Turning ‘Tails’ on the Game Warden

One of the benefits of being a regularly published writer is that one automatically becomes a ‘destination’. By this I mean, I rarely know who my readers are but they know me, and how to contact me. 

And when they reach out it sometimes becomes a gift—more grist for my mill. 

Years ago, I came upon a story identified as an unpublished manuscript by the late Peter Cheeke of Cobble Hill, in his day a rural community between Victoria and Duncan. 

Mr. Cheeke was way ahead of his time; he liked to write about the paranormal, the kind of scripts later favoured by One Step Beyond and TV’s Rod Serling, host of The Twilight Zone.

Readers, TV viewers and movie-goers love that stuff today but, in the 1920s and possibly the 1930s when Mr. Cheeke was putting pen to paper (okay, the three manuscripts in my possession, courtesy of his son Peter Robert and grandson Ryan) are typewritten.  

The senior Mr. Cheeke was very avant garde. But one manuscript, untitled, is purely down-to-earth, the story of a hunter’s encounter with every backwoodsman’s nemesis, the Game Warden. It’s a treat—and next week’s BC Chronicle.

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PHOTO: A blacktail doe innocently poses for the camera. Does can only be hunted during posted hunting seasons. —www.blacktaildeer.org/about