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 the roadside north of Sherwood. To remain off their maps, here in his sovereign land, no careless track could be left behind. The man was badly injured but still conscious. He may have seen enough to recall something later. There was nothing admirable in killing such a puny, pitiful man. It was merely necessary. He suffered no doubt, lost no sleep over it.
He buried the body in the floor of the storage cellar he’d dug into the hillside behind the trailer, where he kept his other meat—bear mostly, some venison. In the deep cool of the cellar, the dead man’s carcass would be secure, forgotten, protected from scavengers inclined to dig up the remains. There was nothing more to be considered. It was done. A thing of the past.
The payoff for the bear bladders and paws was good, as usual, so the business with the man’s body was a minor disruption with no damaging effects. Inevitably, there would be occasional problems to solve in this life outside restraint. He would continue to learn. Nothing he couldn’t manage.
He stepped to the seam at the farthest edge of firelight. From behind him, he could hear the dog gnawing at the bone under the trailer. He lifted his nose and breathed in the immensity of his solitude within the dark surround of the woods. Scenting the night, he drew in through his nose a series of staccato breaths. One. Two. Three, four, five. Yes, there would be the occasional adjustment to be made, irregularity to be dealt with, problem to solve. This grand solitude would not be among those problems.
5
RARELY, IF EVER, DID KEEFE FISH ANYWHERE AWAY FROM the headwaters of the upper Ripshin. For him, the quest for the fish was never a venture whose success could be calculated in pounds and inches, in the count of fish taken, in numbers of any kind. Keefe sought intimate contact with some sort of elemental condition he’d located in the headwaters, in the cascading streams and deep, glassy pools cradled in the stones boiled up out of and tumbling down the hillside. A fly rod, to him, was the language by which he could carry on a dialogue with that condition, and the native brook trout that had haunted these waters for centuries were his interlocutors. Over the past few years, Sandy had absorbed the nature of Keefe’s relationship to the headwaters and made it her own as well. Not only had she embraced this bond, but she now saw in it the answer to something for which she hadn’t, in fact, known she’d been searching. The answer had materialized before the question could be formed.
However, unlike Keefe, from time to time Sandy still felt the need for the heft and weight, the palpable thrill, of a big fish on the end of her line. She now knew something of what the headwaters could provide and how critical that provision had become to her. She could no longer survive without it. But one thing the headwaters could never provide was the thrashing leap of a large rainbow trout or the crafty, deepwater struggle of a big brown trout,
