The hunter, and other stories of men by David Cohen

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Transit Lounge, 2018. ISBN 9781925760064. Short stories.
(Age: Adult) Ibis have so flourished on a building site that they have become like a plague, causing problems for the project. Henrik the site manager aka 'the hunter' has to come up with a solution. After spending all day, every day, watching the birds, wearing a gas mask, Henrik has the answer... at least for the time being.
'The Hunter' is the first in this collection of stories about men, and if one were to attribute a theme to the collection, it could be one of the intricacies of thought in pursuing a problem until its resolution (or non-resolution) - all sorts of problems and strange situations, from the mysterious deliveries to the archivist, the woodcutter posing in the forest, the recalcitrant recycler, the traveller with Jerusalem Syndrome, the man always in the same bus seat, the pioneering cabin builder. Cohen creates many bizarre situations for us to consider - with a curious intellectual detachment. It is perhaps only in the story of the archivist that emotion finds a brief moment, as we gradually discover the dilemma of the female delivery person. Women, and emotion, generally do not have a large role in Cohen's stories; they are, after all, 'stories of men'.
Helen Eddy

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