Bandit’s Run

Bandit's Run
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hope, Faith & Miracles
By David Magill

Dogs are miracles with paws.
~Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy

I was fourteen years old and lost in the woods. My hand gripped the steel handle of my father's pistol and I shivered from the cool of the coming night. I had fallen down a rocky ridge about fifteen feet above a deep valley and rolled into a dry creek bed below. I had a deep cut on my left arm and I was bleeding heavily. I didn't think too much of it, as I had cut myself on the sharp rocks many times before. I sat down hard on the stump of an old cottonwood tree and wondered what to do next.

Our family had been coming to the backwoods of Ozark country since I was born; my two older sisters, mom and dad, and now a baby brother. The little cabin sat against the hills near Lake of the Ozarks, and we would drive down from Kansas City, Missouri and spend every weekend fishing, swimming, hunting, and walking through the deep woods and rocky ravines that formed the landscape. This time, I had gone out alone. My father had given me the gun for squirrel hunting, or maybe a rabbit if one happened by, but now it felt like its purpose had become much more sinister. (Keep reading)