JUSTIN

When they approach the river, Boo freezes. “You see that?” Justin’s father says, nodding in the dog’s direction. “He’s sighted something. Maybe a ptarmigan or a grouse.”

It is another thirty yards to where Boo points, his body black and rigid, his snout indicating something hidden along the edge of the meadow, where the bear grass gives way to willow thickets. “At ease.” The dog relaxes his pose and wags his tail but keeps his eyes focused ahead of him.

Here is a stand of willows, and beyond it, their fire pit. A tent crouches next to it, a brown vinyl dome tent, the kind that might have been purchased from a hardware shop in the late seventies. Its front flap is unzippered, gaping and fleshy and trembling, like an old man’s mouth.

The tent appears to be empty, but they can hear a scritching sound from inside it. “Hello?” Justin says and then says it again, this time raising his voice to make sure he is heard over the river, its waters hissing. The scritching stops.

They set down their gear and slowly approach the tent and draw aside the flap to peer into its shadowy interior. A dark shape comes at them and takes to the air shrieking—a crow, he realizes when his senses overtake his alarm.

The dog barks wildly. His son runs off a few paces before turning around with his hands raised protectively before his face. His father simply stares after the bird—still visible but departing from them like a curl of ash blown by the breeze—before regarding the tent once again.

“Should we camp somewhere else?” Justin asks when his heart settles. “Is there somebody else staying here?”

His father continues to stare at the tent for a minute and then lays a hand on it, as if checking for a pulse. “No,” he says. “There’s nobody here.”

“How can you be sure?”

He raises his hand. Its palm is coated with pollen.

“Why would they just leave their tent?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Right now Justin hears silence. It’s like a mistake in music—the way it makes him cock his head and listen—like a finger losing its place on a guitar, the wrong note so much more striking than the right note. The steady sigh of the wind, the intermittent birdsong, the chipmunks rustling for pine nuts, has stopped. There is only the river, murmuring in the background.

Then, from the nearby forest, a mass of swallows starts up into the sky, frightened by something. They wheel overhead and their shadows speckle the meadow and their frantic chirping fills the air. With that the spell is broken.

His father wipes his hand on his thigh and inspects the palm.

By this time Graham has returned to the campsite. “Did you know pollen never deteriorates?” He is always saying things like this, listing off trivia he has committed to memory when surfing the Internet or reading the encyclopedia. “It’s one of the few naturally secreted substances that lasts indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely,” his grandfather says and snorts, amused by the word.

“Do you know what that word means?” Graham says, not condescending, but eager to explain.

“Do you know what it means to be a know-it-all?”

“Did you know that certain types of plants can eat meat?”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“I read it.”

“Where?” The beginnings of a sneer grow beneath his grandfather’s beard. “On the Internet?” He enunciates it like a foreign dish that once gave him indigestion.

“No,” Graham says. “The back of a cereal box.”

“Oh.” The sneer turns into a smile and his grandfather lifts his arms and lets them fall, defeated.

They make their camp fifty yards upstream from the other tent. Even though they understand it to be empty, there is something about it that makes them uneasy, so that camping beside it is a little like picnicking downwind from the rotting husk of a beached whale.

While Boo splashes along the banks of the South Fork, chasing the silvery flashes of fish, Justin sets to work digging a new fire pit. His father and Graham make another trip to the Bronco, carrying the cooler and a duffel bag and lawn chairs and his old army-issue canvas tent. It leaks and smells like mothballs and mildew. Every night Justin has ever spent in it, he wakes up swollen and sneezing.

Last Christmas he bought his father a new tent from REI—one of those fancy waterproof, windproof four-man deals with a lifetime guarantee and a screened-in moonroof. “What happened to the new tent I bought you?”

“This has been a good tent for us.” His father pats it fondly. “I like this tent.” He does not look at Justin but sets to work unfolding the canvas and planting the stakes.

His voice goes high and he tries to control it. “That tent cost me nearly three hundred dollars. You’re just going to let it rot in the attic?”

Paul finishes hammering a stake into the ground and stands up and straightens his posture to accentuate his six-foot frame. Beneath his stare Justin feels as if he has shrunk a good five inches, as if his chest hair and muscles have receded—and he becomes twelve all over again.

His father eyes Justin with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing. And I didn’t want it.” He begins to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”

“Graham has allergies, you know. I hope they don’t get set off by the mold.”

“Graham has allergies.” He sniffs his amusement. “More like you’ve got allergies.”

“We’ve both got allergies.”

Paul sniffs again. He has never suffered from the watery eyes or shortness of breath that come with fall and spring, so he always views allergy symptoms with suspicion, as though they were invented for sympathy. He passes the hammer to Graham forcefully enough to make him stagger back a step. “Here’s a job for you. Pound in the rest of the stakes.”

Along the banks of the South Fork, willows crowd together. The world tries to reflect itself in the water but can’t. The clouds and trees and sun fall into the surface and vanish, swept away by the white water, along with their faces when they stand at twenty-yard intervals along the rocky bank and plop their spinners in the water. They have to be careful not to tangle their lines in the branches, snapping their wrists with short sidearm casts.

Justin watches his son. He can see in his face a certain excitement he recognizes. There was a time when, upon entering the woods and following a game trail to the river, with the sun falling through the trees in angled shafts, with the air cool and pine-smelling, with his fishing pole in one hand and tackle box in the other, he would dream about trout with freckled backs and bright white bellies and feel his heart turn over with excitement.

He feels something similar now. The dark forest. The green meadow. The pitted, unscalable walls of the canyon surrounding them. Seeing it, he realizes he has actually longed for this place. It is like hearing an old song on the radio. One you loved but forgot existed. Rediscovering it made you happy.

He wonders what his wife is doing. Maybe crunches on the living room floor while watching a DVR recording of Survivor. He has not thought of her since they left that morning, when she hugged Graham tightly to her chest and then gave Justin a quick squeeze that felt more like a handshake and said, “Take care of our boy.”

There had been an argument earlier. He can’t remember exactly where the anger came from—something trivial—maybe his carelessness with his bowl, chipping it in the sink when he went to splash the milk from it. But before long each of them was slamming cupboards, heaving sighs, looking for a way to cut the other with a sharp word or glare. “Fucking excuse me,” he can remember saying as he pushed past her with the cooler.

He hadn’t wanted to leave like that—with their anger unresolved. He remembered their wedding day, when the line of family and friends had exited the sanctuary to tearily offer them hugs and handshakes in the breezeway, his grandmother had whispered to him, “Never go to bed angry. Best advice I can give.” That’s what driving away this morning felt like, like going to bed with their backs to each other, anger spoiling their dreams. He had thought about calling from the road, had even fingered the phone. But then he thought of his father listening in on the conversation and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He was ashamed to call because there was something to be ashamed about. There was history here: no matter what the situation, even if he felt completely innocent, he would always apologize, always, just to end it, to put a stop to the tension that made him so distracted and headachy. Not this time.

There was a time when they would make up with sex—no, fucking was the word for it. In the middle of a screaming match, one of them would get a hungry look and shove the other against a wall or to the floor, ripping off clothes, enough to bare a breast, to bite a thigh, their kissing more like eating. Any bared skin would go red from carpet burn and the crosshatching of fingernails. And then their grunts would rise into mewls and their mewls into the best kind of screams and they would collapse, emptied, satisfied, breathing heavily. He missed those days.

His attention drifts to the river, from which he pulls three rainbow trout, each the size of his forearm. When he stares into their pearly eyes and rips the hook from their mouths, he cannot help but feel a strange pleasure even as he recognizes a thing yanked from its home into a cold white space it did not know existed until that very second. They gut the fish and throw their heads in the river.

When they return to camp, Graham goes to the tent to get a jacket. From inside comes a fierce buzzing, like a dozen maracas violently shaken. He jumps away with a scream and Justin hurries toward him.

“There’s something in there,” Graham says. There comes a sound like the thump of a stick against the canvas.

“It’s a snake,” his grandfather says. “It’s a goddamned rattler is what it is.”

His father retrieves a long stick from the forest and with his knife hurriedly whittles its end into a yellow point. With this he beats at the outside of the tent. “Hey! Hey, snake! Get out of there, you snake!”

Eventually a western rattler slides from the tent, pausing to taste the air with its tongue, and then begins its fast slither through the ankle-high grass. Justin’s father chases after it, hooting with excitement, and Justin chases after him, certain someone will be bitten. At the sound of their footsteps, the snake coils up like a pile of rope to face them. Its tail buzzes out another warning that Justin’s father silences by whipping the spear forward as though it were an extension of his arm. It pierces the rattler cleanly through the head and tacks it to the ground.

He gives Justin a big grin before uprooting the spear and holding it out before him. From its tip hangs the rattler. It twists into an S and slumps into a diamond-backed line more than five feet long. Its beaded tail drops down to zigzag a trail in the dirt.

Justin must look spooked—he is spooked—because his father laughs a little when he toes the snake off the end of his spear, its head now a peculiar saddle shape with a hole through its middle. A lot of blood and clear fluid comes out of it.

Graham says, “If that isn’t the biggest rattler in the entire universe, I’d be surprised,” and his grandfather smiles at him like a big dumb cat with a mouse in its jaws.

The snake refuses to die. It does a dance instead, twisting and knotting itself into calligraphic designs, its tail rattling, its mouth sometimes closed, sometimes open and as bright as bubblegum. Justin believes it is staring at him. As if it can open its mouth that wide.

Minutes pass and the snake continues to knot itself into an ever-moving tangle. Every now and then Justin’s father pokes it with the spear. “Can I try?” Graham says and for a while he and his grandfather trade the spear back and forth, stabbing, prodding.

Watching a snake die is like watching a campfire, a controlled menace. A long half hour passes and then it is done moving, no matter how hard Justin’s father pokes it. The sunlight has begun to retreat from the canyon when he carries the snake to the campfire and lays it out on a log and goes to work with a boning knife, chopping off its head and setting it aside. Then he pries open the body to eviscerate it and strip off its skin and dice its meat into cubes and put them in a pan to cook with a slice of bacon.

They stand around the campfire and watch the meat hiss in the bacon fat. It smells fungal.

“Did you know,” Graham says, the initial nervousness of his voice giving way to an academic tenor. “Did you know that when you see a dead snake you’re supposed to bury it, because the yellow jackets and wasps will eat the poison and when they do it becomes their poison so that when they sting you they sting you to death?”

“You read that on the back of a box of cereal?”

“No.” He purses his lips, terribly serious. “I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

His grandfather picks up the head, a soft jewel, with his thumb and forefinger and squeezes. Its mouth opens. Little clear beads hang off its fangs’ tips. “Did you know the Chinese believe venom is an aphrodisiac? And that the Indians believe it has healing powers?”

“Indians?” Graham says. “Or Indian Indians?”

“Both.”

With his knife Paul widens the snake’s smile and removes the poison sacs. A see-through whitish yellowish color, they appear made from spider filaments. He drops them into a bottle of Jack Daniels. “A snack for later.”

Once cooked, the meat turns bright pink, like plastic. He seasons it with salt and pepper before forking it onto a dish. “Dig in.” They fill their mouths with the snake and the snake is so good—like a rougher sort of pork—it creates in them an appetite. They feel it uncoiling in their bellies and rattling and asking for more. So they feed it.

They throw the trout filets in the pan where they sizzle as if angry. Justin’s father turns them with a telescoping spatula, cooking them through in less than five minutes, serving them up on tin plates already dampened by the snake. They eat the crumbly meat with their fingers and spit out the splinters of bones while the canyon darkens all around them.

For a long time the only sound is the rushing of the river and the occasional crack of a Coors can being opened. “I thought Dad told me your doctor said you weren’t supposed to drink anymore,” Graham says and his grandfather says, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to drink any less.” He settles into his own separate silence and appears like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached expression.

Justin collects the dishes and carries them to the river and goes to work scrubbing with sand and a dash of biodegradable soap that goes frothing downstream. Back at camp, he packs the cooking materials into a large canvas bag they will later hang from a tree.

By this time the air has grown heavy with the shadows that come with early evening, earlier each day now that fall is deepening into winter. A great bunch of honking draws Justin’s eyes skyward where he observes a flock of geese, arranged in a capital V, headed south. One of them appears drunk, swooping and circling away from the rest who continue along their determined course. He realizes it is an owl, snatching moths from the air.

And then he spots another. And another still. He takes his beer and wanders away from camp and in the deepening gloom watches the owls as they fly in and out of the high branches where they make their roosts.

His father appears beside him. “What are you doing?”

“Just looking. At the owls and the trees and everything else.”

“You always liked trees,” he says. Justin can smell beer in his breath and can hear it in his voice, the friendlier, looser tone of it. “I remember when you were a baby. One night you wouldn’t stop crying. So I took you outside and we stood underneath a tree and you fell right asleep.”

Justin looks at him as if for the first time. “I’ve never heard that story before.”

“You always liked trees.”

“I did?”

“Sure.”

The darkness comes right up to the fire. Justin’s father sits on a lawn chair while Graham and Justin take to the logs they dragged earlier from the forest. The pyramidal arrangement of firewood glows yellow at its top and orange in its middle while the charcoal at its bottom gleams with the black, glassy quality of obsidian. The flames throw shadows upon the willows surrounding them and toss sparks into the air and the night becomes a flickering vision of orange gleams and shifting black shapes. From way off in the distance comes a mournful scream that interrupts all other sounds in the canyon.

Graham stands up. “What’s that?”

“That’s an owl,” Justin says.

“It sounded like a dinosaur. I mean, like the dinosaurs in the movies.”

Boo moves to the periphery of the camp and huffs once. Having proved himself, he hurries back.

Graham lowers himself to the log. A few minutes pass before the screeching begins again. From the forest sounds another owl, then another, some of them with voices like a metallic rasp, others a twittering hoot. Graham looks over his shoulder, perhaps wondering if later tonight he will wake to find some phantom looming over him. “They sound sad,” he finally says.

His grandfather nods and pulls from his beer. “That they do.”

For a time they sit there, listening to the owls sing, their remote wailing.

“If I could sing a song like that,” his grandfather says and pokes at the fire with a stick and the sparks float up and grow smaller and smaller until the darkness encloses them. “A song about the way I feel. Well, it would be quite a song.”

From his belt he pulls a Gerber buck knife and flicks open its seven-inch blade, the blade stained and chipped from so many years of skinning animals and gutting fish and carving wood. With it he begins to whittle his stick down to a point. “You got any stories, Graham? Scary ones?”

Graham thinks about it for a while and then launches into a story he heard at school. It’s about an old hunchback who lives underneath the city and pulls boys down when they reach into sewer grates to fetch their runaway baseballs. “You know how Pepto-Bismol turns your poop black? Well, this guy is so evil, he poops black even when his poop doesn’t have Pepto-Bismol in it.” He goes on another minute, and then his grandfather interrupts him, saying, “I’ve got a story.”

A moth flickers by and vanishes.

“Go on then,” Justin says.

“A long time ago,” he says, as slow as breathing, “something terrible happened here.” He studies Graham and Justin, making sure he has their attention. “It was the summer of Red Morning’s fifteenth year, and like every Indian boy, he went on a vision quest.” At this point he has had six beers and from the sound of his voice they are beginning to affect him. “In this very canyon.” He aims his knife at the ground for emphasis before lazily returning to his whittling.

“Now when you go on a vision quest, you’re not supposed to eat or drink or sleep. You’re supposed to just sit there—on your buffalo hide or whatever—and get in tune with nature and eventually, supposedly, your spirit animal will shuffle out of the forest and tell you something you won’t ever forget, at least not for a little while. And then you’ll go back to your village a man. So this Red Morning, he finds a nice meadow and he waits for the spirits to call, maybe two weeks, before—”

“You can only last four days without water,” Graham says. “Then you die.”

“Indians are made of different stuff. They’re tougher.” He aims the knife at Graham. “And if you interrupt me again I’m going to throw you in the river.”

Graham smiles and then covers up the smile with his hands.

“So he waits there three weeks. Lips cracking. Skin blistering. Spiders and ants and mosquitoes biting him. And finally his spirit animal comes. When it first comes out of the woods, he thinks it’s a man, draped in furs. But it isn’t. It’s tall and naked and covered fully in coarse, black hair. It smells like spoiled meat. And it has long yellow claws. But Red Morning doesn’t feel afraid. He knows it’s going to tell him something important. It says only one word before returning to the woods: ‘Kill.’ ”

He falls into a reverie, speaking softly, telling them how Red Morning stands up then and stretches his aching muscles and is about to gather up his buffalo hide, when he sees in the near distance, just around the bend in the canyon, where his village is, tentacles of smoke rising into the sky.

He runs home as only a fifteen-year-old Indian boy can run, so fast that his feet leave the ground and he is actually flying. He no longer feels hungry or thirsty. There is still a pain at the bottom of his stomach, but it’s a different kind of pain, as if all the blood in his body is pooling hotly there.

Near the village, he climbs up an embankment so that he can see what the trouble is before he faces it full-on. He stares in disbelief at the scene below him. The smokehouse is burning. The sweat lodge has been kicked in. Several wickiups have been kicked open, slashed apart. Bodies lie strewn about everywhere, his mother and father among them, with holes the size of fists in their chests and stomachs. Then he spots the soldiers. They wear gray pants and blue coats that fork in the back like a devil’s tail. There are five of them and they stand in a half circle, smoking rolled cigarettes and laughing quietly.

These are the white men he has heard rumors about but never really believed in. The ones who kill elk and deer only for their antlers, sawing them off and leaving their bodies to rot. Here, they have killed everyone and filled their leather satchels and saddlebags with dried venison and bone necklaces and carefully carved pipes and blades and arrowheads. Anything that shines prettily or promises to fill their bellies, they take. They are led by a hawk-faced man wearing a white hat.

At that moment Red Morning remembers the word the creature whispered to him. Kill. His pulse takes to the rhythm of it like a drumbeat. Kill.

Justin’s father pauses here to wet his throat with another sip of beer. His face is red and hollow-eyed from the fire. He has whittled his stick down to a splinter. Shreds of wood decorate his thighs.

He continues, telling them how Red Morning cups his hands around his mouth and howls a war cry, opening up his throat and bouncing his tongue, so that his voice fills up the canyon, echoing off its walls and trees, making it sound as though the whole world is full of Indians hungry for the scalps of white men.

The soldiers throw down their cigarettes and look in every direction. They seem ready to fight at first, but what are they fighting for? They have taken everything there is to take. So they leap onto their horses. When the hawk-faced man urges his horse into a gallop, the strap of his satchel breaks and it comes loose from his shoulder and disgorges itself upon the ground. The food and the jewelry and weaponry fall as a mass that breaks into many pieces that roll and bounce among the hurrying hooves of his horse. It stumbles and kicks and throws him from his saddle. His men continue a good thirty yards and stop haltingly because all around them the canyon still vibrates with Red Morning’s war cry.

The shadows on Justin’s father’s face move when he talks. But that’s it. That’s the only thing that moves. His body stays absolutely dead still. Even his voice is a level drone, so slow you can pick each word from the air and examine it.

“Stop!” the hawk-faced man cries to the men, scrabbling across the ground to where his rifle has fallen. “Come help!” He is about to yell for them again when an arrow strikes his neck and takes away his voice and sends him reeling. His hat falls off and soaks up a jet of arterial blood that escapes from him. He struggles to right himself. Another arrow shaves him narrowly. And then another, this one finding its mark and dropping him.

“The other men leave him there, but each in his own turn meets death, some with their throats slit, others brained by rocks. He finds all of them.” Justin’s father’s voice rises and falls and levels once more. “And then he skins them and guts them and eats their meat and breaks their bones and sucks the marrow from them. And with every bite he takes, his skin grows hairier and his nails grow longer, as long and sharp as talons.”

Graham laughs and his grandfather gives him a severe look before his attention drifts off toward the dark forest and the less dark sky. “If you’re walking through the woods and if you see a tree with scratches on its bark?”

They follow his gaze, expecting to find such a tree. “The Indian once known as Red Morning has been there, sharpening his claws and teeth. He wanders the forest, still hungry for revenge, searching for men with rifles, someone to blame for what happened to him and his family.”

Graham makes big eyes even as he grins to prove he isn’t afraid.

For the next few minutes they sit quietly. Then an owl swoops near the fire, its wings arched against the warm updraft, exciting the flames with the air it displaces. Justin shifts his legs. His feet have needles in them, having fallen asleep. And the log beneath him feels suddenly cold and hard and unwelcome.

Justin awakes with a full bladder and ventures out of the tent and into the evening stillness. The moon is gone, the canyon lit only by the glow of the stars. He pauses after a few paces, his last breath and footstep the only lingering sound. The hair on his arms prickles as it does when you feel you are being watched. He thinks of his father’s story, able to believe in it for a moment, his mind drugged with sleep. Then he shakes his head and in doing so shakes off his fear like a cobweb. He moves hesitantly forward, away from the campsite, to the place they designated their toilet.

When he lets loose a steaming arc of piss, his eyes wander the sky. An owl banks and wheels, its silhouette blacking out the stars in the shape of a mouth. He follows it until it vanishes against the backdrop of a fast-moving collection of clouds. They come from the west. He stands there awhile—half-asleep, entranced by the gray mystery of the night—and for five minutes, maybe more, watches the clouds become a thunderstorm crisscrossed with wires of lightning. Soon the canyon will darken with rain. He shakes off and hurries back to camp and observes nearby the abandoned tent. Its black hump makes it appear like the huddled remains of a beast that has run and run only to collapse exactly there, perishing where it lies, like the shadow-filled skeletons of cattle in John Wayne movies.

He lies awake until the night fills with the dull, even noise of rainfall. The entire world seems to hiss. The wind flares up for a moment and the canvas rattles and flaps, joined by a sound like the crack of whips as branches break off trees. He clicks on his flashlight, revealing their four bodies crowded into a tent that droops and breathes around them with many damp spots dripping and pattering his sleeping bag.

When you put your head on your pillow and listen—really listen—you can hear footsteps. This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. He hears this now—an undersound, beneath the rain—only his head is nowhere near his pillow. He has propped himself up on his elbow.

There it is. Or is he only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment in front of it, circling.

The front flaps billow open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbitbrush, a smell he will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear. Outside, thousands of raindrops catch his flashlight’s beam and brighten with it. He imagines something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moves from darkness into light.

His father releases a violent snore. Justin spotlights him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him shh. His father’s fingers twitch like the legs of the dreaming dog he drapes his arm over. His mouth forms silent words, his eyeballs shuddering beneath his eyelids, and—not for the first time—Justin wonders what is going on in there, inside him.

Morning, a sneezing fit wakes Justin. He wipes his nose and then the gunk from his eyes to see that his father has already risen, his sleeping bag left crumpled and empty on his cot like a shed skin. Justin can smell wood smoke and hear the crackle of the campfire made from the wood they kept dry by storing it in the tent.

His son still sleeps, an arm thrown over his face, so Justin rises as quietly as he can, pulling on his jeans and the Patagonia longsleeved crew he paid way too much money for the other day, when he and Graham went shopping at REI and got carried away, spending over four hundred dollars after an overeager saleswoman wearing a green vest bullied them into a family membership while dragging them rack to rack, talking at a fast clip about how important gear was—that was the word she kept using, gear—emphasizing, among other things, dry-core weave as an essential component in any shirt, the way it wicked moisture away, etc. He wishes he had spent the money instead on an air mattress. He hasn’t been camping in years and he’s not used to the time away from his bed. His spine feels like the hinges have gone stiff, like the oil has leaked out of them.

He steps outside and pops his back and takes in the morning—the trees that remain in shadow down low, while sunlight ignites their upper branches. He then notices the dewy grass trampled down in a path that leads around the tent. He follows it, slowly, as if expecting something to leap out at him around every staked corner, until he has made a full circle. Then he steps out of the ring of trampled grass and stares at it for a long time, the memory of last night surfacing in his foggy brain. He does not feel the fear he felt before, but a mild discomfort brought on by this observation: whatever has visited them—whether deer or bear or coyote, he wonders—hasn’t simply prowled near for a sniff. The wide path of tramped-down grass indicates a continuous circling that reminds him of vultures wheeling in the sky.

A pitch pocket pops and draws his attention to the campfire, left unattended.

He looks around for his father, looking to the east, where the last of the clouds move slowly away from him, seeming to drag the blue weight of the sky behind them. The rain has left behind a dampness that creeps from the ground as a milky mist. A quarter his height, it covers the meadow and makes everything farther than ten yards away gray and indistinct. As he peers into it a red-winged blackbird darts out, flashing past him, toward the river, where he hears a dog bark.

He walks a few paces from camp, toward the hum of the South Fork, until it becomes visible. Along it the mist drifts thickly riverward. He spots his father, naked along the shore. He appears as if upon a cloud. A sudden whirl of mist hides him for a moment. And then, while running his hands through his wet hair, he emerges from its dense vapors as if throwing off a shroud.

The cold water has tightened and pinkened his skin and his dampened hair looks completely black, flattened like seaweed against his head. Justin sees him for a moment as he was, so many years ago. The picture of health. He remembers how his father used to lift weights in the basement and how the house would shake when he swung 250 pounds over his head and then back to the floor in a power lift. He remembers how his father once broke a wrench when wrestling with a rusted-over bolt. How, one winter, after his woodpile receded faster than he knew it ought to, he drilled a hole deep into a piece of firewood and filled it with gunpowder and sealed it with putty—and when the living room of his neighbor, Mr. Ott, exploded several days later, Justin’s father called FTD with a smile on his face and ordered flowers to be delivered to the hospital.

In this way he is like a force of nature, moving through life with reckless abandon, wiping away any kind of opposition as a storm would wipe away a village, the low growl of his voice like a distant shout of thunder that makes you pause in whatever you are doing and look up.

Now he dries off his body with a towel and then spins it into a whip to snap Boo, who barks eagerly and runs a few paces away from him and back. He drapes the towel over a boulder where his clothes lie in a pile. He pulls on a well-worn pair of Wrangler blue jeans and a thermal shirt whose long sleeves he pushes up to his elbows. And then wool socks, Browning boots whose laces he double-knots. Once dressed, he tosses the towel over his shoulder and moves toward Justin. As he does, he seems to grow older, the wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and the yellow creeping into his teeth when he smiles his hello. Age spots dot his skin. Plum-colored pouches bulge beneath his eyes. He says nothing but lays a damp hand on Justin’s shoulder. The chill remains after he takes it away.

Boo follows the circle around the tent, his nose to the ground, sniffing excitedly. He pauses now and then to press his snout fully into the grass, his tail wagging. And then he stiffens and whines and regards the woods a moment before returning to whatever invisible tendrils of scent he discerns.

“He was doing that earlier.” Justin’s father rubs his head and beard with the towel before tossing it over a log near the fire. “Something prowled close for a sniff last night. That right, Boo?” He squats down next to the dog and pulls him into a headlock and kisses him on the snout. “What do you smell, Boo Boo? You smell a raccoon? You smell a possum? You smell the big bad wolf?”

He hikes to the edge of the forest, twenty yards away. Here he hung a red canvas bag shaped like a huge sausage. It contains their dirty clothes and cooking supplies, anything that might carry the smell of food. There is a handle on the hind end of the bag and he has run the forty-foot rope through it and made a slipknot that he choked tight. He then threw the free end of the rope over the lowest branch, twenty feet above the ground and yanked at it until the bag hung suspended just below the limb, like a massive cocoon. The free end of the rope he secured to the trunk in an anchor hitch he undoes now, lowering the big bag until it impacts the ground with a metallic clatter as the pots and pans and plates readjust themselves.

Justin’s father asks him to fetch some water for coffee. He unzips the bag and rifles around in it until he finds the kettle and throws it at Justin, who catches it fumblingly. There is a cold spring in the nearby forest. From it bleeds a marshy stream, one of so many that trickle to the bottom of the canyon and feed the South Fork. Justin pushes his way through the woods. By this time the mist has mostly burned off, only a few skirts of it surrounding the trees and billowing in his passage. A swarm of tiny brown toads hops away from him when he approaches the spring.

Here it is—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones. And there, next to it, a pair of tattered boots, one of them lying flat against the ground, the other pointed skyward, like a gravestone. He has paused without realizing it. Now he takes several hesitant steps forward to see beyond the boots, where a strewn puzzle of bones and cartilage come together and form a body.

The kettle falls from his hand to the forest floor with a thunk.

The man has been dead a long time. So long Justin can only identify him as male by his clothes and even then he cannot be certain. His jeans and flannel shirt have been torn open and scattered in pieces as though he has exploded and left the shrapnel of his person lying here and there among the weeds. The vultures and the coyotes and the flies and the worms have had their way and licked the skin clean off his bones. His bones are the color of old paper, a yellowish black, their surface scored from the gnashing of teeth. Justin imagines the coyotes howling when they ate his remains, fighting over the juiciest cuts of meat.

His ribs look like the legs of a dead spider, curled upon itself. Crab grass grows through his knuckles and around his skull like hair. He seems to have grown out of the soil and is now receding into it. A moth lands on the skull, flexing its wings and tasting from the black pool of an eye socket, before taking flight.

At that moment the world seems to stop. The moth ceases flying, frozen in midflight. A tree limb, bowed by the breeze, stills. A pinecone falling from a branch hangs motionless in the air and an immobile chipmunk watches it not fall.

Justin feels a fist-sized pressure in his chest that comes from holding his breath. With a gasp, the pressure vanishes and the world unlocks and resumes its flow, as the moth flutters away and the pinecone crashes to the ground.

And then he runs. He runs and probably makes it fifty feet before he stops and finds his cool and steadies his breathing and returns to the spring, slowly. There is a taste like salty pennies in his mouth and he realizes he has bitten a hole in his cheek. He swallows the blood and calls for his father. And then again, before a voice faintly calls back to Justin from the campsite, “What?”

“I need you to come here. Come here right now.”

Something in his voice must alarm his father because a moment later Justin can hear a crashing in the woods and then breathing beside him. Boo trots forward and Justin’s father grabs the dog by the collar before he can disturb the corpse.

“This is bad,” he says. He is wearing a John Deere cap with a chewed-on brim. He removes it now and stares into its hollow. “This is a hell of a thing.” He looks like a man who has woken from a nap and cannot find his bearings.

Justin takes his cell phone from his pocket and hits the power button. It chirps to life and the screen glows with greenish light. No surprise: there is no service here, far from any tower. “If we drive to the top of the canyon,” he says, “if we get a little higher, I might be able to get a signal. It’s worth a try anyway.”

“No.” His father puts his hat back on and straightens it.

“Excuse me?”

“No.”

“He’s dead.”

“People do that. They die.” He lifts his hand and lets it fall and slap his thigh. “I tell you something: he’s in no rush.”

Justin understands this completely and not at all. “Dad?” he says. “No.”

There is concern on his face, but Justin genuinely believes this has more to do with having to abandon their hunting trip than with the dead man sprawled before them. His father puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes just hard enough so that Justin knows he means business.

“Look. It turned out to be a beautiful day, didn’t it?” And he’s right—it is—the kind of bright blue day that bleaches everything of its color. “How about let’s enjoy it?” He regards the dead man and Justin notices his cheek bulge, his tongue probing the side of his mouth. “Probably died of a heart attack. Nothing to be done about something like that. Tomorrow evening, when we leave, we’ll drive to John Day and tell the police. But not today.”

His father releases Boo then and the dog creeps toward the dead man, his muscles tense, his body low, as if certain the blackened pile of bones and sinew will leap up at any moment and attack. When it doesn’t, his movements loosen and he begins to pant happily and wades into the spring to drink.

“Okay, Justin?”

Justin looks at his feet—something he does when gathering his thoughts—and there discovers a weather-beaten pack of Marlboros, the cigarettes that could not kill the dead man quickly enough. Next to it sits something shiny. It has the look of a mud-encrusted marble. In mindless curiosity, Justin picks it up and wipes the dust off and turns it over. A faded green pupil stares at him. An eye—he realizes—a glass eye. There is a chip in it where a coyote clacked it between its teeth or a crow pecked at it in the hopes that it would burst. When he shouts his disgust and drops it, it bounces a few times and rolls to a stop with its pupil upright. With no fleshy pocket to retreat into, it does not blink, ever watchful.

“Justin?” his father says again, his voice calm, as if he finds none of this unusual.

Justin wipes his hands on his pants and wishes for a handful of soap. “Okay,” he says in a voice he recognizes as the voice of his childhood. “Fine.” This is what his wife was talking about, he now knows, his father’s ability to bend him into whatever shape he wants. Justin has grown so used to following his direction, he does not think to question, except briefly, whimperingly, such a gruesome decision.

They go silent and side by side stand watching for a time. The way they are standing there, with their spines so stiff, they must look like part of the forest, a stunted group of trees. Finally Justin kicks a mass of dirt over the eye. It does not lessen the feeling of being watched, as he hoped it would. He remembers the feeling from last night and imagines the eye rolling toward him in the moonlit meadow.

From faraway comes the sound of a diesel horn, a logging truck rocketing along a distant highway, reminding him that no matter how much this feels like the middle of nowhere, it isn’t.

When they return to camp, Justin checks on Graham and finds him staring blankly at the ceiling of the tent, his chest rising and falling with a faint wheeze. Already the sun has soaked into the canvas, making the air inside the tent warm and humid; he feels as if he has stepped into a mouth.

“Graham?”

His son lifts his head to look at Justin with eyes that are red-rimmed and watery.

“Feeling all right?”

“I think I need my inhaler.” His voice has that dreamy quality that comes from not getting enough oxygen.

Justin digs around in his backpack and finds the Albuterol alongside his toothbrush and soap. Justin hands it to his son, who sits up and shakes the inhaler and breathes deeply of it when it spurts into his mouth. He keeps his chest puffed out and holds the medicine inside for thirty seconds before letting it escape with a winded pant.

Justin rubs his back. “Better?”

He nods before taking another puff.

Justin holds back the desire to tell him about the body, to tell him to pack his things. Another minute and the boy dresses, pulling on a white waffle-print thermal, stepping into a pair of khaki-colored nylon pants with many pockets and a zipper around each knee so that you can pull off the legs in hot weather. They step outside to find Justin’s father adding a log to the fire. Last night he set up a grill and now the flames rise through it to warm the kettle. From its mouth comes a line of steam.

“I hope you’re happy,” Justin says.

His father keeps his eyes on the fire, poking the coals with his boot. “Something the matter?”

“Graham woke up feeling sick.”

He more grunts than says, “Flu season.”

“Not that kind of sick. Allergic sick.”

His father heaves a sigh, but upon studying Graham—the redness of his eyes and the black smudges beneath them—his face softens. “You know what’s good for allergies?”

“Pills?” Graham says.

“No. Coffee.”

Graham has a Pendleton blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he draws it a little tighter when he squats next to the fire. “Coffee tastes like dirt puke.”

“Well, this is different. This is cowboy coffee.” He waits for Graham to ask for an explanation, and when he doesn’t, he gets one anyway. “A pot of water. Three cups of coffee grounds. Boil for an hour. Drop a bullet in. If it floats, it’s ready.”

“Really?”

“No. Not really.” He takes an old sweatsock and holds it tightly over the mouth of a tin mug, and then, with his free hand, removes the kettle from the grill and pours. The black and grainy coffee filters through the sock and fills the mug. “But it’s strong.”

For breakfast they fry up a pan of bacon and boil a pot of beans and sop up the grease with a bag of wheat bread. When finished, they sit around for a few minutes, rubbing their hands fondly over their bellies like women in their final trimester. Justin’s father pours himself another mug of coffee and uses his knife to stir it, though he has put nothing in it, preferring it black. He removes the knife smoking from the mug and sets it on the log next to him and raises the coffee to sip.

He then breaks their daze when he turns to Graham and asks, “You know anything about guns?”

“Not really.” Graham digs a hole in the dirt with his shoe and covers it back up. The tense look on his face seems expectant of another lecture.

Justin’s father finishes his coffee and sets down the mug and slaps his hands on his thighs and rises from his seat. “I’ve got a gun I want you to take a look at.”

He vanishes into the tent and when he reappears he carries a box of shells and a brand-new .30-30 lever-action rifle. It is crafted out of walnut and blued steel. He sits down next to Graham with the rifle laid across his thighs, smoothing his hands up and down the length of it.

He explains that this particular gun, the Model 94, once known as the Model 84, has been around for 110 years. “And still going strong.” His voice takes on an exasperated tone when he says there are those out there who feel it isn’t a powerful enough gun, those who had taken it hunting and either missed or wounded an animal and then immediately gone to trade it in for a .243 or some other high-stepping number. “I suppose it’s easier to blame the gun than to admit you’re a lousy shot.” He pats the stock. “But this gun works and it works well. It was my first gun. It was your dad’s first gun.”

There is something about a lever-action carbine, he says. Your meat tastes better—your trophy looks handsomer on the wall—when you hunt with it. He stands up and demonstrates how the rifle comes easily to the shoulder without you having to think about it. “See? It points naturally. It’s light. It’s handy. It’s easy to shoot. It’s got a real light recoil but plenty of punch.”

Whenever he speaks of guns his voice takes on an almost professorial tone, carefully explaining intricacies his audience can appreciate only distantly. The terms he uses must make little sense to Graham, but the boy listens eagerly and stares with an enchanted expression on his face, as if the rifle were a long shapely leg capped by a red high heel.

Justin’s father explains that it was chambered for several other cartridges more powerful than the .30-30, such as the .38-55, the .32 special, but he prefers the Barnes 150-grain flat-point X bullet. It has a deep hollow-point designed to expand at .30-30 velocities. “Let me tell you something,” he says when he opens up the box of shells and hand-loads the magazine. “This will penetrate like there’s no tomorrow.” The shells slide in and the breech closes with an oiled snap, the sound teeth make when biting air.

He holds it out to Graham and Graham stands up and licks his lips and wipes his palms on his knees before taking it. The weapon is strange to him—but gives him immediate confidence. Justin can see this in the widening of his eyes, the straightening of his posture. Justin remembers the first time he held a gun. The feeling—the power, the lurking pleasure of the cold metal fitting into his warm hand—is unforgettable.

“Do you like it?” Justin’s father says.

“I do.”

“Good.” The skin around his eyes crinkles like tissue paper. “Because I bought it for you.”

Graham says, “No way,” and a second later so does Justin, only with a different emphasis.

Graham turns to him with the rifle gripped tightly in his hands. “Come on, Dad. Don’t be such a—” He meets Justin’s eyes easily, his stare ugly and powerful. Justin is surprised by his reaction. He is one of those children who eats his vegetables when told to, who shuts off the television after his program ends, who never asks for more than his allowance. To hear such a challenge makes Justin feel momentarily off-balance.

“Don’t be such a what?” Justin says.

“Come on, Dad.”

“Come on, Dad, nothing.”

The stare he gets back—a dark forbidding stare—reminds him very much of his father. Justin wonders what has happened to the pale-faced trembling asthmatic of a few minutes ago. His son opens his mouth, as if ready to say something, and then, having thought about it, pinches his lips together in a line.

Justin approaches his father until he stands only a foot from him. “Got something to talk to you about.” His voice has a crack running through it.

“Now?”

“Right now.” Justin tries to drag him—grabbing his shoulder, as solid as wood—but he will move only when he wishes to move, so Justin releases his grip and walks away from camp and into the meadow and waits. Justin hears his father say to Graham, “Better give that back for a sec.” And then, with the rifle in hand, he slowly makes his way through the grass. On the way he stops to pick a flower and smell it before tossing it away.

“You know what you’re doing?” Justin says.

“I’m giving him a gun. You had a gun when you were his age.” He waves his arm as if the memory of Justin—a boy, hunting—lies out there in the woods.

“Yes, but I’m not you and he isn’t me. He hasn’t taken a hunter’s safety course. He doesn’t have his hunting license. And—”

“For Christ’s sake. When’s the last time you saw a ranger out here?”

“And.” Justin holds up his hand, indicating that he needs to listen. “His mother specified he wasn’t to shoot anything but a picture.”

“His mother,” Paul says through his nose. “You realize you cut your teeth on this sort of thing? Will you listen to—”

His father doesn’t know anything about the trouble with Karen. He doesn’t know that Justin often sleeps on the couch, that Karen often speaks to him through Graham, that Justin often limits himself to touching her shoulder and only when he feels the need to offer a reassuring squeeze or indicate that she ought to move aside so he can grab a glass from the cupboard.

“Look,” Justin says. “Forget her. I’m the one who’s going to make the decision about when he’s ready.” Despite his effort to control his voice, it comes out in an almost whining tone that makes the attention in his father’s eyes give place to a dismissive parental stare. “You’re undermining my authority, Dad.”

“You worry too much. You’re a nervous guy.” He smiles and shuts one eye and aims the rifle at the hawk circling above them. Sunlight reflects off the gunmetal and for an instant lights up the side of his face. “Bam.” He hands the gun to Justin and says, “How about you give it to him? Say it’s from both of us.”

“A little late for that.”

“Still. You give it to him.”

He starts back to camp, pausing after a few steps to dig in his pocket. “Here,” he says. “Have a Werther’s Original. It will make you feel better.”

“Thanks.” He absently takes it and unwraps it and puts it in his mouth and then remembers he doesn’t like Werther’s Original.

Graham’s eyes are a pale shade of gray, almost colorless, regarding Justin when he stands before him. “What do you think?” Justin says, running his thumb along the Winchester’s stock, tracing the wood grain, its color like cream ale. “Do you think it’s a good one?”

“Yes,” Graham says, eagerness creeping into his voice. “I think so.”

Justin regards the rifle. Its barrel is twenty-five inches long, a beautiful black that is almost blue, cold to the touch. He checks the safety and wipes a smear of dirt off the muzzle before holding it out.

Graham lets it hang there a moment, his eyes considering Justin. “So it’s okay?”

“Yes. I guess. But let’s not tell your mother about this. Not yet. Okay?”

He takes it gingerly, with two hands. He keeps his grip a moment longer before letting go. Like all weapons, the Winchester has surprising heft—as if something large, a living creature, is contained within it. His arms lower with its weight. “Nice!” he says, letting the word trail out with a hiss. Immediately he holds the rifle to his shoulder and aims down the line of it.

Justin’s father stands a few paces behind him. When Justin turns to look at him, his face crumples up in a smile. He gives the thumbs-up and Justin shakes his head disapprovingly in response, even as he feels a certain excitement for his son.

“How about let’s shoot something?” Justin’s father says and Graham says, “Okay,” and approaches him, ready to hand off the weapon.

“What are you giving it to me for? Your gun, after all.”

“It’s my gun,” Graham says in a soft voice, as if to himself. He holds the Winchester at his hip and pivots quickly, carving a silver arc in the air when he draws a bead on this tree, then that tree, the hidden threat among them. Justin imagines the dead man collecting his bones and rising up to greet them.

“Come on,” his father says. “We’re going to see what kind of gunslinger you are.” He motions for them to follow him, and they do, out into the meadow, where he instructs Graham to click off the safety and then points at a nearby pine tree with an X spray painted across its trunk. “How about you shoot—”

“Hold on,” Justin says, but neither of them chooses to hear him. The rifle looks so menacing in Graham’s arms, like a snake that might turn on him at any moment, opening up holes from which blood will trickle.

“Shoot that tree,” Justin’s father says. “X marks the spot. Can you do that?”

“I can do that.” Graham takes a long time staring through the sight before he pulls the trigger. Every other sound falls away, replaced by an ear-splitting crack that is lost a moment later in the calm of the canyon. Below and to the right of the tree, the earth splashes up, like mud under the blow of a sledgehammer.

“Holy crap is that loud,” Graham says, putting a hand to his ear and cracking a belly laugh.

Boo runs to the divot and stares intently as if expecting blood to bubble from it. Justin’s father whistles for him to return to his side and then comes up behind Graham and coaches his posture. “Try again. This time brace the rifle to your shoulder. Like this. Now bring your hand forward but not too far forward. And don’t hold your breath. Shoot at the end of a breath.”

To hear them talking about guns, laughing sadistically—acting like men are supposed to act—positions Graham suddenly in a new light, making him seem more mature than he ever has before, a little man. But shouldn’t Justin be the one goading him along, making that happen? Wasn’t he the teacher? With the knack for being alternately stern and jokey in the classroom, inspiring his students?

Again the rifle jumps and the report thunders, expanding and contracting in the space of a second, before rolling away down the canyon—while on the tree trunk a white, pulpy carnation opens up in the middle of the X.

“You’re a natural,” Justin’s father says, clapping his hands twice, before indicating where Graham ought to aim next.

He sends a stone skipping. He knocks a pinecone from a high branch. A stalk of mullein bursts into a pollinated cloud. Each explosion dissolves something or sends something briefly aloft. The coarse scent of gunpowder hangs all around them.

Justin’s father stares then at the tractors parked along the edge of the meadow. At that moment Justin can see through his skull and into the gears of his mind as he considers ordering Graham to blast out the tires and windows. Instead he points to a dirt clod and says, “How about that—”

Gone before he can finish the thought. He curls his finger into his fist and brings it to his chest, protectively, as if Graham had tried to shoot it. “Jeez.”

He clips a magpie and its wings open and close like a black hand. He shoots a marmot and it scurries a few paces with its sides gushing blood. Between shots he pumps the lever and the smoking brass shells land between his boots.

Low-throated laughter rises from Justin’s father. He loops an arm around Graham’s neck and squeezes him tight in what appears to be half headlock, half hug. “You’re one good kid.”

Justin watches from a short distance and notices the pink flush of his son’s skin, so different from his normal complexion—the pale yellow of an onion—resulting from his spending so much time inside, tapping at the keyboard or Photoshopping his pictures or leafing through a book.

It is almost supernatural, how comfortable Graham seems with the rifle. Justin remembers when he was that age, the long hours he spent in the backyard, stapling paper targets to trees and firing at them until his shoulder darkened to a purple shade of bruise. Back then, he had always tried to obey his father, performing his best imitation of him, without ever pulling it off completely, like a clumsy marionette whose movements are obviously dictated by wires and wood. Graham is different. He is not a mimic. He is a student. He learns what he needs to know by asking questions and listening, like he is doing right now—aim over the target when shooting uphill, hold low when shooting downhill—and Justin worries what this might mean for him—this education—and how he might emerge from it changed.

Justin’s father says, gloating, “You see? And you didn’t even want to give it to him!” He then picks up one of the shells and walks to the tree, the one Graham has shot. A yellow trail of pitch oozes from the bullet hole, sweetening the air. With a stick Justin’s father digs a hole in the ground, maybe five inches deep. He drops the shell in it like a seed. “There,” he says. “To mark the occasion. Now if we come back in ten years, the shell will still be there. It’ll be the same, but we’ll be different.”

“Good job, Graham,” Justin says.

Graham smiles and then gazes proudly at the rifle. “It’s a really good gun.”

“Sure is.”

“Do you want to hold it?” he says, as if Justin were the child.

“Why not?” When Justin takes it, the metal is hot and he jerks his hand down to its stock and tries not to cry out.