“An Encounter” takes place in late-19th- or early-20th-century Dublin. The narrator, an unnamed, school-age young boy spends his evenings after school in an older boy named Joe Dillon’s back garden playing war games based on the magazines about the Wild West that Joe likes. Every night, Joe leads a group of younger boys, including his little brother Leo and the narrator, in play reenactments of cowboy-and-Indian battles. Joe always plays as a Native American and, because he is bigger and plays rougher than the younger boys, always wins. The war dance that Joe performs to celebrate his victories is so wild and fierce that the narrator and everyone around him are shocked when Joe decides to follow the path to join the Catholic priesthood.
Without Joe to lead the war games, the boys keep trying to play without him, although the narrator knows that some of them—including himself—only play to prove that they are just as fierce as Joe. One day at the narrator’s rigorous Catholic school, his teacher, Father Butler, catches Leo with one of the Wild West magazines and shames him in front of the class for reading it instead of focusing on his studies. Father Butler’s rebuke makes Leo cry, and his swift punishment makes the narrator even less impressed by the Wild West.
Bored with his repetitive daily routine and longing for a “real” adventure, the narrator decides to play hooky the next day with Leo and another boy from school named Mahony—they play to cross the river to go visit a building called the Pigeon House. But the narrator’s plan quickly starts to go wrong: Leo chickens out and doesn’t show up, and Mahony gets into a scuffle with some ragged girls and ragged boys when he chases them with his slingshot. The poor children then throw stones at the narrator and Mahony and call them “swaddlers,” pejorative slang for Protestants.
The two boys then cross the river on a ferryboat, and the narrator scans the crowd of foreign sailors to see if any have green eyes but is disappointed to find that none do. Watching the sailors only entertains the boys for so long before they grow tired, bored, hot, and hungry—more or less how they have felt for the entire journey. Mahony chases a cat into a field, and by the time they lay down to rest, they realize that they won’t be able to go to the Pigeon House and make it home on time. They each stew silently in their disappointment before a strange old man with a walking-stick wanders into the field and greets them. At first, listening to the man talk is just another experience that bores the narrator. But then the strange old man hints at the sexual content in some of the books he loves. The hint goes over Mahony’s head, and when he asks the man what he means, the man just smiles, revealing his decaying yellow teeth.
The strange old man starts to talk to the boys about “sweethearts,” and while Mahony engages in conversation with him, the narrator mostly keeps quiet. The man keeps talking, his tone shifting as he describes how much he loves to look at young girls. As he repeats the same phrases to himself, the narrator gets the sense that the man is somehow “magnetised” by his own words. The narrator even finds himself somewhat hypnotized by the way the man speaks until the man suddenly stops and tells the boys he has to go for a moment. He walks off to the side of the field, presumably to masturbate, and while Mahony watches in shock and tries to get the narrator to look, too, the narrator only keeps his eyes focused on the ground.
When the man comes back, Mahony makes a break for it by chasing the same cat from earlier to the far end of the field. But the narrator seems stuck in place as the man starts talking to him again. Watching Mahony, the man repetitively describes his fantasies of “whipping” young boys. In his shock, the narrator “involuntarily” looks up at the man and comes face to face with his “bottle-green eyes.” He waits out the man’s speech, then tries to act casual as he stands up to leave. As he walks away from the strange old man he fears that the man will grab him. But he reaches the top of the hill without incident and calls out to Mahony, feeling ashamed of his own lack of bravery. When Mahony sprints across the field to the narrator as if he needed his help, the narrator regrets how he had always secretly “despised” Mahony a bit.
