No author has stamped their name on the world quite like Hemingway. In thirty years as a travel writer, I keep bumping into him: his homes, hotels he’s stayed in, bars he drank at, and – at Murchison Falls in Uganda – the site of one of his two successive plane crashes. I even spent a morning in Cuba with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s boat captain (who claimed to be the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea).
The personality overshadowed the work. For half the literary world Hemingway is now firmly out of fashion, while the other half keeps the flame burning. I’m in the latter camp.
There are a dozen Hemingway books on my shelves, red flags be damned. This story is one of the reasons. Compare and contrast to Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird. They both culminate with a hunt gone wrong. But which female protagonist has agency?
First published in Cosmopolitan in 1936, and collected in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories, Charles Scribner, 1938. It has subsequently appeared in many other collections and anthologies
A Personal Anthology 