“Deer Heart” by Noah Davis / The Idaho Review

Short Story Shoutout

Oct 7

6 min read

“All the colors are brighter when the snow’s on.”

How are we drawn into great short stories?

Often it’s line by line.

Consider “Deer Heart” (3,650 words) by Noah Davis in The Idaho Review’s latest:

Paragraph one:

“Five does follow the crease of the mountain toward the ravine.”

Who / what is Five? Can we assume there are four more? Already working on the puzzle, which is engaging.

Does carries a natural emphasis, as if Five is doing what the narrator expects it to, so there’s an immediate expertise implied.

“Like spring melt, they snake through windfalls and bare witch hazel stands.”

They implies more. Maybe the other four? Four what? While subtly poetic, this sentence signals an understanding of place.

“Hooves cut old snow.”

The “five” are animals(?) It’s winter. I’m a sucker, always, for a string of single-syllable descriptors. Clear, clean, curt.

“No laurel grows on this side of the mountain, and cold air fills the spaces between trees.”

More expertise. The emotional tone is locked down: It’s spare, precise and leans toward the grimly realistic.

Paragraph two:

“In the scope, Clyde sees a cardinal flit, bright as a teaberry.”

The close-third POV is that of a hunter. The cardinal serves up a splash of color and some foreshadowing—a blood red.

“The first two yearlings pass by the crosshairs and over the bench.”

A “bench” is a level section on a steep hill or mountainside. For game animals, a bench is a natural resting spot, and anywhere nearby is a prime location for a hunting blind.

“The third trots quickly, and snow sprays with her step. The twigs and branches look like brown burns against the white ground.”

We have a visual now on three of the five. The speed and spray pick up the pacing. We’re reminded of the unforgiving setting.

Paragraph three:

“He has killed over a hundred deer since he first started hunting at ten, but still, his heart beats quick as grouse wings as the deer reach the clearing where an old logging road hugs the slope. His doctor calls it atrial fibrillation, but Clyde knows his heart is just forgetting its rhythm.”

And here is Clyde. At first, his rapidly beating heart implies either the thrill of the kill, or an anxiety that comes with the approaching act, maybe? But no, it is a malady. The title comes to mind.

Paragraph four:

“Clyde bleats at the fourth doe.”

Clyde’s bleat could be him mimicking an animal sound, or a human complaint, possibly signaling distress or fellow-feeling for what is about to happen.

“She stops and turns toward his sound as he finds the soft behind her shoulder, breathes, and squeezes the trigger until the rifle fires. He learned to pull slowly so as not to jerk the shot and miss low. The shot should come as a surprise.”

The bleat is a ruse to expose a vulnerability. There’s something clinical in the precision of all these actions, but also something humane. If it’s to be done, it’s to be done right. Soft as a noun, soft as a target. Each narrative choice is a reflection of who Clyde is.

Paragraph five:

“The doe buckles as the bullet punctures each lung and exits into the ground beyond. The three others sprint farther into the hollow as the fourth follows, leaving a blood trail Clyde can see without the scope. The fifth runs up the ridge. She pauses and looks at her herd, scattered across the hillside, unsure which way is safe, unsure where she’ll meet the others after dark.”

A brutal economy in the telling, no frivolity, this is not sport. Then the bold stroke of shifting the POV to Five. As we’ll soon learn, the whole of “Deer Heart” is in the minds and mouths of men, so the fact of Five as a doe doesn’t completely register here, but it sure does on a second read.

I’ve often thought about how writing for publication requires a “3D chess” approach: An initial read that enthralls, a second read that teases out nuances, something buried deep enough to raise eyebrows upon a third read. We want to affirm and reaffirm that an editorial team has something nutritious to chew on in our work, something that bears close scrutiny. I really got that feeling with “Deer Heart,” and I think you will, too. It’s definitely worth your time and attention.

Noah Davis was the inaugural winner of the Mitch Wieland Editor’s prize, named for the founding editor of The Idaho Review. The prize celebrates the best work published in the annual issue of the magazine.

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I’ve eaten up a lot of space in covering the opener, and I never want to overstay my welcome. So, economy…

“Deer Heart” is built around an interesting trio considering the setting and what we (readers who don’t hail from similar places) have come to expect from the kind of literature that considers it. Their introduction is made as efficiently as possible, and it comes immediately after the opener above:

“Clyde’s big brother, Dempsey, doesn’t know where he is each time he wakes up. He asks his roommate, Henry, for his name if he’s feeling gentle or screams at him as if he were a stranger in the kitchen.

Henry is the same age as Dempsey, and in high school, they convinced their FFA* teacher to let them do all their projects as a pair. After graduation, they moved into the house on Sandy Run Road. That was over sixty years ago. The families called them roommates. Two men who needed to split a mortgage and carpool into the valley for work: Dempsey at Wolf Furniture, and Henry at Kunzler Meats.

Dempsey went to Henry’s family for Thanksgiving, and Henry came to Dempsey’s for Christmas. Clyde and Dempsey’s mother said Henry and Dempsey were the closest of friends. Their father said Dempsey was smart with his money, staying single. Clyde was fine pretending like the rest of them. He thought that if it was never said, never sent into the air, then Dempsey and Henry were only two friends living together. It was expensive to buy land. If two bachelors wanted to own a couple acres, they had to live together on their paychecks.”

* Future Farmers of America, est. 1928, open to women as of 1969

If there’s one commonality across the very varied stories I’ve shouted out since February, it is surely the introduction of characters, settings or circumstances that are seldom explored. When two or more of those variables offer fresh terrain, that’s when the work begins to feel orchestral. And here, Noah Davis is a conductor.

Notice how what is often a clinical narrative tone amps up the story’s emotion through its restraint (and when you can, check out what Amelia Valasek has to say about this very dynamic in her Shoutout Q&A here). Notice how much more dynamic the drama is for having a trio of main characters, instead of what could have simply been a tale of two brothers. Notice how the theme of kinship (or the lack / loss of it) is reflected through the prism of this story into a full range of colors.

And maybe most of all, notice how a poet, a dramatist and a short story writer can meet in one work (and one writer), each stepping forward when called upon, each fading into the background when necessary.

According to their website, “The Idaho Review seeks to share evocative, beautifully strange work. We publish an annual print issue of exceptional fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established and emerging writers alike.”

They are currently open for submissions and will be through November 15^th (although they may close early depending on submission volume.) There may be reading periods in the winter and/or spring, depending on staffing ability. Although they don’t have a designated page limit for fiction, most of the stories they publish are under 25 double-spaced pages. They pay for work ($300 for short stories) and accept simultaneous submissions.

~*~

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis’ second poetry collection The Last Beast We Revel In was published by CavanKerry Press in 2025. His first collection Of This River was selected for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry. His poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, The Christian Science Monitor, Southern Humanities Review, Orion, North American Review, River Teeth, among others. Read more about Noah and his work at his website.