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Praise for
ANTHONY DOERR

“It’s fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. . . . Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do.”

—Dave Eggers, author of
Zeitoun
and
What Is the What

“Doerr has a way of saying the ordinary that makes you rethink the way the English language is used.”

—
The Denver Post

“Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly. The stories in
Memory Wall
shouldn’t work at all, and yet they do, spectacularly.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“It’s rare to encounter a writer who is able to make us see the world around us in new ways. And yet Doerr does so on every page.”

—
The Boston Globe

More praise for
THE SHELL COLLECTOR

“If you have stopped reading short stories because they have turned pretentious, silly, or meaningless,
The Shell Collector
is a good reason to come back.... The stories in this collection are polished jewels. They will draw you back . . . first to marvel at what Doerr is telling you, and then to see how he has performed his magic.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Stunning. Eight stunning exercises
in steel-tipped feathery fineness that no writer can read without envying. . . . [Doerr’s] is the all-knowing, all-seeing eye we find in D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Pynchon, DeLillo, Richard Powers—writers able to pin down every butterfly wing and fleck of matter in the universe, yet willing to float the unanswerables about the ‘hot, hard kernel of human experience.’”

—
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“These complex, resonant, beautifully realized stories sing. . . . A remarkable first collection.”

—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award–winning author of
Ship Fever

“[Doerr] centers his stories on taciturn hunters and fishers with deep reservoirs of emotion—inept conversationalists and husbands whose senses only come alive in the woods. . . . Doerr’s wilderness contains a touch of the magical, too: a blind shell collector on the coast of Kenya discovers a miracle cure in a snail’s toxic sting. Tourists land a carp so huge it can’t be photographed. A woman finds she can divine the dream of animals by feeling them. ‘Want to know what he dreams?’ she asks her husband after touching a grizzly’s fur. ‘Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles.’ These are tales that capture the wonder and the icy indifference of nature, and Doerr tells them exceedingly well.”

—
Outside

“Anthony Doerr is a wonderful new writer. His stories reach deep and mine the forgotten places, as well as the never-before-discovered. These stories don’t just describe beauty, they help create it.”

—Rick Bass, author of
Where the Sea Used to Be

Also by Anthony
Doerr

About Grace

Four Seasons in Rome

Memory Wall

SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Anthony Doerr

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner trade paperback edition January 2011

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

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.

D
ESIGNED BY
K
YOKO
W
ATANABE
Set in Spectrum

Library of Congress Control Number: 2001040031

ISBN 978-0-7432-1274-8

ISBN 978-1-4391-9005-0 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-7432-2362-1 (ebook)

Most of the stories in this collection have appeared elsewhere, in slightly different form: “The Hunter’s Wife” in
The Atlantic Monthly
; “So Many Chances” in
Sycamore Review
and
Fly Rod & Reel
; “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story” in
North American Review
; “July Fourth” in
Black Warrior Review
; “The Caretaker” in
The Paris Review
; “A Tangle by the Rapid River” in
The Sewanee Review;
and “The Shell Collector” in
The Chicago Review
.

for Shauna

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Shell Collector

Chapter 2: The Hunter’s Wife

Chapter 3: So Many Chances

Chapter 4: For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story

Chapter 5: July Fourth

Chapter 6: The Caretaker

Chapter 7: A Tangle by the Rapid River

Chapter 8: Mkondo

T
HE
S
HELL
C
OLLECTOR

The shell collector
was scrubbing limpets at his sink when he heard the water taxi come scraping over the reef. He cringed to hear it—its hull grinding the calices of finger corals and the tiny tubes of pipe organ corals, tearing the flower and fern shapes of soft corals, and damaging shells too: punching holes in olives and murexes and spiny whelks, in
Hydatina physis
and
Turris babylonia
. It was not the first time people tried to seek him out.

He heard their feet splash ashore and the taxi motor off, back to Lamu, and the light singsong pattern of their knock. Tumaini, his German shepherd, let out a low whine from where she was crouched under his sleeping cot. He dropped a limpet into the sink, wiped his hands and went, reluctantly, to greet them.

They were both named Jim, overweight reporters from a New York tabloid. Their handshakes were slick and hot. He poured them chai. They occupied a surprising amount of space in the kitchen. They said they were there to write about him: they would stay only two nights, pay him well. How did $10,000 American sound?
He pulled a shell from his shirt pocket—a cerith— and rolled it in his fingers. They asked about his childhood: did he really shoot caribou as a boy? Didn’t he need good eyes for that?