The Cranes

A Shot in the Dark Sometimes an author will use certain words to imply that something is going to happen later in the story. We as readers have to infer what that might be. In the short story “The Cranes” the way the author uses “At the shot” it makes us think that the character is shooting at the birds because they flew away, but there is another meaning to this sentence. The true meaning of the last sentence, “At the shot, the two cranes plunged upward, their great wings beating the air and their long slender necks pointed like arrows toward the sun.”, of the short story is the husband committed suicide. The husband says “I’ve been coming here for years and never saw one …” This sentence foreshadows that something bad is going to occur