As Keefe released the brook trout back into the pool and retrieved his loose line, a vague sound began to rumble up in Margie’s throat. “Uh, much as I’d like to say otherwise right now, you’re not overthinking it, honey.”
Keefe emerged from the stream, revealing that, in addition to the brown fedora, he also wore a pair of old deck shoes. He started across the clearing toward the bungalow, and his pace remained steady when he saw Sandy and Margie there.
“Well, this actually is nothing, believe it or not,” Sandy said to Margie, recalling her own awkward embarrassment the first time she encountered this particular eccentricity of Keefe’s. “Does it from time to time. Has since I’ve known him. Says it’s good for the soul to fish naked every now and then.”
Keefe’s stride continued evenly as he approached the two women. He raised his thumb and forefinger to the brim of his hat and tipped it slightly toward them.
“Ladies.” His voice was as steady as his gait as he continued past them, up the steps, and opened the front door. As he did so, he looked down at Stink, whose bent tail had begun to wag vigorously when he noticed Keefe’s approach.
“Come on, old fella,” Keefe said to the dog as they both passed through the doorway. “Let’s see if we can stir up a pot of coffee and make ourselves decent. It appears we have company.”
Sandy sighed, shrugged, and knelt to her gear on the ground while Margie tried hopelessly to stifle a giggle behind her hand.
“And this is normal, you say?” Margie asked.
“Sort of,” Sandy answered.
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry, but if this is normal, well, what you were talking about before is going to be even trickier than I thought.”
Sandy began to assemble her fly rod.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Ain’t Been No Mountain Lions in This Part of the Country for a Hundred Years
From over the crest of the ridge, wind sheared off down the slopes through the trees, pushing before it a wave of scent and sound, lush markers of survival in a season of plenty. Swept through the air over the mountain, the promise of a means to live.
The fawn had been taken easily enough. It and the doe had been grazing new shoots of foliage breaking from the duff under the forest canopy. Young enough to be erratic in its flight, small enough to be brought down without too much effort, large enough to carry sufficient meat, the fawn was the obvious prey. There was no moment lost to choice. Through the thicker brush around the small clearing, her crouch was low and slow, upwind, down across the slope. Front legs stretched out and pulled her forward, the longer hind legs pushed with taut, ready muscle. The thick tail twitched, whipped with anticipation. Around the teeth, the lobes of whiskered jowl and snout quivered. Just outside the hem of the clearing, her hind feet found the purchase of an outcropping of stone. She set and leapt, bursting from the brush in an impossibly high arc. The doe fluted once and bolted. Frozen for a second, the fawn darted frantically away, then spun with unfocused terror in the opposite direction, into the descending embrace of claws. The fawn collapsed under the long, tawny body, held down by the push of paws. She found the ridge of the neck, and her jaw drove the teeth deep and through the spine. Jaw and teeth locked in place, she pinned the hapless fawn. It did not struggle long.
She dragged the dead fawn out of the clearing, through the deeper brush, and up the slope a short way until she came to a humped outcropping. The fawn’s head flopped on the end of the limp neck when she dropped the body. To the side of the ledge of stone, she scratched out her cache and tugged the carcass into the impression. With her front paws she clawed into the forest floor and buried her prey under a covering of leaves and loam. She was hungry, but she would eat later, ripping into the chest under the rib cage, starting with the heart and lungs.
But now she would rest. Though the fawn was small and the kill quick, she was tired. First, replenish the spent breath. Eat after. From this ledge she could see the approach of any threat to the meal that waited. Across the rock ledge, she stretched the length of her body. The hind legs and long tail draped casually over the lip of stone. She licked one front paw and ran it over her snout, cleaning herself of the drying blood.
A Country unto Himself
The dealer had been late for their appointment at the rest area on I-81 near Pepper’s Fork, so he hadn’t made it back until well after dark. If a man said he’d do something, then he should just do it. It should be that simple. And if a man said he’d meet you at 5:00 p.m., then he should damn well be there at 5:00 p.m. Time was the simplest of things to manage. Anger, on the other hand, though it was largely a pointless indulgence, could nonetheless be quite real and a more formidable animal to restrain. However, he’d managed that, too, as he did all things. In a perfect world, he would have mashed the dealer’s throat beneath his boot and gutted him of the same sort of organs he traded in. But he’d held himself in check, waiting, the scowl sitting like a stone on his face. For now, he would still have to do business with people like that from time to time.
The fire he started in the pit when he returned had begun to flare up nicely by the time he emerged from the trailer. Twists of gray smoke from the new fire wound up through the smoke hole in the camouflaged tarpaulin stretched above the fire pit. After setting the fire, he’d gone into the trailer, stripped off his shirt, and washed in the water basin in the tiny kitchenette. Now, bare to the waist, he stepped under the tarpaulin and stood by the fire, drying off with a dingy, threadbare white towel while the fire warmed his torso in the cooling night. The trailer wasn’t much—little more than a camper trailer, with a cramped sleeping cubicle and what amounted to the only other room, containing a table with two cushioned benches, and a kitchenette that was no more than a counter with the water basin, a small refrigerator, and a propane cooktop. No, not much of a trailer, but more than enough for a self-reliant man who was doctrine, society, law unto himself.
He ran his fingertips over his closely cropped hair, through his coarse, untrimmed beard, tossed the towel over his head and pulled on each end of it, pressing his neck against the sling the towel made around the back of his neck. The cords of his chest and arm muscles grew taut with the tension, and the firelight revealed the tattoos, one on the pale underside of each forearm. Simple in form and style, each tattoo was a string of precisely inked, dark blue block letters. On the left forearm, Every True Man is a Cause, a Country, and an Age; on the right forearm, Power is, in Nature, the Essential Measure of Right.
A single, throaty bark emanated from the bed of the pickup parked by the trailer behind him. He walked to the truck, reached over the side panel, and released the dog from its kennel. A mongrel redbone leapt from the truck bed and ran to the edge of the firelight, where she squatted in the brush. After relieving herself, she trotted past the fire to a water bucket sitting by the trailer, into which she sunk her snout and slurped noisily.
He looked down at the dog, then stepped up into the trailer.
When he came back out of the trailer, he wore dark-rimmed glasses and a heavy flannel shirt and carried a large chunk of marrowbone thickly coated with shreds of raw meat. The dog sat quickly before him, and he gave her the bone.
The dog took the offered meal gently in her jaws and crawled under the trailer to eat. He walked to the edge of the fire pit and knelt on one knee, added a length of wood carefully to the blaze, and stared into the fire.
There had been no choice other than to shoot the man he’d collected from