JUSTIN

It takes half an hour to leave the sun-lit rim of the canyon and descend the switchbacks into the cooler hollow below. The wind abates and the temperature drops. Springwater makes the ground marshy.

Justin glances over his shoulder often, scanning the ridges, unable to shake the feeling of being watched, especially when they move through a clearing and abandon the protection afforded by the trees. He thinks about Seth returning to the camp, potentially following them, with his scope trained on their backs. It makes him feel the same way the glass eye did—itchy—as if crawled over by a prickly-legged fly.

They approach a stretch of the South Fork where the white water roars over boulders. They hike upriver until they find a glassy tract interrupted by a humpbacked arrangement of boulders. They clamber across them, using their hands and feet, while Boo plows through the water and shakes off on the far shore and barks his encouragement.

Justin’s father stands on a sandy mound for a time, turning in a circle, before pointing in a northeasterly direction. “I think it’s this way,” he says and Justin can only trust in him, as he has lost his bearings.

Without any trail to follow they hike through the woods, dodging under branches, stepping over logs, banging their shins against stumps, scaring screeches out of the chipmunks that forage in the shadows. The trees and ledges mostly shelter them from the sunlight. The ground, flat at first, begins to slope upward. Horseflies buzz around their bodies and bite the blood from their skin. Justin’s father slaps a hand to his neck and curses, as if the forest were conspiring against him.

At one point Justin turns around to see how his son is doing, to ask him if he wants a pull of water, and finds nothing except the trees and a spattering of Indian paintbrush. His mouth opens and closes as if seeking out a question, finally finding one in “Dad?”

Twenty yards ahead his father pauses and regards Justin with raised eyebrows.

“We lost Graham,” Justin says and in a hurry starts back the way they came, knocking into trees and calling out for his son, feeling that familiar needle jab of panic. His arms push aside branches that swing back to claw his cheeks.

He has run only a short distance when he finds the boy sitting on a log with his elbows on his knees and his pack on the ground before him.

Justin feels the simultaneous urge to hug him and smack him. “What the hell are you doing? Are you hurt?”

“Kind of.”

“What do you mean, kind of?”

“I’m tired.”

Justin glances back to see his father come crashing toward them with Boo bounding beside him. His belly swings when he runs and his breath comes out in a blustery pant. “What’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem.” Justin shrugs off his pack and pulls a water bottle from a mesh side pocket and tosses it to Graham. He catches it and it sloshes in his hands when he uncaps it and takes a long drink. “Graham was just tying his shoe.”

“Why didn’t he say something?”

Over the rim of the water bottle, Graham is looking at Justin, who gives him a wink and hopes his son understands what he is doing, protecting him from the bite of his grandfather’s criticism. “He did,” Justin says. “We just didn’t hear him.”

“Speak up next time.” His father swats at his forearm and leaves behind a black smear. “You get lost, you’ll be pissing your pants and crying for mama.”

Boo goes to Graham and licks his knuckles. Graham offers the dog a scratch behind the ears and then caps the water and throws it back to Justin with a look of damp gratitude in his eyes.

“Let’s go.” Justin slides the bottle back in its pocket and hauls up the bag again and snaps its chest and waist buckle into place and tightens the straps. “There’s a buck out there with your name on it.”

Justin checks on Graham often, as they stagger up the hillside, sometimes slipping on the pine needles, pressing their hands to their knees with every step to give them that extra boost upward. The trees fall away as they come to a rocky embankment that reaches darkly upward and stretches to either side. It is colored with green and yellow lichen that crumbles into a chalky dust against Justin’s hand. Fissures run through the rock and brown grass grows in them. His father says, “If we follow this east, just a little ways farther, I’m almost certain we’ll find the meadow.”

Coming from a man who seems certain about everything, almost carries a lot of dead weight. Justin doesn’t like to hear him say it, especially with Graham so tired and the sun so high and hot. He pulls off his hat and runs his forearm across his brow to wipe away the sweat.

They move along a narrow corridor, with the forest to their left and the wall of vertical rock to their right. Loose rock crunches beneath their boots and makes every step sink and slide, as it does with snow. More than once Graham almost falls and each time Justin throws out an arm and affords him what security and balance he can. Water escapes a cloven section of the rock wall and trickles down an algae-ridden runnel that disappears into the forest; in their passing they pull handfuls of its icy water into their hair and onto their faces and feel revived.

They work their way around the corner and the trees open up into a bear grass meadow with autumn-blooming bitterbrush and snarls of blackberry vines along its edges.

“Thank Christ,” Justin says.

His father crouches next to Boo and whispers something close to his ear before yelling, “Scent!” a command that sends the dog bounding into the meadow, the sun sliding over his slick black fur, making it appear almost metallic. Even from a distance Justin can hear the sniffs and snorts as Boo bends his snout to the grass. The dog runs erratically at first, zigzagging his way through the grass, and then his tail stiffens as he picks up on something that interests him. From there he paces out a wide circle that eventually loops in on itself. He then pauses and lifts his head and gives a throaty moan.

They discover there a splash of blood already beginning to go brown around its edges. They follow its trail—a splatter on the ground, a smear along a trunk—through the woods and over a moraine and around the curve of the canyon, where it vanishes. In the permanent twilight of the forest, they spend the next few minutes circling, like one big huddle of dogs eager to find a scent. Sometimes deer will circle around and return to the place they came from, feeling safer in familiar territory. And sometimes they will circle into the wind so they can smell danger ahead of them during their flight. But more often they will run fifty yards, stop, look, and listen for what injured them, and then bed down if they observe no threat.

Boo seems confused, sniffing eagerly in one direction and then another, growling and whining in a way that makes him sound almost human. He pauses at the base of a dead ponderosa and licks his chops and barks as if asking a high-pitched question.

Justin’s gaze reaches upward, following the trunk twenty feet until it breaks off in a splintery mess that looks like a jagged set of incisors. Its top half lies downhill from them, thrown there years ago by a windstorm. The forest has since claimed it. Vines strangle its fifty-foot length. Yellow-orange conch fungi rise here and there from the rotted wood, their size and shape similar to the plates that would grow along a stegosaurus’s back, giving the log the look of a slain dinosaur. As do the gouged-out sections of wood that run its length. They appear damp and gray with piles of fresh splinters beneath them.

Graham walks over to Boo. With his hand on the head of the dog, he studies the stunted height of the tree. What Justin dismissed at first glance as worm- and weather-riddled wood, he now recognizes as decorated by the graffiti of claws. Graham glances at Justin then. He has the look of an altar boy told to beware the devil. Justin can see the story from last night—the story of the Indian—racing through the caves of his mind.

“Don’t worry,” Justin’s father says, as if reading the question before it is uttered. “It’s just a bear. That story was just a story some old geezer made up.” He has been studying the ground for tracks, but apparently the hard-packed dirt reveals nothing to him. Now he too approaches the torn-up tree and runs his fingers along the slashes that crisscross it. He swings an arm slowly, pretending his fingers into claws, and then reaches his hand to its limit and Justin sees that he would need another arm yet to reach the highest slashes. “Huh,” his father says as he breathes inward, as though speaking to himself.

“Huh what?” Justin says. “What are you thinking?”

“No bear that big around here.” He takes off his hat. It has smashed a sweaty ring into his hair. “Must have climbed up and left those scratch marks.”

Leaning forward, heads down, they form a loose rank and circle the area until Justin’s father spots a smear of blood marking the way into a small space between leaning rock columns.

This turns out to be the entrance to a slim chute of basalt that gradually widens as it crookedly draws them deeper into a side canyon. A thin stream trickles along its floor. It makes a gentle tinkling sound. A cold breath, the breath of a place deep underground, reaches up from the water as it pushes its way through the headstone-sized rocks that lie scattered everywhere, split at sharp angles and decorated with lichen, so that they hardly know where to put their feet. The blood—once visible in infrequent splatters—now becomes a red watercourse.

They know they are close. After fifty yards, the chute opens up and dead-ends at a circular clearing the size of a chapel. The ground here is messy with the skeletons of so many animals, their bones knee-deep, crushed and scattered and bleached by the sun and picked at by crows until there is nothing to be got from them. Jawbones. Rib cages. Spines welded together by ragged strips of cartilage. Skulls with moss growing like hair along their bone plates. Teeth—big teeth—clattering loosely in jaws or lying scattered across the ground and reminding Justin of the pale, forked-bottom tubers his rototiller unearths every spring when he preps his garden for planting.

Some of the bones are frail and brittle and paper white and snap beneath their approaching footsteps. Others are fresher, their color like the grayed flesh of the elderly.

The buck is sprawled out among them, against the far wall. The blood trail leading to it is like a loose thread vital to its stitching. It doesn’t stir as they clatter their way through the carpet of bones; the pure stillness of death has seized it. Justin looks up and forty feet above him sees a round circle of sky, and at the top of the high basalt walls birds sit in black ranks, waiting.

Art decorates the walls. From the floor—to as far as Justin’s hand can reach above him—every inch of stone has been chipped or painted. Here is a series of bear track petroglyphs climbing sideways along the wall. A pictograph of a fat-bodied snake rising up a stone column, its rattles like a bunch of grapes. Another shows a gang of Indians astride painted ponies, their faces chalked white and their long hair plaited and their hands gripping lances Justin imagines he can hear rattling across the wall, joined by the drumbeat of horses’ hooves and the low chant of a war song.

Like the bones, the images seem staggered in their age, some of them faded, others so bright they might have been painted the week before. Here the paint is a richly hued red, made perhaps from chewed berries with fat as a binding agent. It depicts a scene similar to their own, a reflection in a stone mirror. Three men stand over a deer. They carry spears in their hands. They appear to be dancing, bent-legged, bow-backed. In a splotch of color Justin recognizes his father’s face, with his own in blurry red just beyond it.

“I thought Fremont sent archaeologists through here,” Justin says.

“The man pays well,” his father says.

Justin continues to circle the room—the bones snapping beneath his steps, releasing a chalky dust that bothers his nose—as his mind circles back to that moment at City Hall when Tom Bear Claws barged in and spoke his mind with the reporter in tow. He must have known about this place, and if he did, he could have put a stop to the development, but he didn’t. Which meant he was in on it; the tribe was in on it. His presence at the meeting was a matter of theater, no different from a cowboys-and-Indians shootout on the screen. He wonders what Warm Springs has to gain and guesses it has something to do with the long-delayed Cascade Locks Resort and Casino.

He scans the walls and spots scenes similar to the one previously studied, where men chase and stab and eat animals, deer and bear and coyote. There is the occasional portrait of the sun. And the recurring illustration of waves meant to interpret the river. Then he detects a lone figure, off to his right, a hunch-backed, dark-colored figure whose large black silhouette could be a bear or could be a man and among all the redness makes everything else seem an artistic splattering of blood.

They stand over the deer. Somewhere beneath it, and beneath the tangle of bones, the source of the stream gurgles unseen. The deer’s eyes are open and reflect the sky in their black gaze. Its mouth is open, too, and its tongue hangs out, almost comically, if not for the blood trickling from it. Boo comes over and sniffs at it and laps up some of the blood in a kind of kiss before Justin’s father gives him a nudge with his boot and the dog scurries off and busies himself with some bones.

With his finger Justin’s father traces the path of the bullet as it entered the shoulder in a red starburst and traveled the length of the deer through bone and muscle to exit the rear ham on the opposite side. “Not a bad shot.”

Justin looks at Graham, expecting to see his chest swollen with pride. Instead his head is bowed and his hands are folded before him. The deer is no longer something seen distantly through a scope, like some computer-generated image in a video game. The deer is right here and they can smell the brassy blood mixed up with the damp green hay smell of its fur. Weak-eyed and sunk-shouldered, Graham says, “Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you a weird question?”

“Yes.”

The words come slowly. “Does that deer know he’s a deer? Or is he just like a tree. Or something. Like, does he even think about anything? When he got shot—”

“You shot him,” Justin says, the English teacher in him interrupting, wanting his son to take ownership of his language and recognize what he has done. Not to shame him, but to edify him.

Graham nods and chews a dried strip of skin from his lip. “When I shot him, did he think I’m dying?”

What does it feel like to be hunted—he wants to know—to be a deer staring down the wrong end of a rifle, to feel a bullet puncture your skin and mushroom inside you, ripping open your guts, breaking through bone? It is an important question.

His grandfather answers. “Graham. Listen to me. This is what it thinks: I’m hungry. And I’m tired. And I’m going to shit now. That’s what it thinks. But it doesn’t think like you and me think. It’s just meat and bone.” And then he sighs and runs a hand thoughtfully through his beard and surprises Justin by making a leaf-in-the-wind motion with his hand. “Come over here.”

Graham goes to him and his grandfather takes him under his outstretched arm. “I want you to do something for me. I want you to get down on your knees. And then I want you to put your hands together. Now say a prayer. Be thankful.”

Thankful for the deer’s sacrifice or thankful for his true aim or thankful for the thrill of the hunt—Justin isn’t sure—but they bow their heads and close their eyes, praying an old family prayer—“The Lord has been good to me, and so I thank the Lord”—while the blood soaks into the soil and Boo chews his way through a femur and the birds sequestered above them mutter among themselves.

Afterward, Graham seems a little better. Rather than choking the barrel of his rifle with both hands, as if trying to wring the oil from it, he slings it over his shoulder and examines the deer more closely, running his palm along its fur and prodding the bullet hole with his thumb.

They take pictures. Justin’s father borrows the camera from Graham and instructs him to stand behind the deer and rest his foot on top of its shoulder.

“There. This is a great angle. You in shadow, the deer in the sun. It’s a great picture. Seriously.” He takes the camera away from his eye a moment and studies Graham with a directorial gaze. “Do me a favor? Take the rifle and brace it against your hip, so that it’s aimed upward at, like, a forty-five-degree angle.”

Graham does as he is told and his grandfather says, “Now look like a badass.”

Graham stares at him blankly. And then his face slowly changes shape—his eyes narrowing, his upper lip curling—as he tries to make it an Eastwood moment.

“Perfect.” His grandfather raises his free hand, his thumb and forefinger coming together as a circle. The flash blinks three times before filling the air with light and Graham’s eyes glimmer red for an instant, like an animal surprised by headlights on a nighttime country road.

His grandfather studies the camera, turning it over in his hands, before approaching Graham. “Now push the button that lets me see it.”

Graham takes the camera and fiddles with its controls until he brings the photograph up on the screen.

“Now that’s a picture.” His grandfather massages his shoulders. “Taking photos like that, you’ll make it into Field and Stream no problem.”

“National Geographic,” Graham says.

“National Geographic, eat your heart out.”

They regard each other so that for a moment Justin feels excluded. And then, from above, comes a great flapping and cawing as the birds fly suddenly from their perch. Justin looks up in time to see their departing blackness and what might be a dark, massive head leaning over the edge and then pulling back out of sight. Justin remembers the claw marks and remembers the seemingly fresh pictographs and feels his skin tighten all over. Dust and pebbles fall all around them with a hissing and ticking and then everything goes quiet.

Justin’s father stares skyward for a long time, waiting for something. When it doesn’t come, he pulls his knife from his belt—its blade scored with cuts and its handle stained by so many years of blood—and says, “Time to open this deer up and see what it’s made of.”

Justin’s father guides Graham through the cleaning. First he jabs the knife into the deer. The moist insult of metal connecting with flesh has always made Justin cringe, but Graham leans closer to watch as its belly unzips and his grandfather reaches inside the incision to withdraw the gut sack, holding it out before him like some freakish birth, gray and oblong and bulging, then laying it aside. Graham prods it with a bone and it breaks open and makes the air rank with a smell like wet feathers and spoiled gravy.

Justin occupies himself by clearing away a section of the boneyard, enough to reveal the narrow stream that comes to life beneath it so that they might wash the blood from the meat and the viscera from their hands. He wears an insulated backpack and shrugs it off now and pulls from it a box of ziplock freezer bags. Into these he drops the liver and the heart, still warm even after Graham dunks them in springwater.

Later, Justin’s father will hoist the deer onto his shoulders and with blood oozing down his back carry it through the chute and into the main canyon, where they will find a skinning tree. He will tie a noose around its antlers and hoist it into the air and show Graham the whitish membrane that binds the hide to the muscle and bring a blade to it and make a sawing motion until enough of it comes loose for him to grab and pull and force apart with a sound like a big Band-Aid pulled slowly off a damp wound. And the deer will hang naked, its muscles’ color somewhere between red and purple, its rump padded with white fat.

But that will come later.

Right now, with his hands gloved in blood, he rises from his crouch and stands before the wall of the grotto. He appears to be studying the rock art. Then he lifts his hand to the basalt and begins to add his own cipher, dipping his hand occasionally into the deer to refresh his paint supply. After a time Graham copies him. And then so does Justin—all of them going to work on the rock. They start in with soft hesitant strokes that turn rougher and before long their hands move as fast as their muscles will allow, painting bloody swirls and bloody blobs and big bloody eyes that come together in a kind of mural.

Justin feels gripped by a reckless idea. The darkness of the woods and the thrill of the hunt and the wildness of his father have torn away some protective seal inside him; he cannot control himself. For a moment, just a moment, he forgets about his mortgage payment, his shaggy lawn, his Subaru and the groaning noise it makes when he turns left, his desk and the pile of ungraded papers waiting on it. All of that has gone someplace else, replaced by an urge, a wildness.

“Hey, Dad? Know what I think would be a good color on you?” His father gives him a fleeting look just as Justin scoops up a handful of blood and palms it into his face as you would a pie. “Red!”

His father recoils until the wall stops him. Justin was smiling, but now his smile fails as he wonders what kind of spirit has overtaken him, as he tries to read his father’s expression, a red mask. He runs his fingers along his cheeks and they track flesh-toned lines through the blood. “I always knew you were crazy,” Paul says. Blood oozes into his mouth and he spits it out. Then he reaches into the pile of viscera and laughingly hurls a lung at Justin and it knocks the hat off his head.

And for a while, they are close as his father has always wanted them to be close, in that old-time way, like the men in Western movies, affectionately slugging each other, belly-laughing around the campfire.

The dried blood makes a gruesome brown lacework of their skin so that they hardly recognize each other when they return to camp carrying their insulated packs laden with quartered meat. They empty the venison into their five-day cooler and arrange the freezer packs throughout the stacks of chops and steaks and roasts to preserve them.

Then they rummage through the tent, joking about snakes, as they collect clean jeans and T-shirts and underwear and go down to the river and peel off their blood-encrusted clothes and step naked into water so cold it takes away their breath and makes them whoop and shiver. They splash at each other and then take up handfuls of sand from the river bottom and use it to scrub away the blood and sweat until their skin glows clean and pink. As the red husk falls away from Justin, dissolved and carried downstream, he feels his earlier wildness subside, his senses return.

Around them, as the afternoon wanes, the land mellows into green and gold colors. In the fire pit they arrange a knee-high teepee of sticks. His father strikes a wooden match and drops it into a cluster of brown pine needles and they catch flame with a crackling noise. The flames work their way up the sticks and when they burn a white-hot color Justin sets a log into the fire and the flames take to it, too. His father retrieves some Coors from a rock cairn he built in the river. He hands one to Justin and another to Graham.

“Um,” Justin says. “How about no?”

“Come on,” his father says, his voice taking on a confidential buddy-buddy tone. He cracks the tab of his can. Beer foams out the top and when he slurps at it some of the foam sticks to his beard. “What’s wrong with you? Come on. Let him have a beer. Don’t be a puss. Don’t be a girl. We’ve got to make him into a man. That’s why I brought him out here. That’s why you brought him out here, isn’t it?”

Justin isn’t sure he can answer that question; it’s what he’s been struggling to answer since they climbed out of the Bronco.

“Why else, if not to—”

“Fine,” Justin says. “But just one.” He holds out his index finger to indicate the number and then drops it into a point aimed at Graham’s chest. “Again, your mother, she shouldn’t hear about this.”

“I won’t tell.” He turns the beer over several times as if he has never seen one before. He opens it gently, the tab hissing, then popping. When he takes his first sip, his face registers some displeasure at the taste, but he doesn’t complain.

They drink the beers—so cold—and then Graham and his grandfather go into the surrounding woods to gather fistfuls of wild onions. They chop them into fingernail-sized bits and fry them with butter until they caramelize, and they taste good, like candy, alongside the venison steaks browned over the fire. Even as they take pleasure in their dinner and enjoy the pleasant burn in their muscles, Justin scans the long dry ridges that hang over them, unable to shake the feeling that they are being watched by eyes they cannot see.

“You’re eating what you killed,” Justin’s father says to Graham before popping a forkful of meat into his mouth. “That’s responsibility. That’s something to be proud of.”

Graham cannot help but smile at the compliment, at the beer in his hand. Justin imagines his son has experienced today a glimpse of adulthood in all its loveliness and ugliness, the ugliness mostly forgotten as he rams his knife into his half-eaten steak and saws off another slice.

The sun sinks through a reef of clouds and into the mountains and the sky flushes. The trees are green when they start dinner and as the sky grows darker they turn purple, then black. He pulls off his boots and his socks and enjoys the feel of the grass and the dirt, the prickly mound of it beneath his arches. His skin burns and so do his muscles, but in a pleasant way. An earned way. It has been so long since he has spent a full day under the sun, sweating, relying on his muscles as much as his mind. He thinks about this often: how the day-in, day-out routine of the classroom—the lectures, the papers, the conferences—feels insubstantial. Evenings, he looks back on his day feeling vacant, headachy, uncertain, and uncaring of what he has accomplished. Whereas now he feels very full indeed.

He remembers how, when he was a child, he would often eat his dinner alone with his mother. He would ask where his father was, when he would get home, even though he knew the answer. He was at a construction site—operating a payloader, smoothing concrete with a trowel, telling somebody to do something. He would come home after dark and collapse on the couch with an exhausted smile on his face and a beer balanced on his chest. Justin always wondered about that smile; it wasn’t until he was an adult that he understood it. If his father experienced this sensation at the end of every day, well, there is something to be envied in that.