Hunter in the Dark

Robin V.H. Bellamy was an editor and bibliographer in Vancouver.

Monica Hughes should by now require no introduction; she has won numerous awards for her fiction for children and young people, including the Canada Council Children’s Literature Prize 1982, and the Certificate of Honour of the International Board on Books for Young People 1982. Hunter in the Dark began as the winner of the 1980 Writing for Young People Competition (co-sponsored by Clarke Irwin and Alberta Culture), and was recently chosen for the 1983 Young Adult Canadian Book Award by the Saskatchewan Library Association.

Hunter in the Dark is about Mike Rankin, who is almost 16 and has nearly everything a guy could want. In material terms, this is due to his parents’ wealth, but his personal qualities have helped Mike, too. He is good-looking, intelligent, and athletic, and so beautiful Gloria Hlady seems to “go for him” (p. 15); he is thoughtful, good-humoured, and unconceited, which has won him not only a rare kind of friend in Doug O’Reilly, but also a place in Doug’s lively, loving family. Mike’s home is run on standards of neatness, order, punctuality, and politeness, and while he conforms to his upbringing, he often finds it a relief to spend time with Doug’s “clan,” whose relative poverty means worry about the disorder that surrounds them.

Mike and Doug share one ambition — that of hunting by themselves once they are sixteen (old enough to drive, own a gun, and buy a big game license). The boys are well prepared for their adventure; besides practicing at the rifle range, they have learned all they can about tracking and hunting, and also about wilderness survival. Everything seems ready for the big event when for his sixteenth birthday Mike’s father gives him the best rifle money can buy; and then the very next day Mike’s world starts to fall apart, when he faints during a basketball game and the medical tests begin.

Hughes has cleverly set the story of Mike’s struggle with leukemia and, more importantly, against his parents’ overprotectiveness, within the story of his solitary hunting trip. On one level there is realistic detail and the tension of the hunt, while on another there is the unfolding drama of Mike’s discoveries about his parents and about himself. Both lines of action are engaging in their own right, but the way that they are played off against each other heightens the suspense of each and intensifies the climax, when they coincide.

Hunter in the Dark is a fine novel, being at once informative, suspenseful, moving, and well written. Its characters are authentic, its language clear and uncluttered, and its theme — that of living with courage and dignity while knowing that death is certain — timeless and convincing.