JUSTIN

Clouds begin to pile up above them. They move and meet each other, closing the blue gulfs between them, like hands slowly weaving a spell of grayness over the day. The sun filters through the thinner clouds and shapeless sections of light roam across the canyon floor and walls.

Graham coughs raggedly into his fist. “What are we going to do?”

It isn’t a question Justin can answer, so he concentrates instead on the woods around him, where everything seems suspect. Every branch an outstretched claw. Every moving shadow like a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment. He wishes his way out of the canyon and in doing so looks to the sky, his eyes lingering a second too long on the sun, so that when he looks away he sees a white dot, like the last of a television image when you hit the power button, bothered by a program you would rather not watch.

They return to find their camp not as they left it. The cooler is open, its contents scattered across the camp. The lawn chairs are tipped over. The tent has collapsed and Justin’s sleeping bag sticks halfway from its opening like a stuck-out tongue.

“What the hell,” he says as adrenaline-soaked panic hums in the background of his brain. “I mean, what the hell, Dad?” Justin knows this sounds like a line from a bad book, and he wants a line from a good book, but there is nothing else to say. “Dad?”

His father picks up the sleeping bag and smells it, clearly lost in thought. “Mmm.”

“Mmm what?”

“Mmm the bear didn’t do this.”

Justin waits for him to say something more and soon he does, when walking about the campsite, kicking through its remains. “Bears don’t unscrew a jar of peanut butter. They don’t unpeel a stick of jerky. Bears don’t drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and neither do I.” He peers around the cooler and knocks closed its lid. “And bears don’t steal whiskey.”

The thought of Seth—who else could it be but him?—in their camp, sucking on a beer, rummaging roughly through their things, seemed trivial considering what had already happened. He felt only distractedly angry. If Seth were to walk out of the woods now, Justin could kill him without a second thought, throw his body in the river, and turn before the white water sucked it away. He knows this is completely outside his way of thinking, but that’s where the day has brought him. He wants to punch holes in trees, throw boulders around.

“Let’s go now,” Justin says. “Can we just go? Now?”

His father goes to the fire pit and squats next to it and begins to arrange fresh kindling. “Not without Boo, we won’t.”

“We’ll go to John Day and—”

“Not without Boo, we won’t!” This is said at a scream. A freakish look comes into his eyes that Justin doesn’t want to argue with, so he lifts his hands and lets them fall, as he seeks an explanation and gives up on one all in the same motion. “We’ll eat something,” his father says, his voice calm now, “and then we’re going to find him, like you said. Like you said we were going to. We’re going to track him. And if we run into anything else along the way, we’ll kill it.”

Soon flames crackle and venison steaks sizzle in butter and Justin’s brain feels as if the clouds have dropped down and seized it.

After they eat, Justin looks at his father, but his father is looking at the woods. His hope that his father will come to his senses fades when his father stands and moves away from the camp and arranges his rifle so that it runs behind his neck and parallel to his shoulders. His posture is that of a scarecrow stapled up in a dead cornfield. The rifle carries the weight of his arms or he carries the weight of it.

Justin fishes a Pepsi out of the river cairn and hands it to Graham. He accepts it without a word and drinks it hesitantly, and then in a gulping way, as if he didn’t realize how thirsty he was. Justin pours the dregs of the coffee into a tin mug and drinks from it. It is horribly bitter but he swallows it down like medicine meant to purge something from his body.

Birds chirp. The river makes a hissing sound. Patches of bush shudder in the breeze. The shadows of clouds move across the canyon floor. A june bug clacks its wings and he follows it with his eyes as it flies off a short distance and lands on a spray-painted patch of grass and tastes of it. The spray paint sharply turns like the elbow of the arm of a big body outlined by chalk.

He tries to recall everything he knows about bears and a television show comes hazily to mind, something he watched on the Discovery Channel. Over footage of grizzlies pawing salmon from rivers—and black bears wrestling in meadows—a throaty British voice explained that all bears are originally descended from a creature the size of a small dog. That bear shoulder blades were used as sickles for reaping grass. That polar bears weigh some two hundred pounds less than they did fifteen years ago, due to diminishing feeding grounds. These are facts. Facts are manageable. Facts are things you can wrap your mind around and file away on your mental bookshelf and share with classrooms full of students. Facts calm him.

His father must hear Justin approach, but he does not turn to greet him. “Come on,” Justin tells his back. “We’ll go get the police, the Forest Service, whomever. And then we’ll come back here. We’ll find Boo then.”

His father says nothing. He has fallen into a stubborn silence no word of Justin’s can break. So Justin lays a hand on his shoulder, gives him a shake. His father swings around and stiff-arms Justin’s chest with one hand and slashes at him with the other, his knuckles glancing off Justin’s cheek. Justin stumbles back a few steps and his father tries to dodge his way past him. Without realizing it, Justin has made his hand into a fist, and now he swings it, stopping his father with a blow to the face that sends them both staggering back a few steps. Hot nails of pain feel driven between his knuckles and along his wrist. He experiences something similar inside his chest where the sensation of victory and shame mingle in a stabbing way. The slack look on his father’s face indicates he feels equally stunned; he brings his hand to his mouth, where blood already runs.

Then his father rears back and lunges forward, his hands shooting out to seize Justin by the head. His father hurls him to the ground and the breath escapes his lungs in a gasp. Immediately his father falls on top of him and strikes him with a straight right followed by a series of short punches to the cheek. Justin feels a white hot pain in his ear. Sparks dance along the edges of his eyes. Justin grabs wildly at his father’s leg and drags him down and they lie crumpled together, giving each other a rough sequence of blows to the neck, the stomach, the face. Justin’s muscles knot against the force of his father’s fists. When his father elbows him in the nose, a sudden pain boils in and around his eyes that brings tears. Justin knees him in the groin and his father groans and strikes Justin’s forehead with his open palm, knocking him back into the ground with such force Justin literally feels his brain batter his skull and his vision goes black for a moment and then returns to the Technicolor sharpness brought on by the adrenaline humming through him.

Graham abandons his place by the fire and runs to them. Their only noise is their wheezing breath, the occasional muffled grunt, the slap of fists against flesh. In this way they fight as brothers would, quietly, so their mother couldn’t hear.

When Justin was a child, his father would wrestle with him, sometimes laying a knee on the side of Justin’s head or fishhooking his mouth with a finger until he begged, “Uncle.” But there isn’t any sort of satisfying close to this fight. Graham says, “Stop it,” softly at first—and then louder, “Stop hitting him! You’re hurting him.” Justin isn’t sure who Graham is referring to, but his voice is strong enough to break them apart. In this way nobody wins or loses. They just stop—satisfied somehow—climbing away from each other, panting, bleeding.

Amidst the pain, there is a feeling of vacancy. As if a great room inside Justin, once cluttered with hard-angled furniture, has suddenly been emptied—with relief. They now look at each other with a resentful kind of understanding—and then at Graham, who stands with his arms cradled against himself, his elbows in his hands. “Just stop it,” he says.

Justin presses his thumb to one nostril and blows and a thick strand of blood comes from it and clings to his thigh. He tries to wipe it away but it only smears into the denim like a gash of its own. “So?” Justin says. “Have we come to some sort of decision here?”

“You tell me.” His father leans over to spit and then uses his forearm to wipe his mouth.

A thin stream of blood trickles from Justin’s nose to his mouth and he swallows the metallic taste of it.

“You already know the answer.”

They move in the direction Boo has gone, toward an unknown danger. Justin tries to conjure in his head a vision of Karen, her hands on her hips, her lips pursed in vicious disapproval—but the image of her trembles at the edges before dissolving, as if part of his brain has come unplugged, the same part that once cared about the sale at Target and vacuuming under the furniture.

They wade the South Fork with their rifles held above their heads and Graham clinging to Justin’s back. In the deepest part of the river, where it is coldest, the water comes up to Justin’s belly and threatens to pull his son away. Justin tells him to hold on tight. His arms are around Justin’s neck, constricting him like a tight-fitting backpack. Every step is a sliding uncertainty. Beneath the water, his boots stumble along slowly and blindly. The rocks are slick and uneven and occasionally seem to clamp down on his boots like teeth that will only let go when Justin heaves his boot from their grip and then tries to find another foothold even as the current yanks his foot riverward. The water rushes against his body, forming a white frothing collar around his waist, its force tremendous, so that he has to angle his body against it and make a diagonal path toward the shore. All it will take is one clumsy step on one algae-ridden rock and they will be lost to the river, carried downstream in an icy torrent.

His father’s fists have left a headache pounding against his skull and he tries to ignore it now. He tries to concentrate every fiber of his mind on finding a proper foothold and slogging forward. His father arrives on the far bank several minutes before Justin and spends those minutes glancing back and forth between Justin and the woods, his face dense and compacted. He yells his encouragement when they near the shore, or so Justin guesses, since he sees his mouth move and his arm wave, though his words are lost to Justin, muted by the roar of the rapids and Graham panting nervously in his ear.

Once across—once he pulls his foot from the water and sets it on the muddy bank—he tries immediately to shrug Graham off, though at first he doesn’t seem to want to let go, and they both very nearly keel over. “Get off,” Justin tells him, not unkindly—and at last the boy releases him. Justin breathes heavily and moves a few staggering paces from the mud to a stony embankment and more falls than sits down.

Despite the chill of the water, he feels hot all over. His lungs burn. Two long fingers of fire rise up his back, reminding Justin of Graham’s unwieldy weight. His neck feels so rigid he wonders if he will ever turn it again. His quads and calves in particular feel warm and wooden, like lumber left in the sun. He massages them with his hands, hoping he won’t cramp up. A shadow falls over him and he looks up to see Graham observing him with a dismal expression, his eyes wide and moist. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s okay,” Justin says. The spray from the river has dampened his hair and he runs his fingers through it and regards his father. A tree long ago fell from the forest and now its rotting husk lies across the embankment. His father has one foot on it and one foot on the ground, as though he is already stepping into the woods, pausing midstride only to see if they will follow. “Well?” he says.

“Just give me a minute.”

He checks his watch and says, “One minute.”

Justin stares at the river, its gray water foaming over white, and remembers its interminable power as he struggled pitifully against where it wanted him to go. Over the noise of it, he can hear little, except for the distant tock of a woodpecker, like a clock that indicates a perilous appointment drawing near.

He settles his breathing and by the time he does, his father has started into the forest without a word. Justin rises to follow him, leaning at first on his son as he shakes his legs and makes a hula-hoop motion with his hips, ironing the cricks from his muscles. His boots squish and his pants cling to him uncomfortably and when he enters the woods the light falls away as if in a sudden dusk. There are prints everywhere—as if exactly here, all the animals of the forest have decided to scribble in the dirt the graffiti of their passing—mostly the forked depressions of hooves, mingled with the long, thin, and vaguely human imprints left by raccoons and possums, all of them blending into each other. They bend their heads low to the ground and push their way through the thick underbrush and try to find among this ghostly procession of creatures the pattern of a dog’s paw. “Here,” Graham yells and waves them over and he points out a print like a scaly pear with thorns rising from it. It is located in a sandy pocket surrounded by a barren stretch of lava rock, so it takes them several minutes more to find another track, and then another, a series of them eventually coming together to reveal the dog’s flight. The prints wander through the woods, around stumps and over logs and through rabbitbrush, but with a definite northern direction. Eventually the brush opens up into a thin game trail and the tracks continue along it, less obvious now against the hard-packed dirt.

His father takes the front of the line and Justin takes the back, with Graham guarded between them. They hunch along wordlessly, studying the ground and forest. Birds sail around them, squawking and inspecting them, but otherwise they see no living thing as they plod along, a slow-moving progression of tired joints and fearful hearts, following Boo’s prints as best they can.

Justin’s eyes sweep back and forth across the trail, as you would do when driving a narrow passage of road, worried something might leap out and threaten your course. He feels confined, condemned. He tries to think of other words that begin with con.

Condone. Concede.

What did that prefix mean anyway? With. It meant with. Or together. Or something like that. He really ought to know these things, as a teacher. There was always some smart-ass kid calling him out, waiting for him to trip up, and he needed to be ready for them.

Contradictory.

Consequence.

He hears a sudden rumble and flinches before glancing up. There, in a patch of blue sky, he sees a jet with a long white contrail following it. He imagines himself inside the jet, among all the passengers, reading their magazines and eating from their single-serving pretzel bags, all of them heading someplace civilized, safe, contained by fences and lit with bright lights.

He closes his eyes for a second and it almost seems possible. He is almost there. Then he opens them and sees the woods all around him and feels his life spiraling down as if into a cave.

They climb a steep grade and enter a wooded ravine with a stream rushing through it. It is a tight corridor—filled with shadows and jutting knobs of basalt and stunted juniper trees that somehow grow through the stone, their roots groping for leverage—and when they leave this place and enter a wider gulch, it is with the relief of a deep breath and a loosened belt.

They find a pile of shit, like a muddy wig jeweled with berries, resting nearby. The ground as Justin steps around it feels unstable as though it might break open up to his knee. So he walks tenderly, as you would when bringing your foot down on the edge of a frozen lake, depressing your weight gently, watching the cracks appear around it like sudden black creeks. Beneath the ice, the paralyzing grip of fear awaits. When he thinks of the first body and its blackened bones—when he thinks of the circle tamped around their tent like a bull’s-eye—when he thinks about the safety of his son—the cracks widen.

His father walks ahead of Justin and stops, his head lowered, his eyes searching the ground. “Do you see it?” He squats as he asks them this. Justin and Graham huddle beside him and follow his arm when he holds it out and indicates the path. “He’s running along at a good clip and then . . .”

He does not need to say anything more. The soil tells the story, still marshy here from the storm the night before, as easy to read as print on the page. The bear. Justin sees where the pads touch each other and the toes fall close together and nearly in a straight line. Far in front of the toes, impressions from the claws gouge the ground so that they look like something separate from the main print, its size equivalent to a catcher’s mitt.

His father lays his hand over it and for the first time in his life Justin thinks of him as small. A wince passes over his father’s face and a flush follows it. He draws his hand away from the print and brings it to his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose as if to relieve himself from a hidden pain.

“No grizzlies in Oregon,” he says under his breath.

“Keep saying that, maybe it will come true.” Justin feels his heart expanding and the blood quickening through it. He imagines he hears the ghost of a yelp still lingering in the air. He looks up the trail and tries to envision the great shape of the bear, shambling through this thin corridor of trees, with Boo trapped between its jaws, the dog flapping like a salmon pulled from the river.

At a crashing in the trees very close to them, Justin and his father both raise their rifles. Justin’s panicked thoughts flutter inside his skull like owls trapped in an attic. But nothing comes out of the dimness except a mule deer, a six-pointer, a big beautiful animal that rips through the pines and over the fallen timber and into the open trail, where it halts, watching them, swishing its tail, not ten feet away—so close Justin can smell its musk. Its rack is a big and tangled basket.

Justin has not yet processed his relief. The air is remarkably still as he stares down the length of his rifle. It feels cold in his hand. He considers firing—as much for the trophy as for the release, the explosion—but doesn’t. He doesn’t have it in his heart—and apparently neither does his father, who sighs—as if to say, Why bother?—and lets his rifle fall and the movement sends the deer bounding up the trail and around the corner.

His father moves forward twenty paces and then freezes. He crouches and sets down his rifle and lifts something from the ground. There follows a tinkling noise, such as would come from a tiny bell. He holds in his hand a nylon collar. Boo’s. Torn in half, into a long red strip. The tinkling comes from its tags, knocked together by the wind. His father holds it out, not for Justin to take, but for him to look at. For a long time they stare at it. It is torn in places and its color, naturally red, is made redder by the blood that rubs off on his hand when he holds it.

After a long purposeful silence, he casts his eyes on Justin without looking at him, looking through him. His eyes are red and watering, from smoke or from sadness. Justin notices a small patch of white on his beard that looks like a tiny egg nested in it. “My dog.” His voice is thick and watery. He twists and squeezes the collar, as if to wring the blood from it. His face fills with lines of pain and a vein worms across his forehead. A minute passes before he picks up his rifle, his finger curls around the trigger, his voice wild and fast when he says, “I’m going to . . .”

But he doesn’t know what he is going to do.

He looks at Justin through a fog of shock and anger and fear and confusion, finally saying, “What now, Justin? What are we going to do now?” He speaks slowly, each syllable occupying its own time and space.

Up to this point, Justin felt small and vulnerable on this dark game trail, a piece of meat among the shadowy trees. Now the sensation worsens. His father, who always knows what to do, doesn’t know what to do. He needs his son to think for him, and Justin admits to feeling something like paralysis then, as his mind determines the miles they have to travel before the sun sinks from the sky.

“You don’t want to say it,” his father says, “but you’re thinking it.”

A tense silence follows his words, broken by a branch cracking somewhere in the distance. Both of them flinch.

When he finally speaks again it sounds like a reply. “What you’re thinking is we’re going to die.” He smiles without humor. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” He laughs harshly at this.

Justin first glances at Graham—who stands a few feet away, his eyes scrunched closed, seemingly deaf to their conversation—and then to the collar. In its blood-soaked fibers he thinks he can see the oily sheen of unreality, shimmering in the same way the mirror shimmers just before Alice steps through the looking glass. Nothing seems possible and everything seems possible. Life seems possible. Death, too.

Justin says, “Maybe you’re the one who—”

“You’re wrong for thinking that!” He laughs like someone who never shows emotion, explosively, wretchedly, so Justin knows it comes from somewhere deep inside. His laughter goes on and on until it finishes with a sob.

Justin has seen him at funerals—has seen him break a leg after falling from a tree stand—but this is the first time Justin has seen him cry. Before he knows what he is doing, he puts an arm around his father’s shoulder and draws him close—and his father is utterly overcome.

Justin thumps him on the back. It is a strange sensation, comforting his father, just as it is strange to look back upon yesterday—it lies so distant, so irrevocable. “I’ll be glad when we get out of this canyon,” Justin says.

His father lets go of his grasp and wipes at his eyes with the insides of his wrists. “Tell me about it.” He does not gift Justin with a smile, but his voice has some forced measure of humor in it.

Graham still has his eyes shut. He is chewing at his thumbnail, pulling at slivers of it hungrily. Justin gives him a squeeze on the shoulder. The boy’s eyes snap open to reveal his curiosity and fear.

“We’re not going to die?” Graham says. He touches his fingers to his belly, just below his breastbone, something he always seems to do before he cries.

“We’re not,” his grandfather says, though his expression carries darkness.

“All right,” Justin says. “Let’s go.”

His father remains footed in his shadow. “We’re not going to die because we’re going to kill that bear. We’re going to find it and we’re going to kill it good and dead.” He then takes a deep, quivering breath that helps steel him against whatever he will face. “Come on, Graham.” He continues up the trail and Justin stops him by beginning a series of broken sentences—but each thought loses its grip in the empty air. He becomes very aware of his father staring at him.

“Are you done?” his father says, and when Justin doesn’t say anything, he resumes tracking, now following the bear and not the dog. “Come on, Graham,” he calls over his shoulder. “It won’t be much longer. We’ll kill it and we’ll cut off its cock and cut out its heart and we’ll be back in camp by nightfall.” He stops and again says, “Come on, boy.” Not even looking at Justin but holding out his hand to Graham. His hand, roughed over with calluses from gripping hammers and levels and saws, from shaping the world. “Come on.”

Justin knows that this moment—when his son will or will not respond to that hand’s charge—means something. His family hangs in the balance. The family he came from and the family he has constructed. Justin readies to make a grab for the boy, but there isn’t any need: Graham is stepping back, retreating, ducking behind Justin.

Justin’s father drops his hand and balls it into a fist. “Just look at the two of you.” His voice has hate in it then, but also the hardest kind of love. “Go then.”

Nothing else occurs to Justin to say. Not good-bye or good luck or be safe. He is entirely out of conversation. He can only watch as his father departs them, growing smaller as he moves away, until they can’t see him anymore.

“What else did that book of yours say?”

In a whisper, Graham says, “Book?” He seems not to know who Justin is, let alone what he is talking about. His chin is quivering and he is looking over his shoulder as if the trail will at any minute pull out from under him and roll up into a secret closet and leave them stranded there in the middle of the forest.

Justin says, “Let’s head back to camp, okay?”

Graham nods and they return the way they came. They hurry through the trees, a place where shadow is interrupted by columns of light, as it is at the bottom of the ocean. With every step, they seem to move a pace faster—the forest blurring by—even as Justin’s muscles ache and his legs feel as though heavy weights hang from them. They duck their heads to avoid tree limbs, like thick arms swatting at them. They sweat and their sweat streams in muddy paths down their cheeks. Even the birds seem hushed as the two of them hurry along and speak only in whispers and peer now and again over their shoulders.

Justin’s mental switchboard plugs in to its many fearful circuits. He fears for his son and his father. He fears for himself, for his lack of judgment in putting Graham in harm’s way. The short-breathed alarm he feels grows with the steadily slanting light. He feels played with. He feels that soon, any moment now, when they are on the very verge of safety, some thing will rise from the forest and strike them down.

The river surprises him. One moment he is surrounded by woods, the next he teeters on the bank of the South Fork’s fast-moving waters. He had not heard it, his mind noisy with so many fears and doubts, all of them black-clawed and draped in fur. He puts one boot in the water and then withdraws it, as if testing a bath whose water proves too hot. “I don’t know if I can make it across again.”

“You don’t have to carry me,” Graham says, his voice and his face cast in doubt. “I can do it on my own.”

“No, you can’t. The river’s too strong. We’ll have to go upstream until we find a calm stretch.”

“Okay.”

“It might be another mile.”

“Okay.”

Another mile when the other side of the river beckons only twenty yards away. Justin heaves a sigh and begins to walk upriver, his boots crunching over pebbles.

“I remember something,” Graham says.

“What’s that?”

“From the book.”

“Okay.”

“For their dens, they dig a tunnel beneath a tree or beneath a rock face. The tunnel leads to a chamber where they sleep.” Up to this point, he sounds unthinking and emotionless, almost academic—but when he says, “I’m scared,” he becomes twelve again and picks up a spear-sized stick and examines it, as if unsure whether he ought to consider it a toy—something to clack against tree trunks—or a weapon.