Issue 3 cover

Attack of the Mennonite Paratroopers

by Ivan Dorin

Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008 (stories)

The North. Vast, rugged, untamed. Wellspring of the Canadian imagination. Behind me, the stubborn granitic core of the Anvil Batholith slumbers beneath its Paleozoic blanket. Before me, the ramparts of Rose Mountain tower over expanses of boreal green veined with silver streams, where salmon who have swum fifteen hundred miles arrive to spawn and be eaten by grizzlies. The primeval silence is broken only by the distant rumble of hundred-and-seventy-ton trucks in the huge open-pit mine to the south. Yes, it’s an awe-inspiring view. And it’s mine, all mine. I helped the geologist with reconnaissance this morning, but now he’s doing detailed mapping, so I don’t have to do much more than provide an alternate target for the bears, and they’re all down in the creeks anyway.

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"Attack of the Mennonite Paratroopers" is roughly 2200 words.

Ivan Dorin's work has appeared on CBC Radio's Alberta Anthology, and in On Spec, Vox, and the online high-school English course of the Government of Saskatchewan. Partway through writing the story, he discovered that the house in which he had grown up had features characteristic of Mennonite architecture.