On his first hunting trip, a young man learns about the mountain in Pennsylvania where his father grew up and encounters the fabled king of the mountain, Shang Ree Lah.
Shang Ree Lah
a 3,031-word short story by Duane M. Engelhardt
Copyright 2024©
“Sure. Sure.” The old man behind the counter shook his head and then with an ancient dishtowel wiped its pitted surface. The blue, fluorescent lights in the display cases towering behind him glowed with a strained quality making the pies and plates of desserts look tired and less appetizing then one would have wanted. The smell of coffee, eggs, bacon, sausage, and cigarettes drifted about as the old man leaned into the two customers he had just served, “Being first. Early. Yeah sure. Sure. The first bird gets the worm.”
I was about to laugh when my father nudged me in the side, “Good advice. What I tell the boy here, my son. Gotta get out there early if you want to make something of yourself.” He gave me a wink as he drank his coffee.
The place was as dark as it was light. An old diner along a stretch of highway that led eventually into the mountains of Pennsylvania. About thirty minutes before dawn. Thirty minutes before we could pursue what I had been training for over the last four months. The diner was slowly filling up, with men, old men, young men, boys, all dressed, decked out in various stages of age, in hunting gear almost all of which was decorated with bright orange strips. Tales of past experiences, successes, failures, voiced over and over louder and louder as the crowd grew, as people woke up. There was a lot of camaraderie in the group of shaking hands and nodded acknowledgments. Lots of fast talking and glancing at watches.
The door bumped open, and two more men pushed their way through the crowd up to where we were. The taller of the two punched my father in the left shoulder and as my father looked toward where the blow came from the other helped himself to his coffee then winked as he set the emptied cup back on the counter. Uncle Matthew had a warm grin that showed several missing teeth, he hadn’t shaved, and the stubble caught the blue light from the display cases.
“So, you think the boy is ready?” Uncle Matthew slapped me on the back. “Gonna, get your first buck? Stalking the old king of the mountain?”
Uncle Harry the taller one rubbed my cheek, “Shit he’ll be shaving soon.” He had a buoyant chuckle, “See you got your orange.” He pointed to the fluorescent orange gear that was now mandatory to hunt. Laughing he pulled on my collar and peeked down my back, “You got on orange long johns as well?”
Uncle Matthew leaned back against the counter surveying the crowd of hunters all taking turns watching the clock. “Guessin’ you’ll head to your lucky spot?”
My father nodded.
“You and all the rest of these…” There was an uncharacteristic meanness in Uncle Matthew’s voice. “Everyone’s got a special spot. Gonna be more clodhoppers on our mountain than trees.”
“Not like it used to be,” Uncle Harry shook his head. “Every year seems as if there are more and more who claim they’ve always hunted on the mountain or fished in the crick. I don’t get it. Growin’ up, there wasn’t that many people out here. Can’t do much on them old rocks anyway. Hiking, hunting, fishing. Turkeys. Squirrels. Trout.” There was a pause as the three brothers stared at those collected in the diner.
“Empty boots and clodhoppers decked out in ore-ange.” Uncle Matthew picked at his teeth with a matchbook cover. “Be lucky if none of them shoots anybody.” His brothers nodded in agreement.
“Empty boots, pretend hunters, just come around on opening day. Playing at being woodsmen,” My dad added after sensing my confusion.
“All chasing Shang Ree Lah,” Uncle Harry announced. “King of the Mountain. Seen him once. Your dad had a shot at him, way back when we were kids. Missed him. Everyone seen him, misses him.”
“Aunt Peggy named him.” My father whispered to me, “After some place in a book she read when we were kids. Mystical. Something you can see, hope for but might not be able to get.”
“We all seen him, at least once. And we all missed him. Startin’ to believe that he ain’t supposed to be killed. Just supposed to be out there protecting that mountain. He is a sight to see when you do. Big old set of antlers like tree branches. Damn.” Uncle Matthew spread out his arms as he spoke. “Of course no one’s seen him in a couple years.”
“Maybe he’s a ghost,” I mumbled aloud shaking my head in suspicion. The men grew silent. My response had taken them by surprise.
My uncle tousled my hair, “I don’t know if he’s a ghost, or the son, the nephew, the brother-in-law. I do know that Shang Ree Lah roams that mountain.” Mathhew jabbed at my dad’s shoulder, “You thinkin’ he’s gonna run by your old secret spot?” He laughed, “Your old man gonna take you up on the mountain and make you wait while the rest of us real hunters get down to business.”
“Have fun boys.” It was Uncle Harry’s turn to slap me on the back. “Damn, you got enough orange on you I may need a pair of sunglasses to cut down on the glare. Ain’t no one gonna mistake you for a deer.” The two laughed as they headed to Uncle Matthew’s beat up Jeep Wagoneer.
My father shook his head as we watched them speed down the highway, “Them boys.” He smiled and had a wandering look in his eyes as if he wished he was with them. For no reason he gave my shoulder a big squeeze then pointed me toward our car.
The ride to the “spot” was shorter than I had imagined and with the sound of crushing crunching gravel my father pulled off the dark road and parked the car. The two of us sat listening to the radio for a minute and then he shut off the engine. “Are you ready?” he asked, getting out of the car and heading toward the trunk.
The question ran around in my head, and I wondered why it had not been asked at 4 a.m. when he and Mom had roused me from bed. You would think that the ideal time to find out would have been before prying me out of a warm cozy bed into the darkness of a cold December morning. An ungodly hour that only criminals and milkmen seemed to inhabit. And of course, hunters. Nothing moves in that darkness, that predawn light where bright lights of the rooms down the unlit hall reach out like beacons of an airport tower. People are just shadows then, figments moving about with the unfettered purpose of accomplishing very little.
“Keep your safety on and the breach open. We’ll load once we get up in the woods.” The rifle had been my grandfather’s. Every grandchild gets to use it and then it was expected that it be passed on. I was the third, maybe the fourth to come of age. My older cousins had declined, so it was held in reserve until I came along. They were more interested in other pursuits my uncles told me with great disappointment. The gun seemed heavy as I followed my father up the embankment that grew steadily steeper as we made our way into the woods.
It had tried to snow overnight and the upper branches of the trees we hiked past held onto a light dusting. The underbrush was still dry and cold, crunching as we walked until my father found the trail he was looking for. “This’ll take us right up to the top.” He looked around recognizing old landmarks, a big tree and a lichen covered rock outcropping. “Right before the summit will be another faint trail leading us back down toward the north. That’s the one we want.”
The Pennsylvania woods, as on an early December morning, were dark and brown with touches of gray and smelled of decaying leaves and musty old stale water. I followed my father as he made deliberate steps along the trail, stepping over fallen limbs and avoiding old flat precarious stones that looked as if they might tip. An occasional squirrel would alarm others as we walked and sometimes a bird would sing out some unrecognizable song. The sun was up but the sky remained Pennsylvania gray getting lighter but refusing to give way to blue skies. Off in the distance an occasional gunshot could be heard but I couldn’t make out the true direction. My father would give a hard listen to the breeze and the air, shaking his head as the shots stopped and then we would move on.
We had practiced moving through the woods silently on Sunday afternoon hikes with a rucksack and canteens of water. My father knew these woods from when he was kid. Hiked all over, hid up here on this mountain to get away from his brothers and his parents, dodging chores. From the top, the summit he liked to call it, you could look down toward the house he grew up in, but trees and rocks obstructed the view. You knew where it was by the way the folds of the hills kind of just went down and stopped, with the house marked by a faint wisp of smoke from the coal stove still stoked by his mother.
The faint path led off the main trail and my father signaled it was time to take a break and have some water before we followed it. “Deer trail,” he whispered. “See how the leaves are matted down like someone has walked over them. Best trails to follow. They know their way around. This one’s been here since I was a kid.” He took a sip of water. “There’s a place about halfway down where we’ll stop and set up. If no one else has thought of it before us.”
We walked past an old stone wall and some piles of rocks that looked as if they had been tossed around scattered about. “Used to be a cabin. Way before I was born. That’s what’s left of the foundation. Over there is a walled off space, maybe a garden or something. Next summer we should come here and look around for artifacts. Pieces of history, maybe some arrowheads or who knows.”
“Indians? Here?”
The man laughed. “Long time ago. Way before even your grandmother was born.” He smiled, “They say if you know where to look you can find arrowheads. Some other time. Today we have plans.”
Two hundred yards or so down from the remains of the old house we stopped.
“This is the spot.” Setting down the rucksack he was carrying, he stood his rifle against a big old tree. Tramping down the leaves at the base of the tree he marked a circle, “We’ll sit here and just wait. My guess is that other hunters are down there where the two mountains meet up. There’s a small gorge where the creek has a set of falls.”
“Where we went fishing last spring?”
“Yep. Most of those empty boots are kind of lazy and will want to take the easy way into the woods. So, they all will be hunting down there and scaring the deer and just about anything that isn’t human up here, all trying to get to the other side of the mountain as quickly as possible. It’s denser over that way, the way we came. They’ll sense that. So, I’m guessing that they’ll use this path to escape.”
As we had planned, I cleared the circle of sticks and stones then spread a poncho on the ground to set up a base while my father scouted out the area. I sat down cross-legged while my father rested his back against the tree. “I’m thinking we should be okay for a bit to take a rest. I would have thought that there would have been more gunshots down there, but we haven’t heard anything for about a half hour or so.”
“Who owns the mountain?”
“Don’t know. Just a mountain. Just woods. Just land. Never was considered valuable enough for anything. No coal. No roads. Not much leveled land for homes, you would have to get some big machinery in here just to dig a foundation. No good for farming. Just a bunch of old pine trees and gray birch.” He sat there chewing on a twig. “Over there off the trail is a bed down. You can tell cause it’s prepared with a bunch of leaves and trampled old ferns. You need to hunker down alongside this tree so that you’ll be able to get off a good clean shot at whatever comes up over that rise.”
Off in the distance were several gunshots. They seemed far away. There was a big sound of rustling coming from down the mountain directly toward us. I raised my gun aiming nervously down the trail. We smelled him first. It was difficult to keep a hushed laugh as a large skunk wandered about twenty feet from where we were. Something behind him moved and he took off disappearing into the brush. A couple of turkeys rushed by followed by some very nervous looking raccoons. One of the raccoons stopped and sniffed the air as if aware that there was human food close by. Gun shots down the mountain prompted it to move along and like the others it disappeared into the underbrush of the forest.
My father checked his watch and moved about stretching his legs. I stood and stretched as well. My father smiled and nodded his approval as we waited. We both set our guns down, still at the ready waiting for a deer to come up the trail. I began shifting my weight from foot to foot and whispered that I needed to find a tree. “Downwind,” my father pointed in the direction with his head. Then there was silence. It became quiet. No squirrels. No birds. Just quiet. A stillness.
It would be the story that my father would delight to retell over and over. Friends, family, the old guy in the diner where our morning had started. “There he was, the poor guy. We had been hiking and stalking all morning. Way before sunup, climbed up the mountain the back way, hacked our way through the underbrush, up to the summit and then back down over by the old ruins until we found the best spot. Right on the buck highway across from a bed down. Great spot. Perfect spot to surprise a deer. Would have been his first.” He would fight to hold back laughter as he embellished the trip through the woods sounding as if the two of us were intrepid explorers.
“When you gotta go, you gotta go. There he is holding his wiener in his hand when there is a roar, a damn wall of rustling, a tsunami of noise as a god damn herd of deer come up over the rise. At least a half-dozen doe all standing there looking around. He’s standing there just staring. And behind them all is one magnificent buck. King of the Mountain. Shang Ree Lah. Just a magnificent animal. Stately. Big brown eyes stares me down as well. The two of us in the right place at the right time, neither of us near our guns. Damn shame. Damn shame. Lucky for the buck. Unlucky for the kid. The animal didn’t move until someone down the slope shot up towards him and us. Bullets went flying past us. Tree limbs snapping off from wild shots. The deer just stood there. Mighty looking animal. All proud like this was his place, his land, his mountain. The boy just stood there. Hell, I just stood there. More shots and I lunged to knock the boy to the ground. The deer, the buck snorted and disappeared. Silent. Like a ghost. There was muffled yelling and cursing as two hunters popped over the rise and stumbled upon the boy and me. A couple of clodhoppers decked out in fluorescent orange jumpsuits.” He would shake his head, “Done with hunting. Gonna stick to fishing.” Laughing, he would wait for those listening to join him.
My dad would tell the story for years. It got longer or shorter depending on the audience. About five years later Uncle Harry dropped dead out in the woods on the mountain. When my old man heard, his first thought was that his brother Matthew might have shot him by accident. The two of them were stalking the King of the Mountain with Uncle Harry getting the bead on him, only to die of heart attack before pulling the trigger or so the story by Uncle Matthew goes. Uncle Matthew was angry for years afterwards because he had to drag his brother out of the woods to a road only to get fined for hunting on “Posted Land.”
The mountain, their mountain was now off limits. Indignant, my uncle would lament, “That’s how they want it. Fine. It’s always been ours. Been everyone’s. How it’s always been. The mountain is just there. So, we used it. Grew up using it.”
Uncle Matthew would be declared legally blind a couple of years later and no longer allowed to hunt, a diagnosis, however, that didn’t stop him from driving. One evening he drove off the side of the road, avoiding a flock of turkeys, flipped his jeep and was pronounced dead at the scene. In the back of the jeep were hundreds of No Trespassing and Posted signs. Turns out that in retaliation he would pull down the signs wherever he found them on the mountain and use them for target practice.
About three years before he died my father’s mind started to fade and the story became less and less about me and more about how he used to enjoy, to love being out in the woods. Hiking, fishing, hunting. Clean crisp air, the gray Pennsylvania sunshine, and searching for Shang Ree Lah on a mountain. Someone’s mountain.
Originally Published in the El Portal Literary Journal, Issue 83. Number 2 (Spring 2026)
Duane M. Engelhardt 