behind was the hard part. She stayed in touch as best she could, but the truth is that by the time we left they no longer needed mothering. Keith had left school and was working in the local mine, and Dan was ready to make his part-time job at the hardware store full-time when he graduated.

Still, I think that the wrench from her family contributed to her poor health. When she died it added to the anger that I had for all my family, but particularly my father.

Looking back on it, I had much to be happy about the way my life had gone. I could have gone back to being a boy, but I did not. My mother and I set up as dressmakers and ended up running a styling service in the city with some big clients. But I somehow felt that everything about my career, as rewarding and lucrative as it was, had been forced upon me by my father. I even blamed him for the surgery I had to undergo. My husband would have been happy to take me the way I was, but because of what my father had done to me, anal sex was something I could never do. So, I had a vagina constructed for him. It has given me (and him) so much joy that it really was stupid to think this way, but I was angry. I had to settle that anger somehow. My husband understood that too. After my mother died I needed to hunt down my father and my brothers, and settle things.

I was a hunter. I am a huntress. I just cannot kill.

Dan was still living with my father, and had a girlfriend in the house who was serving as the new Wendy. But my brother Keith was living in onsite accommodation at the mine. I knew that they got together for hunting, and I knew where they would be going. I was able to obtain the firearms that I needed – a rifle modified to shoot darts, plus a pistol to do the same thing at short range, plus syringes of the same knock-out drug. It is as I say, I cannot kill. But I can maim.

I have to say it: getting out in the woods and stalking my ex-family was exhilarating. It reminded me of how much I loved that part of the hunt. Why not just do that? Why does some poor creature have to die?

I hired a big SUV and I went up the mountain and set up camp near a favorite spot. But I needed to make my shots close to the road. I would need to be shifting the bodies of three unconscious men to my SUV.

The first dart hit Keith. I made it in the back so he could not reach around to knock the dart away. He did not even realize what had happened to himself. He just looked confused as his legs collapsed under him. He did not even cry out. That is what made it easy for me to put my second dart into my father’s back. He reached around. He did cry out.

My brother Dan was carrying a carcass. I could not have shot him if I wanted too. He turned to see what was happening. I stepped out into the light so he could see me.

“Wendy?” he said. Not Walter. I am not surprised. I have not looked like Walter for years.

“I go by Willa these days,” I told him. I had him drop the carcass and carry my father, while I dragged Keith’s body down the hill to the SUV. I used my syringe only after the work was done.

I had bought a suitable property well away from my home town but well away from the city too. It was an old industrial structure built in concrete and very isolated. I called it “The Station”. It was a place where I could stay for a while and have my father and brothers go through what they put me through, although at a more accelerated pace.

In their case, their transformation would be assisted with drugs. Not just hormones but drugs that assisted in softening the will to resist. In the case of all of them, that was significant.

I kept them separate to start with. I had been thinking that Dan might be the first to yield, but to my surprise it was Keith. The new “Katie” became surprisingly pliant, surprisingly quickly. I had her shave her body and apply the treatments to her face to eliminate hair and poor complexion. Somehow the hormones seemed to work on Katie best.

I suppose that I had a soft spot for Dan, so I reduced hormones for him and enlisted him to assist me. I still never quite trusted him, but I think that he understood what was happening and why. Still, he was the brother living with my father, and appeared to be intent on treating his girlfriend as badly as my father had my mother. I allowed him to call her to say that he was alive and well.

I saved my special torment for my father. The drugs that I injected into his testicles killed them outright. In the end they needed to be removed to prevent infection, but while he was at The Station all he knew was that he was now a eunuch, as I was – or I would be if I had not become a woman.

When I put them all together, he had the added horror of seeing his other two sons feminized. I could watch through the CCTV. I announced that I would release the most feminine one of them. For weeks I sat and watched. Who would think of killing something when this is so much better?

My husband was missing me, and my business needed me too. I can say that is why I left and went back to the city. But the truth is that I was beginning to tire of the whole revenge thing. I think that you can truly say that you have achieved revenge when you tire of it.

I put the locks on a timer and I drove away from The Station. They had to find their own way out and their own way home. I really did not care whether I saw them or heard from them ever again. I had made a life for myself, and with my past now well and truly buried, that life was even better. I never had another nightmare recollection of the horrors of my youth after I left The Station. It truly was everything that I hoped it would be.

But I feel that readers might want to know what became of my father and my brothers. Am I wrong? Well, I did find out through various enquiries. My brother Dan is still living in the old family home and has married his girlfriend. They have two children. I have stalked him and laid a cookie in his home computer. It seems that he might still partake in a little cross-dressing, but beyond that he appears to be a normal male, but with a far better understanding of his wife. I feel that the experience at The Station had a beneficial effect on him.

Katie works as a prostitute and occasional porn actress. You may have seen her in “Big Dick Girl Goes to Vegas” – the brassy redhead with the huge breast implants. I have to say, what she has hardly qualifies as a big dick. It looks fairly small to me these days, and she is strictly on the receiving end in every scene. At least she seems to be enjoying herself.

And my father, well he may be happy as well, after everything, but I somehow doubt it. He is living as the wife of a brute who seems to be pretty much the man he once was, but twice as big and four times as nasty. With his balls removed and his wispy dark hair long but thin, and his ass as big as a truck tire, he looks like a victim, and so he should.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2019