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Stone's Throw

More Adventure Awaits — Stone’s Throw 2025

Welcome to yet another year of Stone’s Throw, the monthly companion to Rock and a Hard Place Magazine. In addition to our regular issues, we want to deliver shorter, sharper content on a regular basis straight to your face holes. Available online and featuring all the same grit and hard decisions as our usual fare, the team at Rock and a Hard Place advises readers to sit down and strap in for their trip here in the fast lane. Enjoy this Stone’s Throw.

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ST3.2 | "Kings and Elk"

PROMPT: There’s always a bigger fish, and this month, give us stories of characters who think they’re the top of the food chain, only to find out in spectacular fashion that they are, in fact, way out of their depth. We want hubris. We want bravado. And then, we want the sinking feeling that you can only get when you realize you’re just a minnow swimming with a bunch of sharks.

KINGS AND ELK

by Ann Wuehler

Mike bled. His naked body shivered in the chilly air of the Sawtooths. He told himself he was the alpha male here. He was the top predator—king of the jungle, prince of the forest.

The bull elk charged again, crazed by mating lusts.

Mike grunted as the antler tips speared his shoulders and chest but he managed to grab the ears, twist them a bit before the animal backed off. It pawed the ground. Mike’s blood dripped from the tines.

He vowed to defeat this bag of meat. If it killed him, let the world weep at his bravery. Let his name be recorded as a name of honor.

Mike ignored the throb of his shoulder as his head filled with the thought of people smiling at him, lowering their eyes when he strode past. He envisioned women, in glittery, slinky gowns, holding their breath as he told the tale of what he had done this day in the wilds.

“Hey!”

A woman rode a palomino between him and his prey The slight wind caught her short black hair, the sun gave it the shine of a crow’s feathers. She wore crisp olive-green pants, a pale green shirt tucked into those pants, and a dark green jacket with an Idaho Forestry badge on her left sleeve.

The elk bugled and pawed the earth. Other elk bugled back. Mike throbbed to rejoin the battle, his blood trickling down his bare chest. The need to defeat this chosen foe consumed him. It coursed through him faster than light itself. Nothing would get in his way, not if he remained steadfast and true, trite as that was. Manhood was built on being true to domination and the triumph of will over another. You stood atop the mountain, or you drowned in shit at the base. There was no other way to be.

“Get out of my way,” Mike growled.

“I’m having you arrested for trespassing and hunting without a license,” the woman replied. “Public indecency. And suicidal. You nutbags, out here trying to battle the local wildlife. Why not a bear? Why is the challenge always an elk? Who thinks of this shit? Stop it!”

This weirdo, with her bitter need to end his journey, began to write in a leather-bound notebook. A forest cop? Why was he always thwarted? Nothing he tried ever came to anything . . . No, that was defeatist thinking.

Life existed to be conquered by those tough enough to handle it. He had shaped his body into a weapon. He had given up brownies and girlfriends. His sister told him he needed therapy. His own dad rolled his eyes and said real men don’t need to tell everyone they’re real men all the damn time. What did that jackwagon know about being real? None of that mattered now. Nothing mattered but this moment—this moment of facing the utter savagery of nature at its worst.

He stood six four and weighed near two hundred fifty pounds, all of it muscle and protein shakes. The elk had to weigh about eight hundred pounds or more. He caught glimpses of it as it pawed the earth, as it called out. It would sprint away to find cows if he did not engage it in a death match for the ages! His name would be synonymous with courage! The movie about this would break all box office records. Oh God, he moaned deep inside his quivering, moist soul, let it begin, let me conquer.

The magnificent antagonist would not get away. It would not win because of some lady bureaucrat. She wrote in her notebook, snickering at him. She snickered. Where had she even come from? How could he be trespassing on public lands in a public forest?

The time had come to act.

Mike tried to just dart past her and continue his quest for dominance.

He ran at the palomino, at the irritation of this ridiculous female messing up this pristine world of battle, of flesh against flesh, soaked in the very fluid of life itself. What did she know of war, of clawing up a solid rock face with raw, blistered hands to ascend to the very top of the world? What did she know of conquest and winning?

The elk charged.

It ran right at the horse, at the woman, at him, screaming defiance, screaming like all the devils in hell let loose.

Mike screamed back, ready to die with his hands about that thick furry throat, choking on his chosen enemy’s hot, salty blood.

Instead, the woman turned her magnificent horse toward the elk even as she removed her jacket, her pale green shirt pulled free, revealing her fish-white bulgy little belly. She flung the jacket into the buck’s face as she flashed by the cervid and it stumbled to a halt, snorting and shaking that antlered head to rid itself of the cloth blinding it so suddenly.

The woman turned her horse and rode it toward Mike, who gaped at such unsportsmanlike conduct.

“Look, you naked, bleeding idiot. Go back to Payette or wherever you’re from. Pretend this never happened. No ticket. No sense kicking someone when they’re down. I get it. You wanna be king of the mountain or lord of the rings, I can’t keep the fantasies straight anymore. You’re the fourth guy I’ve had to save from a bull elk this week alone. Stop it. You wanna bag one? Get a license, wear some clothes, shoot it. Bow hunting! That’s manly. Oh for the love of honeydew melons—is that with you?”

He turned to see a naked man, with a balding head and a slight paunch, emerge from the trees to the left. Mike had also walked up that narrow path from where he had camped by Alice Lake. The newbie stopped, jaw falling adrift as he surveyed blood-smeared Mike, the woman on the horse, and the now-pacified, disoriented elk.

The elk shook off the Forestry jacket. The woman turned her horse and chased it off. The big deer bounded off peacefully into the pines and huckleberry bushes. It bounced toward the tree line far, far above

Mike howled at seeing such a worthy foe escape his wrath. His cry rang outward like the screech of a bagpipe, like the roar of a lion denied its zebra prize. The other man howled as well, making a sort of hybrid wolf howl and cat scream.

These two outpourings of anger and rage at being so thwarted were met by a third, a fourth, and yes, a fifth yowling. Three more naked men, ready to battle whatever they must for dominance and success, burst from other directions and the woman began to laugh. She laughed so hard she bent over with her mirth, clinging to the horse so she didn’t fall off.

Five men had answered the challenge. Five men out of millions, thought Mike with real pride.

His shoulder ached. The blood had dried to an itchy patina on his goose-bumped skin. Something had bitten his left buttock. He had a cut on the bottom of his right foot. Warrior wounds, battle scars that he could show with pride and integrity.

I dare, he thought. I dare where others cower.

The woman got off her horse to retrieve her jacket. “I thought I’d seen it all, I really had.” Up she clambered, back onto her mount, which shook that long mournful head and danced a bit until the woman clamped her knees around the shining ribs and said something into the twitching, swiveling ears. She reached into the back pocket of her pants, took out her phone, and snapped several pictures of Mike and the four other naked men.

“You can’t do that,” the balding paunchy man whimpered.

“I’ll sue your ass, I’ll sue it so hard,” the one who had long blondish braids and the build of a skinny Viking added, shaking his finger at the woman on the horse.

“You do that, cupcake. And I’ll post me some pictures of five stupid men with a death wish. Five naked stupid men with their wieners hanging out. Yee ha and slap my Aunt Fanny, boys! Go have some hot chocolate and calm down.” The strange woman chuckled, gave them a smile and a nod, before she left the five to their fate.

The palomino whinnied, the pale gold silk of tail and mane floating in the Idaho mountain air as the woman rode due east, or maybe west., Mike had no sense of direction or purpose after his near-epic battle with the grand bull elk. He was prepared for only one of two outcomes: he would have either won or died with his hands crushing that proud throat.

His dreams had nearly come true, and now it felt like they had been stolen from him. Dreams deferred, however, were not dreams denied, and surely, they would not die so easily.

Dreams? You watched a stupid challenge on You Tube. You didn’t even know about this last week, you kangaroo.

His sister’s voice had become one of the taunting voices in his head. Mike could not erase her tones from his brain.

One could get a new dream. Or one could still hang onto the old dreams.

“What do we do now?”

Mike turned to the Viking wannabe and he sniffed, his throat closing to a narrow tunnel. Something in him broke at seeing four other men, naked as babies, waiting to be led. Where were the grand men of this age? Where were they? He wished, oh, to be led as well, to be told to go back to his pup tent, pack it up and go home, to Caldwell.

Hot chocolate sounded good.

Payette. As if!

“We find another elk,” Mike offered but he did not use words. His lips seemed glued shut. His eyes stung.

“We should hunt down a bear,” said the man with black hair and the scar of some awful operation twisting from his misshapen knee to his groin and hip.

“I got hot chocolate,” said the paunchy man, eyes on the crushed grasses beneath his feet. “We can, uh, plan. Maybe it counts if we, uh, if we’re like, like a pack? We could be a pack. Like wolves!”

“That isn’t how it works,” the Viking whined, twisting his long blondish braids about his fingers. He had tiny nipples and had shaved all over. “Hot chocolate?”

“I’ll try again. And again. Until I kill one or it kills me,” Mike wanted to say. He wanted to be the leader of this group. The alpha male! Instead, he nodded and trailed the others. They thumped along like a line of baby ducklings. He wept inside, the laughter of the women echoing in his ears, his eyes on the naked rump of the paunchy, balding man.

I am not a baby duckling, Mike told himself. The challenge said fight an elk. But . . . what if I took on a bear?

His mind trembled at such glory that would await surviving that. He’d be somebody. He’d be somebody at last.

Ann Wuehler (on Facebook @AnnRWuehler) has written six novels—Aftermath: Boise, Idaho, Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, The House on Clark Boulevard, Oregon Gothic, The Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus and Owyhee Days. Her stories have appeared in various venues including Brigid Gate’s Crimson Bones anthology, Along Harrowed Trails, Penumbric, World of Myth, Whistle Pig, Stygian Lepus, and others. You can find her online at annwuehler.wordpress.com.

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