The Dog Stars

I

I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, every one.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer. Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die—no If—it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

In the beginning there was Fear. Not so much the flu by then, by then I walked, I talked. Not so much talked, but of sound body—and of mind, you be the judge. Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105, I know it cooked my brains. Encephalitis or something else. Hot. Thoughts that once belonged, that felt at home with each other, were now discomfited, unsure, depressed, like those shaggy Norwegian ponies that Russian professor moved to the Siberian Arctic I read about before. He was trying to recreate the Ice Age, a lot of grass and fauna and few people. Had he known what was coming he would have pursued another hobby. Half the ponies died, I think of heartbreak for their Scandinavian forests, half hung out at the research station and were fed grain and still died. That’s how my thoughts are sometimes. When I’m stressed. When something’s bothering me and won’t let go. They’re pretty good, I mean they function, but a lot of times they feel out of place, kinda sad, sometimes wondering if maybe they are supposed to be ten thousand miles from here in a place with a million square miles of cold Norwegian spruce. Sometimes I don’t trust my thoughts not to bolt for the brush. Probably not my brain, probably normal for where we’re at.

I don’t want to be confused: we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice, why we live here on the plain, why I patrol every day.

I started sleeping on the ground because of the attacks. Survivors, it seemed like they picked it out on the map. On a big creek, check. So water, check. Must have fuel, check. Since it was an airport, check. Anyone who read anything knew, too, that it was a model for sustainable power, check. Every house with panels and the FBO run mostly on wind. Check. FBO means Fixed Base Operator. Could’ve just said the Folks Who Run the Airport. If they knew what was coming they wouldn’t have complicated everything so much.

Mostly the intruders came at night. They came singly or in groups, they came with weapons, with hunting rifles, with knives, they came to the porch light I left on like moths to a flame.

I have four sixty watt panels on the house I don’t sleep in, so one LED light all night is no problem.

I was not in the house. I was asleep under blankets on the open ground behind the berm a hundred yards away. It is an old airport, it is all open ground. Jasper’s low growl. He’s a blue heeler mix with a great nose. I wake up. I beep Bangley on the handset. For him I think it was like sport. Kind of cleaned out his carbon, the way for me going up to the mountains.

It was a high berm, just a big mound of dirt, we made it higher. Tall enough to walk behind. Bangley, he saunters up and snuggles down beside me at the top where I am already watching with the goggles, and I smell his rasping breath. He has them too, the goggles, in fact he has like four, he gave me one. He said at the rate we use them the diodes will last ten years maybe twenty. What happens then? I celebrated my fortieth birthday last year. Jasper got a liver (doe), I ate a can of peaches. I invited Melissa and she came the way she does, a whisper and a shiver.

In ten years the additive will no longer keep the fuel fresh enough. In ten years I’ll be done with all this. Maybe.

Half the time, if the moon is up or if there is starlight and snow, Bangley doesn’t need the goggles, he has the red dot, he just centers the red dot on the moving figures, on the ones standing still, crouching, whispering, centers it on the shadow by the old dumpster, puts the red dot on a torso. Bang. He takes his time, plans out the sequence, bang bang bang. Breath gets heavier, raspier just before. Like he’s about to fuck someone which I guess he is.

The biggest group we had was seven. I heard Bangley lying beside me counting under his breath. Shit on a shingle, he murmured and chuckled like he does when he is not happy. I mean a lot more not happy than usual.

Hig, he whispered, you are going to have to participate.

I have the AR-15 semi-auto, I am good with it, he fitted me with the night scope. I just.

I did.

It was three of them that survived the first volley and after that we had our first bona fide firefight. But they didn’t have night goggles and they didn’t know the terrain and so it didn’t take long.

That’s how it started, the sleeping outside. I was never going to get trapped in the house. Like the dragon sleeps on the pile of treasure, but not me. I stay back a ways.

After the second summer they tapered off, like turning off a faucet, drip drip. One visitor a season maybe, then none. Not for almost a year, then a band of four desperados that almost cleaned our clock. That’s when I started flying regular like a job.

Now I don’t have to sleep on the ground. We have our system, we are confident. The Fear is like a memory of nausea. You can’t remember how bad it was or that you just about asked to die instead. But I do. Sleep on the ground. Under a pile of blankets in winter that must weigh twenty pounds. I like it. Not boxed in. I still sleep behind the berm, I still leave the porch light on, Jasper still curls against my legs, still dreams in whimpers, still trembles under his own blanket, but I think he is mostly deaf now and useless as an alarm which we will never let on to Bangley. Bangley, you just don’t know with him. He harbors. Might resent the meat I share who knows. The way he sees it everything has a use.

I once had a book on the stars but now I don’t. My memory serves but not stellar ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about. I made one for Melissa, her whole self standing there kind of smiling and tall looking down on me in the winter nights. Looking down while frost crinkles in my eyelashes and feathers in my beard. I made one for the little Angel.

Melissa and I lived on a lake in Denver. Only seven minutes from downtown, the big bookstore, the restaurants, movies, we liked that. We could see grass, water, mountains out the big window of the little house. The geese. We had a resident flock and a flock of Canadas that came in fall and spring in great chevrons, mixed with the locals, maybe mated, then moved on. Took off again in raucous waves. I could tell the transients from the wild ones. I thought I could.

In October, November walking around the lake on our evening pre-prandial we’d point them out to each other. I thought she was always wrong. She’d get half mad. She was so smart, but she didn’t know the geese like I did. I never thought of myself as really really smart but I always knew things in my bones.

When we got the puppy Jasper I was confirmed: he would chase the wild ones who were skittish but not the mean residents. My theory anyway.

We had no children. She couldn’t have. We saw a doctor. Tried to sell us treatments we declined. We were okay with just each other. Then she did, like a miracle. Get pregnant. We’d gotten used to the other and I wasn’t sure I could ever love someone more. I watched her sleeping and I thought: I love you more than anything.

Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. And no need to thank even. Just be. Just fish. Just walk up the creek, get dark, get cold, it is all a piece. Of me somehow.

Melissa part of the same circle. But different because we are entrusted with certain souls. Like I could hold her carefully in my cupped hands, like to bear her carefully carefully, the country I cannot, but her I can, and maybe all along it was she holding me.

The hospital St. Vincent’s was right across the lake. The orange helicopters landed there. At the end we talked about flying west but it was too late and there was the hospital, we went to the hospital. To one of the buildings they took over. Filling with the dead.

Bangley just shows up. I’m changing oil. He could rap on the steel siding of the bay but he doesn’t he likes to give me a heart attack. Shows up beside me like a ghost.

What are we monkeying with now?

Jesus, if I have a coronary who will fly your patrols?

We’d find someone wouldn’t we? Put an ad in the paper.

His grin straight across his eyes never smiling.

Anyway I bet I could fly this sucker.

He says it every now and then. It’s like a warning. For what? If he wanted this windy place to himself he would have. A long time ago.

Now Jasper is awake on his dusty blanket and growling. Jasper can’t stomach Bangley unless it’s like an emergency visitor situation in which case he keeps his trap shut, he’s a team player. Once just after Bangley showed up Jasper snapped at his arm and Bangley unholstered a sidearm big as like a skillet and aimed and I yelled. The only time. I said You shoot the dog we all die.

Bangley blinked he had that grin. What do you mean we all die?

I mean I fly patrols from the air, the only way we know we can secure the perimeter.

That word. It was the only one that hit its target. I almost saw it go in his ear and through the tubes into his brain. Perimeter. Only way to secure. He blinked. He worked his jaw side to side. He stank. Like old blood like when you butcher a deer.

Only reason I am still alive. How do you think I live here by myself?

So that’s how the bargain was struck. Without even a negotiation.

No words but that. I flew. He killed. Jasper growled. We let each other be.

I was saying: I’m changing the oil in the Beast and he shows up beside me like a ghost.

Why do you visit the Druids? he says.

They’re not Druids they’re Mennonites.

He grunts.

I put down the filter wrench. Lay it on a rolling box. Pick up the safety wire pliers.

Bangley is standing there. I smell before I see him. I feed the wire through the hole in the flange at the filter’s base, twist it with the pliers. It’s safety wire. Holds the filter on in case. All to spec. FAA regs. Wouldn’t want the oil filter to vibrate loose, fall off, spill all the oil midair and the engine tears apart. Has happened. They used to say all FAA rules resulted from a real accident. So the .032 mil wire is maybe a kind of memorial to some pilot. Maybe his family too.

Bangley is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood, watching me. On top of the tool box is a shop rag a square of old t-shirt. The graphic is faded but I can see rows of smudged pink cartoon women: big breasted little breasted all shapes and underneath “melons” “peaches” “jugs” “plums” “raisins” a big “Cabo” bannered across the top. I read all the fruit before I reach in and wipe everything down one more time. Stab of pain. Just that. Fold it. A cartoon. That we are so hard wired that way. That two little arcs or circles of a cartoon boob could stir up memory, a temperature, change, a tightening of guts, a crawling in the groin. I think it’s curious. I half gulp, stand still for a second, breathe.

Melissa was cantaloupes.

Cabo is out at the end of a nine hundred mile peninsula. Plenty of fish probably. Is there some survivor like me out at the old municipal airport changing the oil in an antique Maule, flying recon every day, using a Ski Colorado t-shirt as a shop rag? Fishing of an evening off some dilapidated pier that still stinks of creosote? Wondering what it’s like to ski.

Why didn’t Colorado shirts ever have tits on them? I ask Bangley.

Not much of a sense of humor in old B.

Walk to the north wall of the hangar slide a case of 50 straight weight Arrowshell off the stack. Set it down on a wooden stool. The sunlight is retreating back across the concrete slab to the open doorway. Bangley is wearing his honking sidearm. Night and day. Once he went to the pond in the creek bottom to hook a catfish and a bearded stranger built like a bear rose out of the Russian olive and attacked him. He says. Bangley shot him through his shaggy head. Brought an entire leg back still wearing three sets of ripped pants and a bandaged boot. The left. Threw it down in front of the hangar.

For the dog he said. Angry. Because I didn’t do my job. To him. I didn’t guarantee the perimeter.

Why do you visit the Mormons? he says again. He is fucking with me. He is ramrod straight and inclines forward real subtle when he is pissed.

I pull at one flap of the cardboard box of motor oil. The glue is heavy, I tear it open tear the other side, four rows of three black quarts. The pale waxy line down the side of each tall rectangular bottle is translucent for reading the level, they remind me of tuxedo pants. One stripe of piping. Twelve little groomsmen.

How do you know that I do?

Bangley gets mad in gradations of increasing internal pressure like a volcano. The veins in his nose turn purple. Madder I mean. He is like one of those volcanoes in Ecuador that is always threatening to blow even when the top looks wisped with clouds like any other mountain.

We agreed, he says. Seismologists at the USGS or wherever seeing portentous tremors on the graph. A certain vein in his forehead just under the bill of his Ducks Unlimited camo cap beginning to throb.

No, you agreed. With yourself.

Off limits. It’s off limits.

What are you? The Base Commander?

I should never talk to Bangley this way. I know it as I say it. I just get sick of the attitude sick to death of it. He’s working his jaw back and forth.

I put the funnel, just an old oil bottle cut off halfway, back down on top of the other quarts. I face him.

Look Bangley relax. Want a Coke?

Once every two months I land on a cleared boulevard in Commerce City and restock ten cases of the oil. On the way over one day I found the Coke truck. I always bring back four cases, two for him two for me. A case of Sprite for the families which I don’t tell him about. Most of the cans have frozen too many times and burst but the plastic bottles survive. Bangley always goes through his Coke a lot faster.

You’ll kill us both. We agreed.

I get him a Coke. Here relax. It’s not good for your heart.

He had arteriosclerosis. Has. Once he said: I’m a time bomb. Which he didn’t have to tell me.

I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.

Here.

Hig you will kill us. He drinks, he can’t help himself. I can see it work in his throat and down into his barrel chest.

He makes himself stop before he drains the whole bottle. You know just one cough, he says. That’s what they said at the end. Not just through blood.

Sharing bodily fluids. I’m not fucking a Mennonite.

A cough is a bodily fluid. Land in your eye. Open your mouth to speak.

I don’t think that was ever proven.

What the fuck does it matter if it’s proven. You want to get this far and die of the blood?

This far. I’m thinking not saying it. This far. Bangley and Jasper and a low fat diet. Well.

You can’t choose for me Hig.

I breathe.

Everything we do is risky. Once in a while they need my help.

For what? For fucking what? They have what? Two, three, five years tops? The luckiest? Every few months one dies. I can tell by how you mope around. For what? Boils and rash and bloody coughs and burning?

They are people. They are trying to stay alive day by day. Maybe some can survive it. There were rumors of survivors.

He is still inclined forward, still throbbing the vein with a dribble of fresh Coke on the stubble of his chin.

They are no threat to us Bruce.

The sound of his given name widens his eyes. He never told it to me, it was always just I’m Bangley, which like I said I rarely use.

The families know to stay fifteen feet back. I’ve trained them. Not once not ever have they showed any aggression, nothing but gratitude, kind of embarrassing gratitude when I fix a pump or show them how to make a fish trap for the creek. Truth is I do it as much for me as them: it kinda loosens something inside me. That nearly froze up.

Bangley works the jaw stares at me. That last thing—it’s like I just spoke perfect Japanese, a whole paragraph ending with a slight bow. Like A, he can’t believe I fucking said it, and B, he doesn’t understand a single syllable. Psycho spiritual language it leaves him, well, less than cold.

Once I asked him if he thought there was something more. We were sharing two rare Cokes on the front porch of my house I never go in, under the bulb I leave on at night that used to work like a bug zapper for attackers. It was evening and the October sun was making for the mountains. Like some old couple taking their ease. Two wicker chairs losing their paint and cricking when we shifted our weight. His chair had a rhythm like he remembered what it was to sit in a rocker. Only time I can think of he told me anything about his life before. He grew up in Oklahoma. That’s what he told me.

It’s not like you think, he added. Long story.

That was it. A little cryptic. I hadn’t really thought anything. He never elaborated. Still, seemed like we were making leaps and bounds intimacy-wise.

I told him I used to build houses.

What kind of houses?

Timber frame. Adobe. Odd custom stuff. Wrote a book too.

A book on building houses.

No. A little book. Poetry. Nobody read it.

Shit? He took a measured sip of Coke watching me as he tipped back the bottle, watching me as he set it back down on his thigh, kind of appraising me with a new appreciation, not readable good or bad. Adjusting the context.

Wrote for magazines now and then. Mostly about fishing, outdoor stuff.

The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I almost laughed. You could see the gears: Phew, outdoor stuff, Hig is not a homo.

Growing up I wanted to be a writer. A great writer. Summers I worked construction, framing. Like that. Tough to make a living as a writer. Anyway I probably wasn’t so good. Got married bought a house. Led to another thing then the other thing.

Long story, I said.

Bangley held his Coke in both hands in his lap. He kind of hunched over himself maybe remembering. Suddenly remote like his spirit retreated to a safer distance. To watch. From a distance. Still rocking the chair that didn’t rock.

We didn’t speak for a long time. The sun touched one of the higher peaks, broke slowly like a bloody yolk. Wind stirred, rattled the dried rabbit brush at the exact moment. Cold.

I asked him if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?

His chair, crick crick, stopped. He got very still like a hunter that smelled an animal on the wind. Close. Like he woke up.

Say again.

More than this. Day to day.

He worked his jaw, his mineral eyes graying in the fading light. Like maybe I’d tipped over the edge.

Gotta go he said. Stood up. Hooked a finger in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, fished out the bottle cap, screwed it on. Carried his Coke off the porch, boot cracking the broken step.

That was maybe the second year. So now in the hangar I know the stuff about thawing out inside will not exactly exact sympathy. Half the time with Bangley I’m thinking about all the stuff I should never say.

I crack a quart of oil and tip it into the funnel made from a cut off bottle and snug it down into its twin. Leave it to drain. Face him.

Who knows maybe one day we will need them. We can’t know.

Ha. A cough of contempt dismissive. Never happen Hig. For funeral detail maybe.

He had consigned them, wished it. All of them dead.

You want to be the only one left? You’d be just as happy. The only goddamn human being left on earth.

If it shakes out like that. Better than the alternative. Anyway I got you. He tipped back the Coke watched me past the bottle.

He meant the alternative if everyone’s going to die. I think. I didn’t say it: One day I’m gonna climb in the Beast and fly west and keep going.

No you won’t he said.

What?

What you were thinking. There is no other safe place. Maybe on the planet. We got the perimeter, water, power, food, firepower. We got mountains close enough if the game gets scarce. We got no internal strife no politics cause it’s just you and me. We got no internal to tear apart. Like the Mormons like everybody else out there who ain’t alive anymore. We keep it simple we survive.

He grins.

Country boys will survive.

His favorite phrase.

I stare at my only friend on earth. I guess he’s my friend.

Don’t go killing us, he says and leaves.

Still I go when they ask. The patrol goes west to the mountain front then south. I follow the line of trees that mark the river. At the stacks of the power plant and the reservoir I swing back northwest. The Mennonites are on the creek. In an old turkey farm. Eight metal sheds in two rows of four set at angles like diagonally parked cars. Tall century old trees strung along a windbreak and clustered into a grove in the middle of which cants the asphalt roof of a big brick farmhouse. Two ponds fed by the creek. In one I can see floats, an empty canoe. An array of solar panels to the south of the sheds and two windmills, one mechanical for drawing water. Why they came here in the first place.

In the yard, in the clearing, a thirty foot flagpole, flag long since gone, maybe stripped for a baby blanket. When they need help they hoist a ripped red union suit. Signal and wind sock. In a strong wind it splays legs and arms out stiff like a headless man.

I land on the straight dirt drive that Ts from the old county road to the west. I can see the sign swiveling in the wind. At the head of the drive they wired a metal sign to two posts it has a red skull and crossbones says DANGER WE HAVE THE BLOOD. The drive floods, gets sliced with ruts. They come out with shovels and fill the holes. They aren’t good at maintenance, they’re most of the time too weak, but the landing strip is one thing they keep clean. Almost always a strong crosswind from say 330. I slip the Beast so she comes down cocked, almost sideways to the drive, left wing low, nose ruddered over hard to the south, then kick her straight at the last second, the kids in the yard jump up and down, I can see they are laughing from two hundred feet, it’s the only time I ever see them laugh.

Jasper used to be able to jump up into the cockpit now he can’t. In the fourth year we had an argument. I took out the front passenger seat for weight and cargo and put down a flannel sleeping bag with a pattern of a man shooting a pheasant over and over, his dog on three legs, pointing, out in front. Not sure why I didn’t do that before. The dog doesn’t look like Jasper, still. I carried him. Lay him on the pattern of the man and the dog.

You and me in another life I tell him.

He likes to fly. Anyway I wouldn’t leave him alone with Bangley.

When I took out the seat he got depressed. He couldn’t sit up and look out. He knows to stay back of the rudder pedals. Once in a shear he skidded into them and nearly killed us. After that I fashioned like a four inch wood fence but scrapped it after he inspected it and jumped out of the plane and like refused to fly, no shit. It insulted him. The whole thing. I used to worry about the engine roar and prop blast, I wear the headset even though there is no one to talk to on the radio because it dampens the noise, but I worried about Jasper, even tried to make him his own hearing protector, this helmet kind of thing, it wouldn’t stay on. Probably why he’s mostly deaf now.

When I picked up oil etc I moved the quilt to the top of the stack so he could look out.

See? I said. At least it’s good half the time. Better than most of us can expect.

He still thought it was lame I could tell. Not half as excited. So now when I’m not picking up, just flying, which is most of the time, I bolt the seat back in, it just takes a few minutes. Not like we don’t have time. First time he sat up straight again and glanced at me like What took you so long? then looked forward real serious, brow furrowed like a copilot. His mood it lifted palpable as weather.

He’s getting old. I don’t count the years. I don’t multiply by seven.

They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

One weird thing: the GPS still works. The satellites, the military or whoever put them up there to spin around us and tell us where we are, they still send their signals, triangulate my position, the little Garmin mounted on the yoke still flashes a terrain warning if it thinks I am getting too close to high ground.

I am always too close to high ground. That’s the other thing about the end of everything: I stopped worrying about my engine failing.

There’s a Nearest button on the Garmin. Somebody was thinking. It tells you fast which way is the nearest airport and how far. It pops up a list of the closest airports, their identifiers, distance, bearing, tower frequency. When I used to worry about stuff the Nearest button was my pilot’s best friend. Any kind of weather or trouble or just getting low on fuel and I tapped it and there was the list and if I scrolled down and highlighted I could just press Go To and pop it gave my vector. Steer the arrow back to the center of the arc. Slickest thing.

Still useful but after nine years so many of the runways are unusable or you have to know where the two foot pothole is exactly and rudder around it. Surprising how fast. How fast it turns back to grass and ground. Back before, there was a TV show: Life After People. I watched every one. I recorded it. I was gripped. By this idea: New York City in a thousand years would look like: an estuary. A marsh. A river. Woods. Hills. I liked it. I can’t say why. It thrilled me.

That fast. Because it is amazing how fast girder steel corrodes when exposed to water and air, how fast roots break shit apart. It all falls down. Oh, so the runways: nine years doesn’t sound like a long time but it is for the tarmac unmaintained and it is for a brain-cooked human trying to live it. I could make a list. Nine years is pretty fucking long:

But. I lost a cylinder one evening south of Bennet. I was flying the city which I do now and then not too low just to see and. Tap tap tap vibration like a mother. Best to get down and troubleshoot, might be just a fouled plug. I didn’t need the Garmin to tell me Buckley the air force base was just to the west maybe twelve miles. I banked around and came down with the gold sun straight in my eyes, banging louder, now kind of alarming like it would suck to throw a bearing and practically blind with the sun, using the left pavement edge as a guide, and a hundred feet after I touched down still tearing ass, maybe seventy indicated, WHOMP, and had it been the nose gear and not the left main the Beast, and me too, we would be toast. Jasper too. I walked back and checked. The hole was waist deep practically, neatly rectanguloid, it looked like it had been dug out by prairie dogs with little backhoes. Fuck. My back. The jolt. I sat down with my legs dangling in the hole, Jasper sat too and leaned against me like he does, and glanced up at me real quick and polite, and real concerned. Sitting that way reminded me of a Japanese restaurant Melissa took me to once that had instead of chairs, instead of mats and pillows, like a well for your feet, like cheat floor seating for stiff Westerners. The sun threw our shadows about half a mile long down the runway. As it was, the impact cracked the strut, which is when I learned to weld and also it’s possible to weld with solar power.

I sat with my feet in the hole and shook myself by the shoulders and said, What’s wrong with you? Is this a game to you?

That took a while to answer.

Do you want to live today?

Yes.

Do you grant that you may want to live tomorrow? And maybe the next day?

Yes.

Then get methodical. You got nothing but time.

So I made a survey. I took the chart we call a sectional and flew every airstrip within a hundred miles. I flew Centennial, I flew Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy, I flew Kirby, formerly Nebraska, I flew Cheyenne. I flew them all at probably thirty feet in good light and made notes. Surprising how many would have killed me. At Cranton we almost did when I came in for the fly-by real low and parallel to the runway and some xenophobe put a high powered hole through the fuselage. I knew because it exited right through my side window up and out. That’s how I knew we had neighbors in Cranton.

So the Nearest button still works but about half I can’t use anymore at all. Better to land in an old field. Used to mean Nearest Haven now means Nearest Maybe Death Trap. All good information.

I still monitor the radio. Old habits die hard. Every airport has a frequency so traffic can talk to each other if there’s no tower. Important to know where everybody is when you’re taking off or entering the pattern. Used to be. Collisions used to happen every year. Between airports there’s no designated way to communicate but there’s an emergency frequency 121.5. What I do when I’m approaching an airport is flip to the old channel. When I’m within five miles I make a call. Call a few times.

Loveland traffic Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha five to the south at six thousand en route Greeley. Repeat. Anybody? I’m the only goddamn plane up here and likely to be til the end of time. Maybe on another planet in another universe they will again invent the Cessna. Ha!

I laugh. I hoot. It’s kinda morbid. Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment.

I have a book of poems by William Stafford. It’s the only thing I went back for: my poetry collections. Landing at night on no power, no lights, in the old King Sooper’s parking lot, one row a thousand easy feet between low cars, the wings went over and no light poles. Just over a mile from there to the house. Fires burning west and south, some punctuating gunshots. Waiting in the plane with the AR-15 between my legs waiting to see if anyone was left to bother the Beast for the half hour I’d be gone.

I took the rifle and jogged around the lake like so many times before, morning and evening. Used to jog. I ignored the pictures on the mantel, along the stairs, didn’t look, packed an old backpack and a duffel full of books, just poems. Fingered We Die Alone which is the first book Melissa gave me which was creepily prognosticant in the title only: the protagonist is a true real Norwegian commando back in the last good war. He out-skis two entire divisions of German troops and survives to pose handsomely in distinguished middle age in a rollneck fisherman’s sweater for the back of his memoir. I had always envied that guy, a war hero in hearty Norway who must have had a cabin up in the fjordland and a thousand friends and too much mulled cider or aquavit or whatever they drink at parties, and enjoyed skiing now just for fun. If that man could have imagined hell on earth probably. He’d seen its shadow. I fingered the book, didn’t read the inscription and slid it back on the shelf. Done. I’d decided I was done with crying about anything.

When I got back to the parking lot I circled in from the outside rows and there were two figures leaning into the open doors of the plane, one about to climb in. I cursed myself and checked the safety, heart hammering, and stood and yelled to get the fuck away, and when they grabbed hunting rifle and shotgun I shot them at twenty yards the first ones. For poems. I gave their guns to Bangley, refused to answer when he asked.

The Stafford book is called Stories That Could Be True. One poem is called “The Farm on the Great Plains” and it begins:

He calls his father. He calls his mother. They are gone for years only a hum now on the line but he still calls.

When no one responds from the airport I’m about to fly over I flip back to the emergency frequency and make a pro forma call

Mayday mayday Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha feeling awful lonely.

In year seven someone answered. I took my hands off the yoke and pressed the headset into my ears. The hair stood up along my arms like it does in an electric storm.

It came out of the static with a doppler fade.

Triple Three Alpha … tailing off into aural snow.

Triple Three Alpha … Gust of static … Grand junk. Whomp like hit with magnetic wind.

Grand Junction …

I waited. I shook my head. Actually knocked my temple in the headset. Keyed the mike with the thumb button on the yoke.

Grand Junction? Grand Junction? Triple Three Alpha over Longmont.

I’m over Longmont holy shit! Didn’t copy. Repeat: didn’t copy!

I circled. I circled higher. Climbed to fifteen thousand feet and circled til I was dizzy with hypoxia. Descended to thirteen and circled for two hours til the fuel flow gauge told me I had fifteen minutes left, then I banked east.

Whoever it was was a pilot or a controller.

The one and only time.

I cook my meals in the hangar. About a month after Bangley showed up I got him to help me dolly over a Vigilant woodstove from the kitchen of a fancy Mcmansion on the east side of the runway. Maybe the provisional nature of eating in what’s essentially a mechanic’s garage makes me feel like none of this is permanent. Part of why I don’t live in a house. Like living in a hangar, sleeping outside, I can pretend there’s a house somewhere else, with someone in it, someone to go back to. But who’s kidding whom? Melissa is not coming back, the trout aren’t, and neither is the elephant nor the pelican. Nature might invent a speckled proud coldwater fighting fish again but she will never again give the improbable elephant another go.

Still last summer I saw a nighthawk. First one in years. Flitting for bugs in a warm dusk, wingbars blinking in the twilight. That soft electric peep.

So the hangar is where I cook and eat. I tried eating in my house at the kitchen table like Bangley does, tried it for a few days but it didn’t sit.

All the firewood we could use in our lifetimes is stacked up in the walls of the houses around the airfield. A sledgehammer and a crowbar gives me all I can use for a week in a few hours. Not to mention fine furniture.

Took a few winces to get used to battering apart finish carpentry, cherry and walnut, and maple flooring for firewood. But. Value relative to need. Still I’m taking apart the crummy houses first. Not sure if I’ll ever get to the four or five really beautifully built mini-mansions the ones with exotic hardwoods, if I do by then they will hold no cachet probably. Probably just look to me like some refreshingly different scents in the burning. By another unspoken agreement we began harvesting wood in the cheaper houses on the west side of the runway, him working north and me south. That leaves me a not-so-long wheelbarrow roll back to the hangar.

Often Bangley wanders over and joins me. He can’t cook I can. Can’t train the man to knock ever, or at least not whisper in like some ghost, which creeps me out a little cause I never know how long he’s been watching.

Dinner early tonight.

Fuck Bangley, I nearly scalded myself.

You cook like you enjoy it.

Huh?

The way you move around with the skillet, the knife, like it’s a kitchen. Like it’s one of those cooking shows.

Bangley’s nostrils flare with a gill-like rhythm when he’s particularly enjoying himself.

I stare at him for just a moment.

You hungry?

Like one of those cooking shows where they tie on an apron. Like cooking a frigging dinner is some kind of dance. Tra la la.

I put a pan full of fresh new potatoes down on the stove. In the beginning I tried using venison fat for lard but it went rancid so fast.

Well I’m not wearing an apron, as you can see, and I’m not dancing.

Almost no oil in the pantries of houses at the end the last few months they must have been drinking it for the calories. Then in the basement of the big Bauhaus across on Piper Lane I found two five gallon barrels of olive oil. Hidden behind a stack of new bricks.

You were singing though. He flashes that straight across grin. Just makes him look meaner.

The stove is hot with Canadian fir two by fours, the best frying wood for flash heat. The oil is spitting and I prod at the cut potatoes until most of them are in contact with the bottom of the pan. With the steel spatula I reach down and joggle the chrome lever that closes the side vent to the stove to slow it down. I think: If I were made of different stuff, if I thought I could defend this place myself I would shoot Bangley where he stands and get it over with. Would I? Maybe. And then I would miss this sparring every day. Probably feel it like a big void. We really have become like a married couple.

I don’t think I was singing, I say finally.

You were Hig, you were. Wasn’t Johnny Cash either. He grins.

Like that was the only approved sing to yourself music in the Book of Bangley.

Well what the fuck was it?

He shrugs. Hell if I know. Some pop girl stuff. From the radio I distantly recall.

Distantly recall. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That’s what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter. To the point of ridiculous and then a fuse pops, flicks a switch, and I laugh. Lucky for both of us I guess.

Sit down Bangley. Pull up a stool. We’re having catfish, dandelion salad with basil, new potatoes au something not gratin.

See? he says. Just like one of those shows. If you aren’t just a little light in the loafers I’m a jew.

I look at him. I laugh harder.

I play music sometimes. I have mp3s, cds, vinyl, everything. I wired my hangar to the main battery bank at the FBO the one that pulls from the wind turbine so power isn’t a problem. The mood has to be just right. I have to be careful or it sends me back to that place I don’t want to ever be again. Can’t be anything we used to listen to: we were a sucker for the decades old singer-songwriter, climb out of the bottle, country road stuff, Whiskeytown to Topley to Sinead. We loved the Dixie Chicks, who wouldn’t. Amazing Rhythm Aces. Open Road, Sweet Sunny South, Reel Time Travelers, the scrappy fine bluegrass and old timey groups just before before. We thought it was heartbreaking then. Try playing it on a fine early spring morning with the hangar door open and a single redtail gyring over the warming tarmac:

Or the sweet wrecked mountain tenor of Brad Lee Folk singing Hard Times.

I never thought I’d be an old man at forty.

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

At night I lie with Jasper against the back of the berm. It’s early spring, some late or very early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

Jasper is unleashed, sleeping on my left thigh but my thoughts are leashed tight. I allow them to circle tight. To brush the green house, the hangar, the possibility of a spring hunting trip for spring bear when the bear are careless with hunger.

He is snoring softly like he does, a little snort on the inhale and maybe a whimper on the way out. Then against all plan I begin to remember the call from Grand Junction. Coming in like a train out of a snowstorm, whomping the bandwidth then receding back into the static blizzard with a long mournful tail of dopplered distance. Lost. Triple Three Alpha … Grand Junk … Grand Junction … The voice older, kind, concerned, like a grandparent calling up a steep flight of stairs.

How many years ago? Two or three. It was summer I remember. I remember the smoke from the summer fires, circling the Beast up into the smoke, and the sunset that night like a massacre. How I circled and climbed and made the circles broader and keyed and keyed the mike. Frantically worked the squelch. Some skip in the atmosphere maybe, how could it travel that far with none of the repeaters working anymore years since. The competence in the voice. An older man. I remember that. It came through the noise. Another pilot, I was sure it was another pilot.

I can fly to Gunnison and back on my tanks maybe Delta the other way. Maybe—if the wind is right in both directions. Which rarely happens. I have thought about it. Again and again. Junction less than half an hour beyond. And then. What? Another pilot at another airport probably much less secure. But.

They had power somehow. They—he—had survived seven years. Maybe still so.

Jasper shifts, straightens his legs in a dreaming stretch and pushes back against me, wakes himself up. Sniffs. Lowers his head again.

Li Po’s most famous poem.

Even then: long before before the end, the bottomless yearning.

Almost never home, any of us.

I lie back against the duffel bag stuffed with foam I use as a pillow. Doesn’t get dirty as fast, doesn’t remind me of my old bed. Rub the band of the wool hat back down on my forehead. The sky is bell clear, the forest fires don’t start til mid-June, and the Milky Way is a flowing river of stars profoundly depthless. I mean deeper than can be reckoned. Jasper sighs. Almost no wind. What there is is cooling my right ear, a lazy breeze from the north.

Would I be more at home if I met a pilot from Grand Junction? If Denver to the south was a bustling living city? If Melissa were sleeping on the other side of Jasper as she used to do? Who would I be more at home with? Myself?

Still I think of the pilot’s voice. The competence and the yearning. To connect. I think I should have gone there. Pushed the fuel, backed off the throttle, flown slow, maybe eighteen square, picked my morning and gone. To see. What, I don’t know. Still I didn’t come close. To going. Admit it: I was scared. Of finding the interrupted dead as I had and had and had again. Nothing but. And running out of fuel before I was even back to Seven Victor Two which is Paonia, the airstrip up high on the narrow flat butte like an aircraft carrier. Running out of fuel in the ’dobe flats east of Delta. Going down in the shadow of Grand Mesa.

Before, I read that they found Amelia Earhart. Conclusive I guess. On the island that had been checked off in 1940 as Searched. Opened clam shells, a jackknife shattered apart for its blade, for maybe a fishing spear. A fire pit. Ancient crumbling makeup. A plexiglas airplane window. A woman’s shoe. Bones. Chips of bones. The DNA verified against a living female Earhart cousin. Of course it was her island, she and the navigator castaways for how long until they succumbed to what? The coral atoll from the air: elliptical oasis with a central lagoon. Flat outer reef at low tide like a parking lot. The Lockheed Electra with a landing configuration stall speed of fifty five mph, she’d need seven hundred feet, no more. Wading the meager provisions to shore maybe injured. Maybe not low tide, maybe the gear torn off by water. Maybe blood in the water. Running out of fuel over the Pacific taking gratefully what comes. That they made that tiny island at all. Living off of shells and rain.

Shells and rain.

And the company of another, just one.

Starvation. Slowly burning through time like a fire in wet wood. Attenuating to bone, to walking bones, then one dies, then the other. Or attacked by passing islanders maybe better.

Missing what most the whole time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

I have none of that now. Those choices. And yet. I do not want to run out of fuel and go down in the high desert grass of the western Gunnison valley and die trying to walk with Jasper three hundred miles home. Home. Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

Jasper growled. I had slept in my reverie.

Low, mean, serious.

I held my breath, listened. Sat up slow. He is mostly deaf, yes, but his nose is good.

Could be coyotes. Or wolves. The mountain wolves in the last two years: drifting down from the mountains in ragged packs. Growing pressure of the growing repopulation. Because they used to be there in numbers enough and are again.

Jasper growled now in the night and I sat up in the blankets heart thumping. I whispered Stay and crawled to the top of the berm.

Jasper knows. He knows when the shit’s serious.

He sat back on his hindquarters and cut the noise mid-growl and looked at me with real concern and also with the taut poise of a hunter who is enjoying himself. He was amped. So was I. This hadn’t happened in a long time, maybe half a year, and I felt a little sluggish, a little out of practice. A couple of years ago and I would have been at the top of the berm by now and scanning with the goggles with my left hand on the receiver of the AR. As it was I had to dig the rifle out from between the cold damp tarp and the back of the duffle. Next to it the goggles inside an old wool sock. At least I still thought to bring them out with me when we slept. I set the goggles against my brow and stretched the strap over the back of my head and slowly, quietly, tugged against and pulled the charging handle that racked the gun. Climbed the berm slowly, more cautiously.

Jasper stayed still. Straining against the urge to chase down the smell in the dark. Or maybe some sound, some sound in some frequency that penetrated his near deafness. I climbed the steep back of the berm slowly. Prayed it was coyotes, even wolves. Not in the mood for killing, not one bit. Not myself, not to spot for Bangley.

At the top I slid the rifle flat over the smooth top and lowered myself to cold dirt and wriggled upwards until my eyes cleared the lip.

In the light of the porch bulb I saw them. One two threefourfive … break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat … Five men all fullgrown except maybe one smaller maybe younger.

Shit.

With great effort that first summer we had levered and toppled the dumpster back south maybe a hundred feet further from the house. It was on its side, the open top gaping black. The creek bank was sheer and deep. The stream ran around it so that the airport sat in an oxbowed bite. Perfect moat. The only good ford was a trail that led out of the bottom to this house, the only one we lit. So they naturally clustered against the dumpster, south of it in the shadow of the bulb, shielded from the house where they—anyone not a professional soldier—would imagine the threat and the prize.

Fish in a barrel. Whatever other hapless metaphor for the hapless soon to be dead.

I kill deer. I have no problem killing deer. Dressing, butchering, eating.

Heart now thumping like a blind thing trying to bang its way out of the ribcage. I felt down to my belt and squeezed the sides of the radio, keying the mike button with my thumb three times. Then three then three. Then I counted. Before I got to two hundred Bangley would be sauntering up behind me carrying two guns: M4 assault rifle and a light sniper, probably an AR-10 .308. Counted to myself and shifted the rifle up and over one of the sandbags at the top and snugged the stock into my right shoulder and sighted. Ninety feet. We had measured it to the inch.

Onethirtyone onethirtytwo

They were crouched and talking among themselves, whispering, I couldn’t hear them. The wind was light, cool against the back of my neck, westerly from me to them. Carrying sound. Very slowly I thumbed the safety to fire, heard the click, wince, seemed loud, eased the small lever forward to full auto.

Oneseventynine oneeighty

They were not even not pros. They were crouched together as one target at this distance one alone filled the scope, way more than filled it. They were farmers insurance men mechanics. Probably. Haplessly clustered. But. I shifted the scope, just the slightest pressure from the inside of my shoulder, and swept them and they had guns, each one. As I swept, the sight picture tremored with the hammering of my heart. At this stage they were killers. I mean this stage in our mutually culpable history. Who to say how many or how cruelly. At this stage they were gathered in the posture of armed assault. On who knew what remnant of family had managed to survive in that house. And.

The cruelty of it struck me: they in relation to the house, the fictional family, me to them, that any of us should be in this position. Don’t fucking think, Hig. You will get us all killed Bangley liked to bark.

TwoOfive twoOsix. No Bangley. What the fuck. Never happened not once he wasn’t here by two hundred, usually earlier.

I eased my eye off the eyepiece and twisted my head around to the left. No shadow. No figure, no Bangley approaching. Fuck. Eye back on the scope. Hand on the trigger guard trembling. Starting to tremble.

They were talking among themselves. I flipped the lever that unlocked the scope with my trembling left hand and released it from its rail. Lay it to the side out of line of the iron peep sight. It opened up my field of view.

Even as a boy, the killing part was my least favorite. I loved to hunt with my Uncle Pete. He was an unreconstructed man of letters and of action in the mode of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, except that he taught ballroom dancing. On cruise ships. He and Aunt Louise did that for like twenty years and she died, and my normally exuberant and talkative uncle got quiet, more serious. Still fun. He wasn’t very good at either one, either the action or the letters, but I idolized him for a long time, longer than was necessary and went on my first elk hunt with him when I was twelve.

I was good. I mean I quickly understood terrain and habitat almost as if I had grown up with People of the Deer, and I was quiet and careful about the direction of the wind and the sound of twigs whizzing along the cordura of my pack, and the covering sounds of water, and I was an adept stalker and helpful in camp and nearly leapt out of my bag into the icy five a.m. chill of what was still a mountain mid-November night. I adored it all, and it seemed I didn’t have any problem putting the cow elk in my sights, but the way she stumbled over the rockfall when I shot, tripping forward and somersaulting over her own neck, and the way her eye shone up at me and she scrabbled her useless legs sideways over the rocks before I shot again right into the head in a panic, and the life went out of her eye and her legs, and then the way when I dressed her the blood spilled onto the frozen ground and mixed pink with warm milk from her still feeding teats—

Didn’t like it. Did it every year for years afterward and loved it all including having elk in the freezer, but not that. Don’t even like to kill a bug.

Twotwentythree twotwentyfour

No Bangley. I had tried negotiating once. Closest I ever came to dying.

Old rules are done Hig. Went the way of the woodpecker. Gone with the glaciers and the government. New world now. New world new rules. Never ever negotiate.

He loved to say that before he set up to plug someone.

Five was a big bunch, biggest we’d had in a couple of years. They were crouched, the biggest closest to the dumpster had a rifle with scope, was twisted back doing the talking, signing with his right hand, touching the watch cap cocked on his head, the one just beside him had some sort of assault rifle probably an AK, the three others: two shotguns and a ranch rifle all clear at ninety feet with the goggled eye. The third from the left with a shotgun wore a cowboy hat a short man in a big hat. They were bunched and nodding and they were about to move. My hand shook. They would never be this tight a target.

I planned to sweep right to left. Full auto. Set the peep in the middle of the last one’s bulk and planned to cut across through the midline of the bunch.

Moved right index finger onto the cold trigger, took a deep breath, a deep living breath to let out slow the way taught and

Cracked open. The night. Not me. Erupted pulse of flame peripheral from down to my right, the hulk carcass of a truck, the concatenate blast of rapid fire, the group in my sight coming apart entropic, the red dot flying across like a lethal bug throwing their shadows upwards and out to land, to be swallowed by the green ground.

Not me.

I hadn’t pulled the trigger.

A shriek and scream, one moaning another writhing, and whimpers, I saw Bangley step out from behind the truck, unholster his .45 walk calmly across the open ground and three shots, the ones crying suddenly silent.

Light wind, cold. Blood rushing in my ears, rinsing the cries. Quiet.

He picked up the scattered guns, slung all five. Walked around the berm, unslung the guns, heard them chink together on the ground, talked low to Jasper, climbed up to me where I was still prone, I would say still frozen on the trigger but more like just stilled with disbelief.

What the fuck.

Good he said. Good job. Not sure you still had it in you.

He meant that I would. That my finger was moving on the trigger.

Before he took over.

What the fuck Bangley. Not sure I still had what in me?

Silent. Knew I knew what.

I’ve never had it fucking in me. But I do it. What the fuck were you thinking? What if I’d seen you and thought you were one of them?

Never happen: You see me. Unh unh. Not that way.

I opened my mouth, closed it. I said, Unfuckingbelievable. What if they had broke apart. I mean just launched. Sooner.

Silence. Knew I knew now that he had them covered from the get go.

Well how the hell did you know I was about to pull the trigger and why didn’t you? Let me?

Silence. Knew that I knew now that he was scoping me more closely than he was scoping them. Scoping my frigging finger while he kept half an eye on the men that could have frigging killed us. Had them sighted all along. Let loose only when he saw me take the big breath maybe. I see him in my mind’s eye pulling the trigger on the first man not even looking, watching me first in the good night scope on its own legs, watching me jerk back in alarm in surprise, then casual but efficient tuck down to his weapon and sweep the rest of the group. Not sweep. Bangley doesn’t believe in full auto. Two shots probably to each panicked leaping shadow. T-TAP. Each one that fast. Maybe he was laughing at my confusion all the while he harvested this bunch of souls.

C’mere Hig. Show you something.

Goes over the top and down the berm. Jasper still down there, this side, trembling. Not with fear. I can see him in the starlight. Sitting on his haunches following my movements with concern, restraining himself from action, somebody doing their job just their job the way they are supposed to.

C’mon. I whistle soft. He jumps, not like the old days but still fast enough up to the top of the berm and over. Bangley is down there among the black figures sprawled. Jasper already moving one to the other, not stopping, nosing, the low growl.

Look at this Hig. They never should have done it.

He doesn’t sound unhappy.

Bangley has reached up and switched on the LED headlamp banded to his cap. His cap is on backward. He shines it on the short man, the one in the cowboy hat, the hat now tumbled into a drainage furrow a few feet off. It’s a boy. Maybe nine. About the age. Melissa seven months pregnant when. Nine years ago. This boy is thin, hair matted and tangled. A hawk feather tied into it.

Face hollow, a shadow smirched with dirt and exposure. Would have been born into this. Nine years of this. Piecing the jigsaw puzzle of this world into some dire picture in his head to end cast as an extra in Bangley’s practical joke.

He grunts. Arms in the hands of babes. Should have left him behind.

Where?

Bangley shrugs, swings his head up, the light up into my eyes, blinding.

I wince down against the harsh white blare but don’t turn.

Then when he wandered out of the creek starving tomorrow you would have shot him just like the others, but in full daylight and at three hundred yards not thirty.

I can’t see anything but the light, but I know Bangley’s grin is straight across and grim.

Hig you haven’t learned a goddamn thing in all this time. You’re living in the past. Makes me wonder if you appreciate any of this. Goddamn.

He walks off. He means do I deserve it. To live.

I walk away leave Jasper to his business. We will bury them tomorrow.

This is what I do, have done: I strip off haunches arms breast buttocks calves. Slice it thin soak in salt brine and dry to jerky for Jasper for the days between. You remember the story of the rugby team in the Andes. The corpses were corpses already dead. They did it to survive. I am no different. I do it for him. I eat venison, bottom fish, rabbit, shiners. I keep his jerky in airtight buckets. He likes it best of all his food I’m sure because of the salt. Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I’ll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.

That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in the warnings. I walk back around the berm. I am supposed to lie back down in our blankets and sleep with the berm at my head like a wide headstone. So I am fresh for tomorrow to fly. I will not sleep all night. I lay the gun down, just the gun, snug it back under the duffel and keep walking.

II

Back then I took up flying with the sense of coming to something I had been meant to do all my life. Many people who fly feel this way and I think it has more to do with some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit. The way the earth below resolves. The way the landscape falls into place around the drainages, the capillaries and arteries of falling water: mountain slopes bunched and wrinkled, wringing themselves into the furrows of couloir and creek, draw and chasm, the low places defining the spurs and ridges and foothills the way creases define the planes of a face, lower down the canyon cuts, and then the swales and valleys of the lowest slopes, the sinuous rivers and the dry beds where water used to run seeming to hold the hills and the waves of the high planes all together and not the other way around. The way the settlements sprawl and then congregate at these rivers and mass at every confluence. I thought: It’s a view that should surprise us but it doesn’t. We have seen it before and interpret the terrain below with the same ease we walk the banks of a creek and know where to place our feet.

But what I loved most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, windbreaks casting long shadows westward in the morning, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks, the pickups in the yards, the trailer parks in diagonal rows, the tract homes repeating the side-lit angles of roofs, baseball diamond and kart track ovals, even the junkyards just so, ragged lines of rusted cars and heaps of scrap metal as inevitable and lovely as the cottonwoods limning the rivers, casting their own long shadows. The white plume from the stack of a power plant tended eastward on the morning wind as pure as washed cotton. This was then. From up here there was no misery, no suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection. The immortal stillness of a landscape painting. Nor ever can those trees be bare … Even the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle progressing along the track of a highway pulsed with the reassuring rhythm of a cricket.

And for a time while flying, seeing all this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details: I am not grief sick nor stiffer in the joints nor ever lonely, nor someone who lives with the nausea of having killed and seems destined to kill again. I am the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is as at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

I took him flying in the first week of his arrival. He wanted to recon our perimeter, our weakest approaches. Squeezed him into the passenger seat and gave him a headset so he could talk to me. I made widening circles outward and climbed like a climbing hawk. It was a clear morning with the gullies still shadowed and a flock of seagulls shocked white between us and the ground. At ten miles and a thousand feet he said Druids. Go lower circle.

I’d never heard the word.

Met them on the way in, he said. They have the blood sickness. Yelled across the yard. Shot two that came too close. Wish I had incendiary now.

I glanced at him. The shock of it. Never heard that story but of course how could they know he ended up with me, my partner.

A few of the ragged kids ran out of a turkey shed and waved, jumped up and down. Bangley turned his hunched shoulders in the cramped seat to look at me.

They know you?

Yup. I help them. They’re not Druids, they’re Mennonites.

I felt his eyes on the side of my face then not. He said nothing the rest of the trip, not even when we flew up close along the mountains and saw the fresh snow blowing off the rock ridges.

III

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.

To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

Counter I guess to Bangley’s modus which is to kill just about everything that moves.

On the night of the one sided firefight in which I didn’t pull the trigger I walked straight past the west hangars and kept going. Jasper has a good nose and I knew that if he looked up and got worried he would just follow. Didn’t want to whistle him away from his party, and I knew Bangley well enough that he’d had enough killing in one night not to fuck with my dog. I had no goggles no gun. Bangley always wears a belted sidearm, I’m sure he wears it to sleep. I have never seen him asleep but I wonder how many nights he has watched us at the base of the berm snoozing. There is much about the man that creeps me out but this is the worst, the unrelenting sense of being surveilled. I’ve learned to live with it the way the Cree in Canada must live with swarms of mosquitoes. Did live. But there is the nagging fear: if he decided the attacks had tapered off enough to defend this place himself or if my visiting the families was too much of a risk he might kill us both, me and Jasper, unimpeded with an easy two shots fifty steps from his front porch. So in this sense I am crazy to sleep in the open, but then if Bangley wanted to kill me he would have limitless opportunities in any one day, so I decided from the beginning to make my daily choices without including Mr. Death in the calculus.

And so, in this way, I thought as I walked past the last hangars west and away from our one burning bulb on the one porch into the not total darkness of the starlit plains, I thought that in this way the visitation by the five men paid a kind of surety against my survival at least for a while. For a while Jasper and I were indispensable, though Bangley had dispatched the group, the killing part, with literally one eye on the ball.

I walked around the old gas tank which was green in daylight, now black, bulked in the tall sage brush, and my feet found without thinking the worn trail to the mountains. My trail. The one Jasper and I had worn over nine years, and Bangley out to his tower. Erie airport had no control tower, it was an uncontrolled field, meaning that the pilots just talked to each other and worked things out according to long used protocol, but Bangley and I had built our own tower four miles out onto the plain, halfway to the mountain front, and this tower was for killing. It had taken us two months to build, salvaging the lumber out of a painstaking teardown of an ugly, blocky, modern, wooden thing on Piper Lane that reminded me of a grade school from the Seventies. We hauled the lumber out to the site in his pickup when it still ran, and in his dry van trailer, the one he had showed up with that was full of guns, weapons of every murderous phylum, and mines and canned food and ammo. We hauled out a generator too from one of the electricity free hangars on the north side, and we ran it on avgas to power the saws and drills. Bangley was not a born carpenter and it was the first and only time I saw him do a manual job with any kind of éclat, the work fired I know now by a vision of the clean, long shots he’d get with his .408. He couldn’t wait to get to the top platform and install the bench rest and locking swivel he had spent hours at his desk designing. A separate permanent mount for his spotting scope and another for his laser range finder. None of which—the gun nor the scope nor the range finder—he ever left on the tower. But he left a windspeed/direction indicator out there on its own pole where it wouldn’t be queered by wind deflecting and eddying off the roof, and he left his ballistics tables in a neat dove jointed drawer which I crafted for him.

His preferred range was fourteen hundred yards. Close enough with his skills to pretty much guarantee a kill but far enough to flatter his pride. Which meant that there was one spot on the trail that was a place where many people over the years had seen their last living look of the sad world. It was a place literally soaked in blood. The ground here, the dirt between a tall sage on the south side of the trail and tall bushy rabbit brush on the north, was black with the coppery minerals of spilled blood, stained the way the place in a yard or dirt drive where a man changes the oil in his car is stained. That night I covered the four miles plus four hundred yards in much less than an hour. I didn’t notice the distance and I didn’t notice the time. By my calendar it was the night of April 21st which to my knowledge is not some solstice or equinox, but seems significant anyway to me like all 21sts of the month. It was also Melissa’s birthday. She didn’t like parties so we never had one. We had quiet dinners, usually sushi, which she regarded as a ridiculously decadent form of nutrition but adored nevertheless like twice a year. Her favorites were gone by the end, the tuna and yellowtail and wild salmon, and the prices were so high for most of the rest we just stopped going.

I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you’d find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone. But some motif from the cover illustration was stamped on the cloth of the hard cover itself, a rearing horse or an ancient elm, so that you could close your eyes and run your hands over the grainy surface and feel the fleet curves of the bucking bronco, the brachial patterns of the spreading tree.

My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter

Under a muskrat:

Beaver:

I walked past the tower in the dark. The path through the brush absorbed and gave back the light from the Milky Way and was clear in its windings. I walked over the target spot, over a black staining that was not the shadow of the sage. I did not shudder or feel much of anything. I felt the wind. It was west down from the mountains and it should have been cold-snow cold, but it was warm and smelled of earth, and of the cedar on the lower slopes and the spruce higher up. Like rock emerging from ice. Lichen and moss. I thought it did. It smelled like spring.

Too early in mid-April for a real thaw, but anymore the old seasonal benchmarks were mostly nostalgia. We had snow in the mountains this winter but there were two years running where the peaks were dry holding almost nothing. This scared me more than attacks or disease.

Losing the trout was bad. Losing the creek is another thing altogether.

I still fished in the mountains. The trout were gone because the streams got too warm, but I fished suckers and carp, nymphing the bottom like before, and overcoming the revulsion when I got a sucker, the sluggish resistance that couldn’t be called a fight, and the distended lips and the scales. I made myself get used to the taste and the bones. Now that the trout were gone the carp had learned to occupy the niche and feed more and more on the surface, so I even sometimes fished dry flies. Never brought them back for Bangley because he wouldn’t have understood. The hours spent. The danger in being so absorbed along a stream which was the thoroughfare for both animals and wanderers.

But I did. He would have called it Recreating, which he called with scorn anything that didn’t directly involve our direct survival, or killing, or planning to kill which amounted to the same thing. Christ Hig we’re not Recreating here are we? Good goddamn. Deer hunting was one thing. The amount of quality protein in one successful trip divided by the risk. The fact that I wanted to go, that I needed it—to get up there, to get away, to breathe that air—he overlooked. Had I hated it, he would have liked that better. Same with flying. He knew that flying for me was life somehow and yet he couldn’t count on two hands the times we were arguably saved by the intelligence from some patrol.

He wasn’t my boss and I did what I did, but he made sure his disapproval grated hard, and after a while it was easier to not put this stuff in his face. A matter of keeping the needle in the green day to day.

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

I listened to the creek, and to the wind and watched it move the heavy dark boughs. In a pool below me the dark surface was dusted with green pollen. The roots of a tree exposed in the bank snaked over the water and in their spaces old spiderweb swayed in the wind and glimmered along the threads with its rhythm.

I took out the four pieces of the rod wrapped in flannel and snugged them together, sighting along the guides and twisting the shining metal loops so they lined up true. It was a Sage pack rod, a little number four I’d had since high school. My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday just after I came to live with him. He died of pancreatic cancer the next year before he could ever show me how to use it, but I ended up teaching myself and learning from Uncle Pete.

I pulled out the Orvis reel he had given me with the rod, which I’d kept cleaned and oiled when no other part of my life was working smoothly if at all. I slid the tang of the reel foot into the aluminum slot in the top of the cork handle and tightened down the nut. The nut went around the whole rod and rod seat and was stamped with a deep diamond pattern that made it easy for the thumb and forefinger to grab. It turned easily and locked down tight.

All of this, these motions, the sequence, the quiet, the rill and gulp, the riffle of the stream and the wind soughing the needles of the tall trees. As I strung the rod. I had known it all hundreds, probably now thousands of times. It was ritual that required no thought. Like putting on socks. Except this ritual put me in touch with something that felt very pure. Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself. My attention and carefulness, my willingness to risk, and my love. Patience. Whatever else was going on. I began fishing just after Pop died and I tried to fish the way I thought he would. Which is a little weird thinking about it now: trying to emulate a man I had never seen wield a rod, and with the fierceness of a son this man had never had much of a chance to father.

When I lost my high school girlfriend, I fished. When in a fit of frustration and despair I quit writing anything, I fished. I fished when I met Melissa and barely dared to hope that I had found someone I could love in a way that surpassed anything I had known. I fished and fished and fished. When the trout got hit with disease, I fished. And when the flu finally took her in an Elks Hall converted to a hospital and crammed with the cots of the dying not five hundred yards from our house, I fished.

I was not allowed to bury her. She was incinerated with the rest. I fished. In the increasing chaos of dwindling supplies and longer gas lines and riots, I fished. By then I was nymph fishing for carp just to get away and follow a stretch of creek, the curves and moods of which I knew as well as I had known the body of my dead wife.

In all the years at the airport I kept bringing my rod into the mountains. I’d set down the pack and put together the rod and breathe and Jasper would take his cue and lie down on the bank where he could get a good view of the action. I put on the light wading shoes which were like hi-tops with sticky rubber on the soles, and stepped down to the smooth stones that were dusty and gray in air and stepped into the water. As soon as these riverbed rocks were wet and covered they came alive with color, greens and russets and blues. I did too. Felt like that. Soon as the cold shocked my feet and pressed my shins.

Never used waders anymore. I just liked the feel of cold running water against my legs.

I was thinking, remembering this as I followed the path toward the mountains and I thought how I hadn’t fished in over a year, not at all last summer, and wondered why, and wished now that I had the rod and Jasper, just a pack for a day and no gun and fuck Bangley I wasn’t even going to pretend I was going hunting. But I didn’t. Have any of it. I’d been walking for as much time as it took Orion to decline over the mountains, probably an hour and a half, and I stopped. I breathed and looked around me for the first time and realized I was very close to the first trees of the mountain front. And I was alone. I came out of reverie and almost called out for Jasper and realized that for the first time I could remember he wasn’t with me. An icy fear contracted my guts and I turned and trotted all the way back to the airport.

IV

It warmed fast. Spring gave way without resistance. Two weeks earlier than last by the calendar I had scrawled onto a board in the hangar. I judged the threat of night frost over and furrowed and strung the rows of the garden, and drilled and planted under a benign sun which warmed the back of my neck and turned the fur of Jasper’s back pleasantly hot under my hands.

I planted the same crop I planted every year: string beans, potatoes, corn. Also had spinach which I grew in a cold frame along with the little tomato plants I’d started.

In the final days when I decided I would have to bail out of the city fast, those are what I took out of my own cold shed in the backyard. A dirt crusted basket of seed packets and a bucket of seed potatoes. The same five, this now our tenth planting. I’d need to trade seeds with the families soon to keep the plants strong, why I hadn’t done it already I’m not sure. A couple of years I used the warm conservatory room of one of the mansions to start seedlings but they died in a hard frost each time when the cold overcame the stored heat in the brick floor. I couldn’t be bothered to put in a woodstove and keep them warm. Then I made the cold frame for the spinach so we could have it all year and for tomato starts in the spring. It worked usually. I planted the potatoes later than normal so that we would get a late harvest and have them all winter. With what we had, and with just me and Bangley, I canned more than we could use and stored the jars and a heap of potatoes in a cold room in the basement of my house, the one with the bulb. I never told Bangley but I dropped off fresh vegetables in the summer, and jars too later in the year, to the families who also had a garden but were hapless in their efforts due to the disease.

On this afternoon in late April I worked slowly, enjoying the warmth of the day and letting the sun soak into my winter bones. I talked to Jasper the whole time.

We need a hill, I called, picking up the spade. We need two rows built up nice for the potatoes.

Jasper furrowed his brow and agreed, happy just to lie on a pile of sunwarmed dirt and supervise.

Hey where are the old stakes for the beans? Where did we put em?

Jasper’s ears came up and his mouth opened in his version of a smile. He didn’t know. He didn’t give a fuck.

Were life that simple, I thought, as I had many times before. Simple as a dog’s life.

I spaded up the hills for the potatoes and buried the pieces, each with its eye. I found the split lumber we’d used as bean poles and dug them in and guyed them out with string and strung three lines laddered for the climbing vines over six feet high. There was almost nothing on earth as satisfying as a wall of beans, leaves fluttering taller than you are.

I was in no hurry. What we didn’t plant today we’d plant tomorrow. Probably warm enough even to plant the corn. Our shadows puddled to the south at midday and lengthened over the furrows as the spring sun made its transit into the northwest. I hummed almost tunelessly. Melissa always ribbed me for the unconscious near melody I repeated day after day when I worked. Always the same non-song. The comfort. I made a little trough for the beans, sprinkled them along it, covered them firmly. Dirt from shoveling furred the hairs on my arm and smudged my face when I rubbed my nose with the back of a fist. From the dammed-up pond in the creek, I siphoned into the shallow ditch at the head of the garden and broke it in four places with the tip of the spade to run water into the furrows. The silver runnels in the turned earth went ruddy and molten with the low sun. Staining the dirt to either side. By the middle of the night the whole planting would be wet.

I was tired. Tomorrow I’d plant the rest, the tomatoes and corn. The next day if the weather was good Jasper and I would take the sled, and this time the fly rod, and go up to the mountains for a spring buck.

The deer wandered the plains but they knew somehow to stay away from the airport and I hadn’t had much luck stalking them on the open prairie. I was a mountain hunter and anyway I wanted to go up there before the creeks got too high.

Bangley sometimes set up on the second floor of his house with a sandbag in an open window and made sport long-shooting what he could. He killed two gray wolves at great distance but then they too steered clear. He sewed the fur of a ruff onto the hood of his winter fatigue coat and wore it like a trophy.

I stood back of the new garden watching the sun touch the mountains and ruddle the turned dirt and the threads of water and I can say there was something moving inside that resembled a kind of happiness.

I would never have named it. Not then. For fear. But I name it now.

C’mon, Jasp.

I speared the spade into the loose earth for tomorrow and turned for the hangar and heard the muffled clapping as Jasper shook himself and came trotting behind me.

Couple days, I said. Maybe three.

I pushed two gallon Ziplocs of Jasper’s jerky into the bottom of my pack. Long since over the nausea. My Uncle Pete told me, You can get used to stepping over a dead goat on the doorstep. How about a dead person?

Why three? Bangley said.

I stuffed in my down sweater, the bulky stained brown one I had ordered from Cabela’s in my late twenties and taken with me to the woods every trip since. On top of it I lay the bags of my own jerky, the venison, and the folded nylon tarp I used for shelter, and a roll of parachute cord.

Why a couple, three? Plenty snow Hig. The deer should be down low.

I couldn’t think of a reason so I said: That last trip in November I saw elk sign. I swear. I know you think it’s crazy talk but I saw it. Tracks of a big cow. I want to look some more. Christ, if we could get an elk.

I didn’t look at him. Silence.

We were like a married couple unable anymore to speak the truth about the most important things. I had never lied to Melissa about anything except the conviction that she would pull through the flu. She knew it was a lie and did not hold it against me. She was too sick anyway to worry about whether she might survive. She had dysentery-like nausea and diarrhea and her lungs were filling up like pneumonia which was terrifying. In the end she just wanted it to be over. Pillow, she whispered to me. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, her hair wet with sweat, her hand terribly light, almost desiccated on mine. And cold. Pillow. I’d been crying. I tried with every ounce not to, not to weep as I saw my world, everything in it of any importance, vanishing from my grip. In almost a panic, I can say now, I adjusted her one pillow behind her head on the cot, not sure what she wanted adjusted, so that it bunched a little and raised her head.

No, she breathed. Barely breathed. Her hand scratched the back of mine like a claw, like she was trying to grasp it and couldn’t.

Use it.

I stared at her.

Hig. Two, three breaths short, unable to get enough oxygen. Please.

Her eyes glassy, still blue gray, I always thought like a clear sea on a cloudy day, now deepening in color, struggling to focus on mine.

Please.

Please.

I looked around the hall filled with cots for a doctor or orderly, in some desperate hope to forestall, but they were almost all sick anyway, or starting to throw up and cough, this was like some ring of hell, there was no one. A stench, the clamor of coughing and sickness.

Her hand scratched at mine her eyes would not leave my face.

I gently lifted the back of her head off the pillow and laid it back down on the stained sheet and brought the pillow around and said I love you. More than anything in God’s universe. And her eyes were on mine and she didn’t say a word and I covered her face and used it. On my own wife.

She heaved twice, struggled, clawed lightly, went still. The clamor in the hall did not stop the moans and coughing. Did not stop.

I loved her.

This is what I live with.

Bangley said, What’s wrong with you Hig? You look kind of fucked up.

I shook myself. The way Jasper does.

Nothing.

Maybe you need a vacation Hig. You been working too hard in the garden. Men weren’t meant to be farmers the way I see it. Beginning of everything fucked up.

He meant take a vacation lying in the hammock I strung in the shade of the house. Between two ornamental trees, a Norway spruce and an aspen that always looked to me a little lost down here, and like they were shaking their limbs longingly at the mountains where they belonged.

I breathed. Yeah, maybe you’re right. But listen I want to go up there. If there are elk. Jesus. We’d be like kings.

We are like kings Hig. It took the end of the world.

He began to laugh. Gravelly, a little like a cough. Unpleasant.

Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day. Huh Hig? Captains of our fate. Ha!

Then he really did cough. A short fit. When he came out of it he said, Well you go up there. Do a little fishing. Recreating. Unwind. Get us a goddamn ghost elk. But get a deer, too, why don’t you Hig. Something we can eat.

He smiled straight across, stared at me with his eyes that sparked like gravel in a streambed.

Not more than three days. I mean it. Every day you’re gone fucking around we are vulnerable.

I cocked my head and looked at him. It was the very first time he had admitted to my usefulness.

I don’t sleep that good he said. To tell the truth.

He coughed once more and spat out the hangar door. Well, good luck, he said, and walked off.

He didn’t sleep well when I was gone. Like a wife. Fucking Bangley. Just when I thought I wished him really gone.

We would leave the next morning in the dark. I could cover the eight miles under cold stars and make the trees with the air getting gray and grainy. I packed the pack for three days though I thought if we got on an elk it could be longer. Bangley would have to deal. I could tie the pack into the sled and drag it, but I kept it light and I preferred it on my body with the sled almost weightless behind on the way out. I knew the creeks and I moved from drainage to drainage so I packed two quarts of water only.

I decided to make one more flight. Both to scout the hunt and to give Bangley one more day of security in three directions. The afternoon was fine with just a light breeze stirring off the mountains, warm in the sun but almost winter cold in the shadow of the hangar. I had the woodstove going and the kettle on, steaming. I made tea from the jar of summer flowers, leaves that I dried: wild strawberry, black raspberry, mint, and sat in Valdez, the recliner I had pulled out of the home entertainment room of one of the mansions. It was named after the Exxon tanker that had wrecked and spilled in Alaska.

It was a split double recliner for husband and wife presumably, but now for me and Jasper, with a lever on each side and covered in the finest calfskin. It was very soft. I put an heirloom quilt on his side, patched with prints in blues and yellows, and with a repeating pattern of a log cabin made from squares and triangles in printed cloth, every piece different but with the same twist of smoke coming out of each chimney, paisley or polka dot or ribbed with color, so it gave an impression of a fanciful village evenly spread over a country of geometric fields and flowering crops, and at a retiring hour when everyone was indoors enjoying the warmth of a fire. As we were. It was comforting to look at and comfortable sitting in the deep chair in the waves of heat from the stove, levered halfway back and drinking tea.

I could almost imagine that it was before, that Jasper and I were off somewhere on an extended sojourn and would come back one day soon, that all would come back to me, that we were not living in the wake of disaster. Had not lost everything but our lives. Same as yesterday standing in the garden. It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

It was like I was living in a doubleness, and the doubleness was the virulent insistence of life in its blues and greens laid over the scaling grays of death, and I could toggle one to the other, step into and out of as easily as I might step into and out of the cold shadow of the hangar just outside. Or that I didn’t step, but the shadow passed over like the shadow of a cloud that covered my arms with goosebumps, and passed.

Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occurred to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. And life was inside death, virulent and insistent as a strain of flu. How it should be.

It was memory that threw me. I tried hard not to remember and I remembered all the time.

Spencer was his name. Going to be. Sophie if a girl. Very English. In the second trimester we decided we wanted to know. Melissa’s family was Scottish. Came over from Melrose when she was seven, enrolled in a West Denver primary school and was made to stand in front of the class and repeat words like arithmetic while all the kids giggled and the teachers died of cuteness assault. She said she lost the accent completely in two months. Adaptable as only a seven year old can be.

Her father’s name.

Not sick, not once, the whole time. Never nauseous. Never craved avocados and ice cream.

She didn’t like to hunt at all but she loved to fish. She fished with me when she could. In some ways she was better than me. She didn’t have the distance and accuracy in her cast but she could think more like a trout than probably anyone alive. She would stand on the bank of a creek and just breathe and watch the bugs flying in and out of the sunlight.

The guides, the freaks, did stuff like pump out the stomach of their first fish with a rubber bulb to see what they were eating right now. As if being caught, netted, held in the scalding air wasn’t traumatic enough. They put the fish back, but did they live after that operation? They claimed they did, I doubted it. She didn’t do anything like that. She snugged the halves of her rod together, strung it, pulled the line straight down from the top guide with a whizz of the reel and let her slender fingers slide down the length of the leader, the tippet, and pushed back the brim of her Yankees cap, and then she asked me.

Hig what should I put on?

I studied the hatch flitting in the sunlight or swarming the surface, turned over a few rocks to look at the larvae.

Eighteen Copper John on the bottom, a Rio Grand King, pretty big, on top.

She’d move her lips around looking at me like I was putting her on. Then she’d tie on a bead head prince and an elk hair caddis. Big and small just the reverse. Or she’d go with a purple wooly booger, the one with the brass conehead, which is like a swimming minnow mimic and an entirely different strategy.

Why do you ask me? I said. I think you ask and then do just the opposite.

Her smile, bright and sudden, was one of my favorite things on the planet.

I’m not disrespecting you Hig. I’m doing a survey. Kind of calibrating what I’m thinking against the finest fisherman I know.

Flattery now. Jeez. Fish on.

She usually outcaught me. Except on the big rivers, the Gunnison, the Green, the Snake, where a long cast was helpful. The last time we went fishing we had a terrible fight.

I drank the tea. It occurred to me that Jasper owned more special quilts than any dog in history. He had his Valdez recliner log cabin quilt, his flying hunting dog quilt, his outside sleeping quilt covered in Whos from Whoville. He was lying flat on his side with his butt against me and his legs sticking off the cushion and he was snoring.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

I drank in the beginning. Every kind of food, even the horses, were all consumed in the first year, but the booze was still tucked in cabinets and closets, in basements. Bangley and I used it for treating cuts. Bangley never drank because it was part of his Code. I’m not sure if he thought of himself as a soldier or even a warrior, but he was a Survivor with a capital S. All the other, what he had been in the rigors of his youth, I think he thought of as training for something more elemental and more pure. He had been waiting for the End all his life. If he drank before he didn’t drink now. He didn’t do anything that wasn’t aimed at surviving. I think if he somehow died of something that he didn’t deem a legitimate Natural Cause, and if he had a moment of reflection before the dark, he would be less disappointed with his life being over than with losing the game. With not taking care of the details. With being outsmarted by death, or worse, some other holocaust hardened mendicant.

Sometimes I think the only reason he kept me around was so he had someone to witness his prowess in the winning of each day. I wonder if the stunt the other night was just to let me know that it was him. That he vouchsafed our survival every day. Remember that, Hig.

I heard a joke once about a shipwreck. I heard it way back when a model named Trippa Sands was the woman in the posters on the walls of teenage boys. The cover girl of cover girls, the paragon of sexiness. She is on vacation on a big cruise ship that hits a reef in the Caribbean and sinks. She washes up on a desert island with my buddy Jed. The only survivors. They wash up onto the beach, the waves christen them with foam, they are in tatters, mostly naked, and they look into each other’s eyes with the dawning apprehension of their unique solitude, and love hits them like a falling coconut. They fall hopelessly. Luckily, the island is replete with low hanging fruit and sweet fresh water, and oysters and fish that jump into their woven baskets, so that sustaining themselves is a breeze and they have a lot of leisure time just to gaze into each other’s eyes and make the kind of fierce love I imagine an apocalypse affords. About a week into it Jed says, Tripp?

Ahh. Hmmm. Yes, my fragrant studliness.

I have a favor to ask you.

Of course, my sandbrushed power drill. Anything. For you.

Can you wear my cowboy hat for a few days?

Oh sure, why not!

Next day he says, Trippa?

Yes, Pooty?

I have a favor to ask you.

Anything my little mango.

Can you use a bit of this charcoal and draw on a moustache?

Hmm. Well for you, you big Cumquat, anything.

Next day they’ve just made love nonstop for an entire tide cycle. They are sitting on a tortoiseshell bench watching a thunderstorm sweep over the azure water, Trippa in her hat and moustache, and Jed says, Hun?

Yes Poots.

Um, can I call you Joe?

Well, ah sure, you plunging hammerhead shark you.

Jed grabs her and shakes her shoulders.

Joe! he cries. Joe! Joe! I’m fucking Trippa Sands!

Still makes me laugh. Can’t help but think of me and Bangley which isn’t so funny. That he wants me to be Joe so he can show someone how well he is surviving. I’m fucking the shit out of this survival stuff aren’t I, Hig? He never told me another thing about his upbringing except that it wasn’t what you think, but I imagine that his mother, if he had one, was pretty hard to impress.

Well. I guess. I say it to Jasper who has shifted so his head is hanging down off of Valdez but is still snoring. I put my hand on his ribs in the short fur and rub.

Let’s go flying.

It’s late afternoon, my favorite time after dawn. I fuel up. The pump runs off its own solar panel. Used to use a battery and inverter but the battery died so I wired it directly to the inverter and now can only fuel up if the sun is shining which it is. I have a hand pump if I need it, but it’s a pain. I fill the tanks from a stepladder, through capped intakes at the top of each wing, and it’s a real pain to be on the ground and pump and keep track of the fuel level which is checked by climbing up and looking straight down into the bladder through the fill hole. I can estimate and get it close, but it’s way easier just to stand up there and pull the trigger on the pump hose and hear the reassuring electric hum and the clicking of the numbers rolling on the meter like filling up a car used to be.

Used to. Plenty of gas still out in the world but problem is the auto gas went stale and bad a year or two after. 100 low lead, which I burn, is stable something like ten years. So I expect to lose it one of these days. I can add PRI and nurse it along for ten more years probably. Then I’ll have to look for jet fuel which is kerosene and lasts for basically ever. I know where it is, the closest. I know that right now I’m the only one alive who knows, or at least knows how to get it out. But every time I land at Rocky Mountain Airport I feel vulnerable in a way I never do at my other stops. It’s too big. A big old jetport with scores of buildings, hangars, sheds and the pumps and the steel fill plates out in the open.

When I have to, me and Bangley will pow wow. Maybe we’ll have to break camp. Can’t imagine. Or maybe I’ll just have to take him with me to cover my back every time I fill up which would be a kind of party for him but would leave Erie wide open for at least half an hour.

Jasper is sitting up in his seat and I taxi past the rows of private aircraft still tied down. All have flat and rotted tires, many cracked windshields from hail. Some, the ropes frayed and wore and broke in big winds, and the planes upended or rolled into others across the ramp, or further. Last spring we had a gale and a Super Cub broke loose and ended up in the second story plate window of a fancy house across the runway, on Piper Lane, which was fitting. The green street sign like a pre-printed headstone.

Why don’t I fly one of the Super Cubs or Huskies? Some narrow tandem (one seat in front, one in back), something more agile, that can swoop down and land short, can basically land and take off on a tennis court? Why do I fly my eighty year old Cessna four seater?

Because the seats are side by side. So Jasper can be my copilot. The real reason. The whole time I fly I talk to him, and it amuses me no end that the whole time he pretends not to listen.

We taxi between the rows. There are some beautiful old planes. The colored stripes, the blues and golds and reds are fading. The numbers. One I used to fly, a little home-built plane with a pull down bubble cockpit, stands nose down to the tarmac like a forlorn bird, the U.S. Air Force stars painted on the fuselage burned to washed splashes. It was built by a longtime friend of mine, Mike Gagler. An Alaska bush pilot who ended up flying jets for the airlines and built planes as a hobby. Never did anything like anyone else almost as a matter of principle. He died early with his family in a yellow house I can see from the open door of the hangar. He refused to go to the hospital, said they were just a way for the government to get the dead in one place. He was the last in his family to die, by force of will, so his wife and two daughters would have someone to hold them. I buried the four of them with the airport’s backhoe when it still ran.

In the early days I took it out, Mike’s RV-8, and wasted gas. Left Jasper sitting anxious and alone by the gas pumps and climbed straight into the sun and kept pulling the stick until the sky rolled down beneath me and the horizon came down over my head like the visor of a helmet. Big, slow, sickening backward loops and fast barrel rolls. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.

Then I’d buzz the runway at ten feet and see Jasper rooted on his haunches following me with his eyes, and even at that speed I knew he was worried, and grieving that I might leave him like everything else had done, so I stopped.

The wind sock midfield swings northward, puffing without urgency, so we turn south onto the taxiway, and I jam the throttle and we take off. One thing about everybody dying is that you don’t have to use the designated runway.

Nothing is designated anymore. If it weren’t for Bangley I’d forget my name.

I figure we’ll fly the big circle then stop for a Coke. Scout the meadows below Nederland, below the peaks of the Divide, fly the spiral inward, check the roads and the two trails while there’s good light, make sure Bangley is clear of visitors at least a day in the three directions, then land at the soda fountain and bring back a couple cases. Only eight minutes out to the northeast toward Greeley. A peace offering. Of bloated cans and plastic bottles. There’s a stack of Dr. Pepper I can see with the headlamp in back of the semi, maybe now’s the time to spring it on him like Christmas. Bangley seems like a Dr. Pepper man. One of Sprite for the families, land there one time, it’s been a few weeks. As we bank left, north, the lowering sun spills through the glass like something molten.

Look straight down, the tract development north of the airport patterns itself in the head to toe lollipops of feeder and cul de sac, and if I squint, to blur the ones burned, I can imagine a normal late spring evening.

Continue the climbing bank west and level out at eight hundred feet and begin my scan.

Nothing. Nothing the whole way. Roads empty. Blessedly. Usually are. Had there been wanderers it would have fucked up everything, delayed our hunt. Then I would have swooped, cut the engine, played the tape. I have four songs on the CD rigged to the amp and the speakers: they are titled

The words are easy to remember: just the title over and over. Followed by the exhortative: We know you are here. You will become dog food like many before you.

Bangley made me add that.

Fuck no, I said. That’s unnecessary and disgusting.

Bangley just stared at me, his grin half formed.

It’s true ain’t it? Ain’t it Hig?

Hit me like a punch.

Add it, he said. This isn’t some debutante ball.

Mostly it works. Enough unknowns, enough survived that visitors can’t be sure there isn’t some phalanx of Mongols at the airport waiting to tear them apart. Which I guess we are. A phalanx of two. No, three. And they must think: These guys have an air force, a loudspeaker, a recording, what else have they got? We have Bangley, I think. You have no idea what that means. You better fucking turn back.

If they need more convincing I’ve gotten pretty good at shooting Bangley’s Uzi machine pistol out my window on a left bank. I try not to hit anybody but sometimes I do.

I have been shot at fourteen times. Three went through the fuselage. Most people don’t know how to shoot at airplanes. They never lead us enough.

Nobody now. Highway 7 is clear, 287, the interstate. Our trail west. Sun is pouring down Boulder Canyon brushing the tops of the Flatirons. Used to be our favorite day hike, the trail along the base of the slabs, when the when. To the north Mount Evans flushes with blood snow. Misjudged the time, no time to scout the hills if I am going on a beverage run. In truth I don’t need to scout them anyway. I do it because it’s beautiful to fly low over the foothills but we know where the deer are. If we are going to cut elk sign it will be on the ground. I bank east and beeline straight for the power plant on the St. Vrain SW of Greeley. It’s a jackknifed double trailer semi half off the county road, half into a long farm driveway. I can see it five miles out. The dirty red and white sides catch the sun like a billboard. Hijacked for the potable water, I guess, the bottled water inside and all the pop. First time I saw the truck it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to land, but for the five bodies strewn around it. And one doubled out the driver’s window. Tableaux of gunplay made me throttle back and circle.

I am not as quick as I once was, I am sure. Sometimes it is fog and shaggy horses. But the bodies spoke from the ground and the truck blazoned. Think, Hig. A gun battle around a Coke truck.

Which led to our monthly treat.

That first time, the farm pond east of the semi was slicked black in a crescent along the north bank, and wrinkled over the rest so I circled and landed on the yellow dotted line to the north, into the wind. I climbed down and turned for Jasper who waited bunched and excited on my seat, and I carried him to the ground. I dragged the men off into the grassy ditch by their boots so Jasper could—Discovered early on that it is easier that way than by the arms.

The doors of the rear trailer were padlocked, a simple brass U lock. I walked to the farmhouse and across a muddy yard and found the bolt cutters in the tractor shed.

Didn’t occur to me til some months later that I could fly Bangley out there and he could drive the truck right to the airport. By then I enjoyed bringing back a few cases at a time. By then I figured to make it last the years of our lives. Little enough in our lives to celebrate.

Didn’t occur to me either until much later that by then, by then if it were years, the cans might be utterly ruined by freeze and thaw. No matter. It was a good system now.

That first time I loaded three cases into the Beast and closed and latched the doors. I had the key turned in the mags to start the plane when I climbed out again and tied the strip of a man’s red shirt to a mile marker for a wind indicator. Mile 4. I remember.

Riddled with three .22 bullet holes in a three inch group. Pretty good. Probably the farm boy practicing for prairie dogs.

Today it is again from the north. The wind. Shifted one eighty in less than an hour which is typical this time of year. This time of year I have seen the wind socks at either end of the runway at Erie facing in opposite directions, which makes for an interesting landing.

A line of telephone poles runs along the east edge of the road. Doesn’t matter, they were set back far enough. The small reflector poles and mile markers easily pass under the wings. My first instructor told me that in an emergency landing a paved road was almost always wide enough if you landed dead center, almost always enough setback on any kind of pole or sign. What got dicey was a nice wide looking dirt road. The signpost you don’t see could be the one that grabs a wing and cartwheels you.

Still, I bank left for a final approach into the wind, very high, and float down on full flaps, down the middle of the left lane sighting a spot on the road just short of a tall cottonwood, then at the horizon ahead, the road rising to meet me, floating downward, and then I smoothly pull the yoke, back back back to my chest and flare and settle one light bump while the stall horn blares. Still, after all these years, the thrill of a good landing. Have done it many times before from this direction and know I don’t even need to lean on the brakes, just hold the nose up and let the plane roll out to the driveway and the truck.

One tap of the brakes, Jasper sitting his seat on his haunches on the thick quilt in copilot position, jerked forward just a little, resetting his front feet. Pull the red mixture knob and cut the engine. A prolonged sputter, the whirring prop becoming visible, slowing then silence.

Wind shudders the windscreen, shakes the plane. Windier than I thought. Gusty. Flattening the short grass in the field, intermittent like a breeze through a crew cut. Purple asters in the ditch nodding. The side window is open, I rest my elbow. Smell of damp earth rich with rot and newness. Heady with memory as only smell can be. Still a tang of ancient manure from the mud feedlot back of the sheds. Everything unstable this time of year.

Turn to Jasper.

Welcome to Old Coke City. Another On Time Arrival and perfect landing brought to you by the flight crew at Mongrel Air. Please remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop. Careful opening the overhead bin.

Jasper deigns one glance, disapproving, and continues staring straight ahead through the windshield, brow furrowed like any good copilot. He doesn’t appreciate joking while on the job. He knows we’re going to the truck so he watches the truck twenty yards ahead.

Then he growls. Short. A low huff that puffs the loose skin over his upper teeth.

Okay we are at a complete stop. There is no overhead bin. Don’t be a stickler. Jeez.

His growl lower now, continuous. Hackles standing, hair on the rough behind smoothed flat over tight skin. Eyes fixed on the back of the Coke trailer. My hair, the small hairs on the back of my own neck, prickle and stand. Follow his eyes. The white painted latch back of the trailer angles out from the faded red door. A strip of black shadow between the two. Doors. The right one ajar. Barely. The smell coming north to south down the road. To us.

Without taking eyes off the truck I reach across for the AR. It’s racked vertically, muzzle upwards in a bracket fixed to the front left side of Jasper’s seat. Next to it the machine pistol. Thumb the latch of the chrome strapping and lift out the rifle. Courtesy of Bangley.

Okay, boy. Good one.

Whispering now, no reason.

Okay, c’mon.

No use to tell him to stay in the plane. He never will. Not in these gigs. Don’t want him to sprain something jumping out. I unlatch my door. Two steps, wing strut to ground, half turn and gather him in one arm, the right, and lower him to the tarmac, his claws scrabbling for pavement.

Okay. Heel.

He knows. Has been through this before. Too many times.

We are sixty feet maybe fifty five. I fly with the rifle racked because it is too difficult to do in the air. Pull out the collapsable stock Bangley made me. Thumb the safety. Push the lever over, full auto to semi. The wind is light for a minute, warm in our faces, and rounded a little to the west carrying complex scents, earth, flower, even maybe salt. Of the sea. How far? Nine hundred miles at least. I listen. Just breeze catching in the whorl of my left ear. Jasper’s growl has not ceased. I step. Wait. Step again. A kestrel flies over right to left, not high, a stooping, cantered flight. Step again. We cover half the distance and stop. Crouch and then go to one knee. Low as possible without going prone. Prone is best but prone is hard to move fast. Like this, if they fire out of the trailer, I am confident they will shoot high.

Bark of my own voice startles me.

You are dead men.

Wind.

You are dead men. You try to shoot your way out you are definitely dead men.

Jasper’s growl. Sun warm on my left brow and cheek.

You are fish in a barrel. You hear me! You try to fight and this is your last minute on earth. Throw out your weapons come out. COME OUT! Hands where I can see them. If you do, do what I say I will not harm you. My word.

Wind. Sun. Bird. I am thinking, Do I mean that? No harm. I am not even sure. Whatever happens here I plan to live.

Three two one—OKAY YOU DIE!

I sight the iron sights. I know the last cases in the back are stacked to the roof. A third of the trailer emptied. Gives me enough angle not to shoot up the bottles and cans, probably. Two shots high—

No wait. A clank of steel, a scrape. Hand holding a crowbar snakes through the gap.

Steel bar, hand, forearm.

Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!

It drops. Hits the road with a clang.

STEP OUT, hands where I can see them.

They are big hands. Hair on the back dirty. Stuck through the gap they look like a thug trying to do a hand puppet show. Forearms in a blue ski jacket too short for his arms, greasy but new. Door pushed wider. Mallet head, wide blonde dreds, camo bush hat. Tangled beard. A huge man stepping down off the bumper, unwilling to turn his back.

There are two more.

Hoarse shout, the voice rolling through a half ton of gravel. Blinking back the sun.

A plane that runs. Where’d you get a plane that runs? Goddamn.

Shut the fuck up. Tell them. The same. Hands first.

Baseball bat, hands, arms in an oiled Australian duster, another Mongo stepping down. Long hair in a thick braid, eyes jittery: my face, the gun, the dog, the ditch. Wants to bolt. Jasper’s growl a step lower.

You ain’t got no bullets in that thing. World ran out of fucking bullets. Hear that Curtis? Calling back. Edging west. One step two.

Captain Pilot thinks he’s gonna shoot us. Eyes skittered: the gun to the ditch.

Woulda done it already. Yes he would. Likes to talk this one.

Me thinking: So far he’s been doing all the talking.

C’mon out Curtis. This is copasetic. Man’s kneeling at thirty feet, got a gun but no bullets.

Him the closest one now three feet from the partly open door. I sight with both eyes open. Always have. Advantages. I can see the door. I can feel the evening pulling taut like a twisting wire. Dreds calling my coordinates like a mortar man. Heat. The heat of pure anger climbing into my neck, pure and clean like a white gas. My finger on the smooth cold curve of the trigger.

Door swings. Open. A shadow. Edge pulling back like a curtain, light following, lighting, lit the man in motion, swinging the bow across and down. I fire. Twice. Arrow like a hole torn in air, angry thwip of a vacuum high and wide, the man blown back, bow clattering, the front wall of Cokes toppling and spilling. Silence. One Dr. Pepper rolls out hits the road.

The two on the road half crouched and frozen, arms in reflex covering their heads. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.

The can of Dr. Pepper has rolled over, rested against Pony Tail’s boot. A string of blood drips from trailer edge to the pavement where the can fell.

Look what you did. I am yelling. You fucking bonehead scum. Ruined it. Probably twenty cases of pop.

My chest, breath, vibrate with adrenalin and fury.

Killed your buddy too. Nice fucking try.

The men frozen, arms covering, crouched. This the last pathetic gesture before death. Fully expecting now to die. The gun already sighted on Dreds, finger already pressed on the trigger. Breathing hard. I hold there breathe. I will kill them.

Fuckers tried to kill me. For Coke. Well. For a not quite daily Coke. Twenty four in a case, once a month, I bring it back. The week going without—a contrived measure of want to make the next run a treat. For me and. To up my value with Bangley. Face it. Landing at the families’ place with the Sprite like a god.

One is whimpering, the blonde one. Not bothering to beg.

Have to kill them. Leave them and they will empty the truck, hide it all in the ditches, windbreaks, no more monthly treat. These few things. Few enough things to look forward to. Plus they tried to kill me.

Dreds kneels, covers his eyes with his huge hands just like a kid playing peekaboo and crying. Pony Tail squeezing his head with forearms watching me in naked terror, half wincing, quivers, bracing for the shot.

Get up.

Get it over with! Dreds screams.

Get up. I’m not going to kill you.

The words like liquid nitrogen. A moment of complete freeze.

What you’re gonna do is drag your buddy to the ditch and not say a word, not one fucking word while my dog has dinner.

The images colliding, conflicting in their terror shorn minds. Their own lives, the relief not even digested or believed, the horror of the feeding dog. Creates a vortex, a crosscurrent like the two flags at the airport facing each other in contrary winds. They both start to tremble. Hard.

I mean it. Not gonna shoot you. Like you said I would have already. Certainly would.

Hands down watching me. Kill them for a Coke. Not a staple, a luxury. The way before we killed for diamonds, for oil. Not. Not today.

You’re gonna drag your buddy to the ditch and then you’re gonna load twenty cases, fifteen of Coke, five of Sprite, and oh yeah two extra of Dr. Pepper, you’re gonna load them in the back of the plane nice and neat and then I’m gonna climb in and fly away. And you can have the rest. Because I can’t prevent it. Once I take off. Unless I kill you. Which I won’t. Done too much of that. Go on.

The kestrel is over the field. The wind is in the short grass, the sun is almost on the Divide. He will hover and hunt until past dusk. Hover and swoop, hover and swoop. In his little helmet, hovering tireless, treading air. Hunting mice and voles.

I feel sick. Want to throw up on the road but won’t. Sick of defending whatever it is I’m supposed to defend.

They loaded the cans. They dragged their compa to the ditch and I whistled once, turned my back. They carried four cases stacked at once, it went fast. I told them to load in the bow and quiver. Pony Tail swung a long necklace of shriveled leather pieces when he bent over. Both of them smelled like death.

You’re a dead man anyway, Pony Tail grumbled, passing me with a load.

What’d you say?

Nothin. Grunting the cases through the jump door.

What the fuck did you say?

He turned, passed. I stopped him with the barrel of the AR.

What was that about being a dead man?

Shoved the barrel into his ribs hard. His grunt.

The A-rabs. You can kill us but the A-rabs will kill you.

What d’you mean the A-rabs?

We heard it. In Pueblo. Ham radio. The A-rabs. They’re here. Or coming. Kill us all.

He spat. Inches from my boot.

What is that? Shove.

What is what?

That. Your necklace.

He stood straight, swallowed. His eyes gold green in the last full sun. Mocking.

Them are cunts. Dried cunts.

I pulled the trigger. Tore him open. Without thought. Left him sprawled back on the road, guts spilled. The other, the Dreds dropped his load of cases and ran. South. South between two green fields. Beneath a reef of clouds flushed rose an antic figure diminishing to a dot.

Try to do the right thing. Circumstance intervenes. What am I going to do with twenty cases of Coke? Dole them out to Bangley?

V

When I told Bangley about the encounter at the Coke truck he took a can of snuff out of his vest pocket, a new can, and slid his sharp thumbnail around the coping of the lid and pried it off. I could smell it from the workbench, strong salty must like a shovelful of turned peat. He tucked it into his lower jaw, backed up two steps and spit out the hangar door, this one success in the domestic training of the man.

Thanks.

Hell Hig, once I learned this was going to be your kitchen and formal parlor, hell.

He leaned back against the high stool I put there for him near the door. So he could talk and twist and spit. He leaned, half standing, legs straight, arms crossed, never truly sat.

So you gave em a chance to live.

Turned, spat.

You were a Boy Scout.

Watching me. I imagined his mineral eyes when they shift make a dry sound like stirring gravel.

Ready to compromise an important source of caffeine. Not to mention carbonation. Not much carbonation in our lives, Hig. Effervescent we are not.

Couldn’t help but smile at him. He turned, spat.

You were willing to sacrifice your own life too. Twice. No, thrice.

What’s thrice for four? I can’t even keep track.

He loosed a hand from under his crossed arms and winced down his eyes, scrunched his mouth, made to count. He had a three day beard, gray stubble like wire. Gave up.

Let’s see: first mistake not working around to the side where you could shoot wide of the cargo and clear the back. You told me the trailer is two thirds full. Well. Plenty of room. And chances are the combatants are huddled up by the door. Got plenty of ammo. Anyway it would’ve flushed em. The guy with the bow could never have got set up.

Shook his head. Not amused.

Second time: when the guy called back to his buddy behind the door and basically gave your coordinates. Sighted you in, Hig. Gave his shooter angle and distance. Only thing I can figure for a move that bold is they knew they were dead anyway and thought to give this one desperate effort a chance. I mean, they knew they were dead with anyone else in the hemisphere but old Hig. They didn’t count on that. Hig who must be trying to get to heaven.

Spat.

So they call out, Here’s how to shoot this fucker, and you said you had them sighted. Now that would have been the time to pull off a shot or two. At least three. Kill the outside man first, that fast, the one closest to the shoulder where he could turn the corner of the trailer, then the inside man, then the man who was obviously in the back of the trailer about to try to kill you. Bang bang bang.

Spat.

Nope. Not old Hig. Never fails to astound me. You wait til the door swings open and you see the guy with the drawn bow, and you wait til he looses off a shot just in case maybe he was hunting pheasant or something and didn’t have your ass in mind—

Not like that.

He got off a shot or didn’t he?

No use arguing. I leaned back against the workbench, crossed my own arms. I was embarrassed. I can say that.

Okay so you plug him. First right move all morning. But how many cases were ruined? If we had set up to the side like a good tactician, well. But okay. He’s terminated. Threat neutralized. The other two are big pussies and freeze, stead of taking that opportunity to attack or retreat.

Shook his head.

They give the Hig one last golden opportunity. Far as you know. Present themselves as perfect targets. Practically begging you to end it.

Spat. Uncrossed arms, lifted the brim of the sweat stained camo cap and scratched his thinning scalp. Replaced the cap. Grin straight across.

But no. We are going to put ourselves in mortal danger again. Fact we are going to give them the whole trailer of soda pop for their troubles. Which, by the way, Hig, you never told me it was a semi. Which we coulda drove over here anytime. I always figured a warehouse or something. Never even thought to ask.

Twisted, spat. Stayed half turned looking out into the sun across the ramp and the runway.

Turned back.

Well, your call. You found it. Stared at me.

Where were we? Oh yeah. I mean they tried their best to kill us, it’s the best we can do. Give them all the Coke. Consolation prize. I guess. So we’re gonna give it to em, but we’ll give em another chance to kill us first. We’ll get them to load us up with our own tiny consolation prize, and give them proximity while we’re at it, you close enough you can touch em with the gun, them big and fast, perfect opportunity for another attack. One of you, two of them, the situation not controlled, not in the least, loading, unloading, the two at constantly moving spots, constantly changing angles, no restraints, not even tied together. Just like a work party, huh, Hig? Well.

Spat.

Well, might have been the best break you got all day. Because maybe it wasn’t the smartest fucking move, but you are lucky Hig. That’s one goddamn thing I’ll say. Because then they gave you intel. Totally out of the blue. Un fucking prompted. Not even under duress. Not from Hig. We get the beta about the A-rabs.

Now he cursed for real. Under his breath. Now he didn’t turn, he spat on the floor of the hangar.

We get the beta about A-rabs and what do you do? You plug the fucker. NOW you plug him. Finally realize he’s not a Boy Scout like you, and you off him in cold blood. Before they could tell you what the fuck they meant. First intel about a possible real visitor, I mean a visitor with some fucking muscle, a possible goddamn invasion, and you terminate the conversation. Because you discover, oh surprise surprise, that the man is a rapist and a killer like every other survivor walking around this goddamn country. Holy shit. What a goddamn shock. Goddamn.

He was officially steamed. His neck, face were red. That one vein throbbing in his forehead. I felt the heat in my own face. He’s right. That’s what I thought. If I get caught short and killed one day it’s because I’m too soft. Right? Is it worth living the other way? Bangley’s way? Well, I’m an apprentice. Still. An acolyte in the School of Bangley. Just by living here. And not too great at it. Still.

Good job, he said. Happy hunting.

Stood up, unkinked his back, walked off.

Well, that didn’t work out so well. I stopped at the truck to bring Bangley back a treat. Was thinking of him. Hunh. He didn’t even take a Coke not a single one. He wouldn’t take one while we were gone either. I knew the man. He might watch us in our sleep through a night scope but he would never touch a thing inside the hangar. Part of his Code. Anyway the Coke is tainted now. Tainted with incompetence. Here at what cost. Because even though I survived the encounter there is a cost. Statistical if nothing else. For Bangley, we only get so many fuckups before the jaws close, so the fight at the truck puts one more in my column which for better or worse is now his column. That’s what steams him the most. He doesn’t want to lose because he suffered some fool.

I blew the air out of my cheeks. Thought: The mountains will be good. Good to get up there. Breathe some fresh air. Thought: Strange. One other person but the families in a hundred square miles and I still need fresh air.

VI

Now we walk fast in the dark. Me and Jasper, the sled scraping behind. Cold. Good and cold. High stars nettle the black, no moon, crossing under the Milky Way like crossing a deep river. Never will get to the other side. We never do.

The argument with Bangley still rankles. Now just our breaths. Winter fat. Can feel it in my legs. Good to move, move fast.

I pull the sled on a lead with my right hand then switch. Pack is in the sled, rifle too. This time, Thanks Bangley, wearing a subcompact handgun, a plastic Glock weighs almost nothing. A sense of more survivors around, increasing traffic, don’t know why.

Pass the tower on our right. Pass the Spot without a shudder. Thoughts come with the rhythm of the fast steps. Can get used to killing the way you can get used to a goat on the doorstep. Uncle Pete. With his bottle and cigarillos and stories. His living on a yacht with Louise. Their living in a trawler in Alaska. As if somehow being afloat could make a life more compelling. Never liked whiskey, he told me. But I drink it because it has a storied history.

The dead goats multiply. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

We walk. We are half an hour from the first slopes, the first trees. The night is without weight: the dark weightless now in its immanent passing like a deer about to bolt. The morning light a thought that is just occurring. Still and quiet, high stars, no wind.

I think about the Plains tribes, the ones that lived here, that moved through. The Utes the Arapaho the Cheyenne. The Comanches came this far, the Sioux moving and hunting and raiding, the Kiowa, the occasional Apache. When I was a boy I read about the wars and raids between them and wondered why anyone would fight in a country this big. Why the landscape ever became a territory that needed division. Well. Bangley and I are two and sometimes our resource base seems cramped. Not because we don’t have enough food, enough raw materials, enough quilts. It is ideological. Ideology that tears apart nations. Tore, past tense. What nations now? Whoever is left still fighting, scrapping over the leftovers. Maybe banding together like me and Bangley.

Still we are divided, there are cracks in the union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do. What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating your own death.

Me versus him. Follow Bangley’s belief to its end and you get a ringing solitude. Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The cold stars. Like these that are fading, silent as we walk. Believe in the possibility of connectedness and you get something else. A tattered union suit flying on a flagpole. Help asked and given. A smile across a dirt yard, a wave. Now the dawn not so lonely.

We are philosophers, huh, Jasper?

He’s just happy to be moving. Together. He knows where we’re going.

Follow the creek trail upwards. A trail long before we trod it, before the Arapaho, the aforementioned Cheyenne. Deer and elk, bighorn before. The coyotes who hunted them. Cougars. The wolves. The wolves again. Maybe mountain buffalo. Grizzlies occasionally, but mostly they are shy of trails, even game trails.

We move in and out of cottonwoods which make a deeper darkness. Thickets of willows. Up the grassy slopes going pale, into a short rock canyon echoing the spilling water. Then a ponderosa forest, smelled before seen, the scent carried downstream: redolent of vanilla, like a sweetshop. These still living. The sled scrapes over the trammeled roots, exposed rock. Clusters of deer scat long desiccated. I stop, let go the bridle, and hug a big tree, standing in a frieze of sweet sage that is also paler than the night, patches beneath the trees, fragrant also and tangy. Hug the thick rough bark, nose stuck in a resined crack, inhale vanilla strong as any small brown bottle, the tree pungent and sweet as butterscotch. A time when we entered shops that smelled like this. Staffed with high school kids in aprons struggling to scoop the hard ice cream. Seemed cruelly hard back then. Why keep it so cold? Thin girls blowing hair back and approaching each cone like a grudge match. Rum raisin my favorite. Melissa’s pistachio. Or anything with chunks of toffee. But adored a butterscotch sundae. The saliva running in my mouth at the base of the tree. Would kill for it now maybe, not even a figure of speech.

Jasper is patient. He sits, then lies down. In other years he would have ranged ahead and swung out on our flanks, wide, crossing and recrossing the trail, following his nose, picking up game, irrepressible, but now he is happy to rest. Me too. We are in no hurry. There is plenty of stored food at the airport and Bangley can get along without me for a few days, though I hope not too well. Always the fear when we take to the mountains that he will learn to like it like this better. Alone. Though he is smart enough, a good enough tactician to know that long term his odds go down. Plus, he is not a farmer. Jasper has been through this before too many times and is polite enough not to be visibly embarrassed. The hugging a tree, the mutterings. Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. But the tree smells almost sweeter than anything in our world now and it smells like the past.

Apples used to be one of the sweetest things. In North America. Why they were such a treat, why the student currying favor left one on the teacher’s desk. Honey and apples. Molasses. Maple sugar in the north woods. A candy cane at Christmas. Visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Sometimes in the fall on the way back from a patrol we land at an orchard north of Longmont. Acres and acres of apples, varieties I don’t know the names of, most of the trees long dead for lack of water, those living along the still flowing old ditches gone scraggly, bristling with new shoots, reverting to some kind of wildness, the apples stunted and pecked, ravaged by caterpillars, but sweet. Sweeter than before. Whatever is left of whatever they distill is more concentrated in their complete and dangerous freedom.

I inhale deeply, arms stretched round, palms to the rough skin which is warmer somehow than the air, fingers holding the flaked corduroy of the bark with almost the same affinity, the same sense of arrival as they would hold to the swells of a woman.

These small what? Gratifications. And smell is always the smell itself and memory, too, don’t know why.

We climb along the creek as the grainy gray seeps between the tall skeletal trees, the beetle kill ponderosa and lodgepole, the branches without needles, empty handed in death.

I still don’t like it here. The dead forest. Which began to die in great swaths twenty years before. We climb. Step down to the stony bank, the cobbles rounded like eggs. To rest, drink, then climb again. Up into the spruce and fir which are still fragrant and thick with rich darkness yet.

Jasper. C’mon. You’re lagging boy. Not feeling so good?

Run fingers through his thick short fur, up the bumpy ridge of his back, to the loose skin of his neck, and dig. Dig. He loves that. Turns his head away to stretch the skin. Have to bring aspirin next time. We have pounds of aspirin. Bangley says we should take it every day so we don’t get Alzheimer’s.

So we don’t forget why the fuck we’re here! he shouts, as close to glee as he gets.

So you don’t forget. Seems to be more important to you than to me, Hig. To remember shit. Eat some goddamn aspirin.

Bangley perceptive in his own way, a judge of character.

We rest. I sit on a bench rock above a pool and Jasper lies over my feet. Does that when he’s not feeling well. Morning now, the gray suffused with color. Barely. We rest until the sun filters straight through the trees with, I swear, a slight jangle as of loose banjo strings. The creek responding, a burble and lip.

Last fall I saw elk tracks. One set that wended down from the dark spruce, printed themselves in the silt where the creek ran in summer, and were lost again on the smooth dusty stones of the gravel bar. One. A large cow. A ghost. They, all of them, supposed to be gone.

A shriek. Kingfisher. Sometimes a kingfisher keeps us company. Lilts upstream ahead of us. The dipping flight reminds me of telephone wires weighted with ice, the same arc again and again and again. He perches on a dead limb over the creek, screams, flies again. Telling us, it seems, to keep up. For miles. Maybe lonely, shorn of company. Sometimes a dipper bobbing the stones at water’s edge. Maybe once a year we see an osprey.

We like the birds, huh Jasp?

He opens his eyes a sec, doesn’t lift his head off my boot. If I say another thing, I know him well enough: he’ll lift his head to look at me to check if there is some subject that truly concerns him, that maybe I am asking for some consideration and he will hold the gaze on my face until he figures out what it is, or if it is nothing, so I don’t say another word. Let him rest.

We rouse ourselves and climb. The ascent steep here, twisting up into the first bulwark of the hills.

We cross the old state highway at midday. Don’t even touch the broken macadam, walk the big corrugated culvert beneath it, dry now since a flood washed the revenant and sent the creek around. Hollow in there. I think of Jonah and the belly of the whale. Used to shout and sing inside it to hear my compounding echo but don’t anymore.

Jasper didn’t like it.

We cross the highway and continue up the creek. I wait for Jasper to catch up. He looks stiff in the hips, his breath short, panting. First long walk this year, he is probably out of shape like I am, carrying a little winter fat.

Two wolves. Two sets of tracks in and out of the fine mud at the very edge of the water, moving fast. Catches Jasper’s attention. For a minute. Hackles rise but he quickly loses interest. Seems preoccupied with keeping up as if the walking is taking all his attention.

At what might be two, I decide to give us both a break. We are in no hurry. We are still some miles below where I saw the tracks but that means nothing.

Could be anywhere up here, huh, Jasper?

I pull the rod case out of the sled so he knows he is officially off duty.

A shallow run above a short rocky drop, just riffles. A fallen tree sieves the stream. Not quite canyon yet, but the big dark trees still living, the blue spruce and Norway, the doug fir, lean in close, their limbs strung with Spanish moss that tilts and moves in the wind. The moss I wonder how old. It is dry and light to the touch, almost crumbly, but in the trees it moves like sad pennants.

I assemble and string the rod and Jasper lies on a flat rock and watches me. It is the only one sunstruck and he watches me in a patch of warmer light, his own shadow thrown on the cobbles conforming to the round stones like thin water. The stalks of last year’s mullein stand on the bar like lightless candles. In the same sunlight I can see a hatch of tiny midges almost a mist.

I take off boots and pants, slip on the light, sticky soled sneakers I’ve used for years. When the rubber wears out I’ve got more. On the last trip to the parking lot at the box store I took five pairs my size. Not as light, but workable. Three years maybe a set so that should last me until until. I can’t imagine. The pictures don’t cohere in my head. To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting. We’ll keep track of this little rill. Of tying on fresh tippet and the tufty fly, and we’ll blow on it for luck. Of this cast and the next and if we ourselves are lucky it will add up to nightfall.

And dinner. I want to yell that to Jasper but he is sleeping and he knows the word and would get too excited so I won’t yell it until I catch a fish. The first one always goes to him.

I fished for a couple of hours. Cast and cast the caddis again and again. I walked to the top of the bend fishing the shallow water which turned silver as the sun came over the cut of the creek upstream. The current was silver and black twining, like mercury and oil. Then the sun moved over beyond the ridge and put us in cold shadow and the water reflected only the clear sky and I could see the stones again in the shallower runs. Green stones and water blue where it wrinkled and riffed. Somehow Jasper knows even in his sleep when I am walking more than a few steps and he roused himself and followed me and curled in a sand hollow between stones about fifty yards up. I left the fly on and tied a length of tippet to the hook and snugged on a beaded pheasant tail and caught four big carp in a few minutes. I let the bottom fly roll past the pool, the top caddis drifting easily, and it would stop, a small hitch, fleeting, not even a jerk, and then I knew a carp was mouthing the nymph below and I struck and set the hook. They fought without the vigor of a trout but with a sullen reluctance like a mule digging in its heels. They didn’t charge upstream or wrap themselves in the branches of an old deadfall, they simply refused to budge which wasn’t fun, but then there wasn’t much fun anymore and I came to admire their stoicism. A stolid refusal to be yet consumed by the universe.

Like us.

So when I picked the fat torso up in two hands and thwacked the head on a rock I said Thanks bud knowing just what it feels like not to be ready.

I whistled. Jasper may be near deaf but something in the whistle tickles something in his head deeper than hearing and he uncurled and stood a little shakily and shook himself off and came trotting happily upstream and I gave him the first fish which could have weighed seven pounds. I filleted it, gave him the two slabs of gray meat, the head and the tail, and threw the bones back in the creek. The next one I caught I split and cleaned and the stomach was full of midges and a few big crawdads.

Already late. I’d been wading all afternoon and the current was cold where it pushed up against my knees and thighs but my feet were long numb with that kind of dead warmth. Starting to get chilled. I caught a fifth fish, smaller, cleaned it and pushed the butt end of a hooked stick through its gills and slid it down to the others on the stringer. Lay it in the sled. Rubbed my naked legs to get the blood going. The sun was gone, the creek now luminous in early dusk. I felt what? Happy. We were thinking of nothing but the creek, but dinner, but making a camp just upstream on a sandy bar I liked to visit. I slipped my pants back on, sat on a rock and put on my boots. Jasper was revived after the fish, watching me with his mouth open, smiling because he knew we weren’t going far and there would be another fish or two, this time cooked and salted.

Okay, let’s go.

We walked around a thicket of willow and alder not yet leafed out and found the path through a stand of green and living and venerable fir trees, the bark, the almost pumpkin orange they get when very old, and we found our fire pit in the sand a few rocky yards from the water and the smooth sleeping place beneath one of the big old trees.

I pulled some fallen limbs out of the denser woods that backed the camp and broke them up and lay them over a pillow of dried Spanish moss and quickly made a fire. So we could warm up. The wood was dry and full of resin and popped and cracked which was a domestic song above the syllabic murmur of the creek and the wind in the high boughs. Darkness was already in the forest, it filled the little canyon like a slow tide, and the flames deepened it but the sky was still bright with the thinnest blue and I could see two stars.

Jasper was happy too. He curled up close to the fire upwind and out of the smoke and lay his head on his paws and watched me cook our fish on a light long handled mountain frying pan which must have been made a hundred years ago. The handle was wrapped in a sheath of shiny tin to disperse heat and stamped with Simpson and Sons Ranchware. A hundred years ago when the ranchers ran their herds up in the mountains in summer on Forest Service leases and camped for days, rounding them up in the fall like a cowboy song. Those hardbitten riders squatting at just such a fire. What they could never have imagined. What we can’t, cooking our fish here in the pan heavy with carp and spitting salvaged olive oil. Spit and sizzle, pop of branches, the flutter of flames in a shifting wind, the same wind downstream carrying cold from the higher slopes and rushing in the limbs of the trees like the ghost of long ago surf.

Jasper is sitting up like a Sphinx now watching me closely. His moment. I salt the biggest fish, lay it on a flat stone and pull out the skeleton from the tail up, unzipping the bones.

Provecho.

He is up, tail wagging, first time today, and gobbles his dinner with quiet grunts.

I tie a taut line from the big tree standing sentinel on our camp back to a young alder and string up the tarp just to keep the dew off.

I cook a fish for me and kneel by the water on the rocks and drink and splash my face. In the smooth dark between stones with barely a current a waterskater slides away and a handful of stars shimmer.

I spread out our bed under the tree and lie down. Get up again, untie two corners of the tarp and slide it back to the tree. We’ll get dewed on a little but I don’t care, we can dry everything out by the fire in the morning. Tonight I want to see the sky. Lie down again and Jasper walks stiff to me almost a hobble, the hike today long, and licks my face all over until I am laughing and turn away. Then he curls against my side with his customary collapse and huff. We listen to wind high, water low. I tuck my arms under my head and watch the Dipper brighten. I feel clean. Clean and good.

In the morning I wake stiff. The sleeping bag and Jasper are covered in frost. So is my wool hat. Maybe not the best idea to sleep uncovered. It’s okay, we’ll start a fire in a minute.

You must be cold, boy. C’mere. I pull at his Whoville quilt to fold it over him. He is heavy, unmoving. Getting stiffer, the morning’s harder.

C’mon, bud, this’ll be better. Til I start a fire. C’mon.

He ignores me. I tug at the quilt and lay it over him brush his ear.

My hand stops. His ear is frozen. I run my hand around to his muzzle, rub his eyes.

Jasper, you alright? Rub and rub. Rub and tug his ruff.

Hey, hey.

Pull on the scruff of his neck. Hey, wake up.

I push up to sitting and roll over, chest on his back, and cover him.

Hey, it’s okay. Sleep for a while.

Sleep.

I pull him, stiff and curled, closer to me and lay the quilt over him and lie back. I breathe. I should have noticed. What a hard time he was having on the walk. The tears that weren’t there yesterday flood. Break the dam and flood.

Now what am I going to do? Start a fire in a few minutes.

Jasper. Little brother. My heart.

I’ll start a fire. Put sticks over moss and start. I’ll cook the last two fish. I’ll eat one. I’ll.

For the day I don’t move. I keep adding wood to the fire. I leave him in his quilt wrapped and cozy just his nose sticking out. It is the sight of him there I don’t want to leave.

He is the only one now. The only sight. Which. Tomorrow I’ll. I don’t know.