Free The World's Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key Page A

Patriot Sasquatch Slaughter . I sat there and read my book, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the slaughtering I’d seen over the years, and the last thing I’d seen slaughtered up close, back on that December day when I was thirteen.
    N obody wants to hear a hunting story that goes like this: “I went to the woods, and I saw a deer, and I shot him, and it was amazing.” No, the best hunting stories are full of surprise twists and sudden reversals, such as, “I went into the woods and shot my brother, but then I learned that he was not my real brother.”
    The surprise twists in my stories mostly revolved around how I would shoot at things, and they would almost never die. This can be frustrating, not only to the hunter, but also to the animal, who might now be missing an essential part of its body. It may sound cruel and unfeeling and perhaps even upsetting to the reader. And to that, I would say: It is even more upsetting when it was you who did the maiming. You should try it sometime. It builds character, mostly through nightmares.
    This was funny at first, my inability to kill anything very well, a sort of family joke. Ha ha, the boy missed , they would say, every Christmas. They laughed, I laughed. It was all good family fun. Occasionally, I prayed that God would send a gang of jackals into our Christmas dinner to murder them all, but mostly I just smiled.
    Ha ha, you got me . And the jackals will get you .
    Growing up in the country, it seemed like every little general store had Polaroids of slaughtered things over the register. Magazines and newspapers carried black-and-white photos of young boys posing with their very first slaughters. Most of these boys were in elementary school when they’d done it for the first time. And if you looked closely, you could tell: Some of them were girls.
    Girls!
    Who’d killed deer!
    People like to say places like Mississippi are bad for girls. Oppressive, they say. But I’ve still never met a girl down here who wasn’t encouraged to kill something, should she have a taste for it, as many did. All the feminists I knew as a child owned guns and knew how to remove the liver from an animal with a knife, which earned them a great deal of respect from men, since those men also had livers capable of being removed by those same knives.
    If girls could do it, why couldn’t I?
    Other boys my age had done so much, already had wives and children of their own. Did I have a bad eye? Nerves? Palsy? Or worse, perhaps I was in possession of an overactive conscience or had some genetic defect that made me have emotions about animals?
    â€œDon’t worry, you’ll get one,” Pop said.
    That’s sort of what I was afraid of.
    T he day I finally got one, that cold December day, started at 4 a.m. When Pop turned on my light, I had been dreaming. Of what? Of a childhood that didn’t involve waking at 4 a.m., mostly.
    â€œRoll out,” he said.
    I had so many questions. What day was it? What time was it? Why couldn’t I have been born with no arms? I knew, though, even if I had no arms, Pop would have found a way for me to hunt, rigging complicated pulley systems into trees and hoisting me up in a sack, then dropping me on the animals with a knife in each foot.
    This day would be a cold one. “Arctic blasts,” the weatherman had said, illustrated by what appeared to be an angry cloud vomiting ice crystals across the southern states. “Your plants will die,” he said, and I briefly considered how great it might be to be a plant.
    Should I play sick? I’d done it before. I’d faked fevers and nausea on many a brisk morning, but you can only fake illness for so long before your mother believes you’ve had a bad blood transfusion and are now dying of AIDS. Although the idea of spending a quiet, comfortable day in quarantine sounded nice. Sometimes, I claimed to have vertigo or ingrown toenails, and