Tom bent down to pick something off the ground, something I couldn't see, but when he straightened, he had a small stone in his hand, and he hucked it at my grandfather where he slept. Rise and shine, f.u.c.ker, he said. Looks like we're going on the hunt after all.

Aborted snore, half a lung sucked into his throat and blown back. Smacking sounds then, chewing on some meal from dreams, first images of what the world might be, and then an enormous yawn.

We all waited unmoving. The trees not pillars but ribs, this place not a cathedral but a cavern, and my grandfather was held nowhere. He was both smaller and larger than this mountain.

He bent his knees in the air, wearing only his boxers, legs thin as bone, draped with loose pale skin and no meat, and he swung them forward to rise to a sitting position. Hundreds of pounds somehow levered by nothing at all. Only boxers, naked otherwise, and the great teats hanging down, pink and waiting to feed all that would be.

You look like deer, he said. Frozen in place, watching, about to jump.

f.u.c.k that, Tom said. I'm not afraid of you.

My grandfather smiled.

Tom looked away, then sat down and started making a sandwich. My father and I unfroze and worked on our own sandwiches. The water thickening and slowing beside us. Pink meat and yellow cheese, white bread, red ketchup. All of us aware of every movement my grandfather made, pulling on his pants and boots, his shirt and jacket, tottering off to the outhouse and returning with his vacant stare to sit on the uphill bench beside Tom and swing his legs in. He reached for his knife, drove it into wood to stand beside our knives, large curved blades, and in this moment we could have been all the same, but only in this moment.

I see you decided not to use the buck's head, my grandfather said. So the man has had a proper burial?

My father glanced at me and didn't answer. The two of us on the downhill side sharing a bench, hanging on.

Something went wrong, my grandfather said. I'm curious now.

I focused on chewing. The bread gumming at the roof of my mouth.

Well? he asked.

But my father only ate.

Did he come back to life? Was that the problem? Did you lose track of him?

My father brushed the crumbs off his hands, grabbed his knife and sheathed it, then stood. I'm leaving for the hunt in five minutes, he said. I don't care who's left behind.

Tom grabbed his knife and looked at my grandfather. Then he sheathed it and stood and walked away toward the truck. I'm ready, he said. His rifle already slung over his shoulder, and I saw he had his canteen, too.

What was it like to bury your kill? my grandfather asked me.

I didn't, I said.

So he's not buried?

No.

My grandfather smiled. Where is he, then?

In the upper glade. In two pieces. He fell apart.

Fell apart.

Yeah.

My grandfather grabbed his knife and looked at it. He was chuckling. Fell apart.

It looked like he was taking a dive.

Into what?

I don't know.

My grandfather's pig eyes cold and small. The chuckling and grin on the surface only. The rest of us here for his grim entertainment. Holding his knife in one meaty fist, point up, twisting it slowly as if gouging the air, working a small rip, tearing a bit at the fabric of the air, opening some vacuum invisible that would begin to pull all things inward. Annihilation. It was always what my grandfather promised, and it might begin in one tiny point, without warning. He had a different relation to air and light and sound and weight. He was nimble even in the places we could not see.

Long curve of that blade, beveled to an edge too slight to know. Milky thickness beyond the bevel, metal polished so smooth it might have been liquid, pewter gray, a.s.sociated with the mercury running through the veins of this mountain, similar satiny surface and unfathomable weight beneath.

A trick of my grandfather's to distract. Each of us lost, over and over.

The knife suddenly gone below the table, sheathed. And then he shifted his great bulk, swung his legs over the bench, and wandered off returned to nothing at all, a heap of flannel and wool.

My father had already started the truck. Sitting in the cab with Tom. Last hunt. The two staring ahead past the stream and waterwheels into the hillside, waiting.

The buck waiting also, slow revolution of blue-green galaxies at the back of those eyes, beyond annihilation. The rip my grandfather had opened might pull all things toward it but those eyes. Impulse and source.

This camp no refuge. It was not possible for us to carve out any place of our own. I understand that now. The stream and ferns and trees no barrier against the open meadow beyond or the mountain above, no separation.

My grandfather grabbed his .308 and stuffed into the cab, the truck dipping on that side, hanging tilted, and I waited until his door was closed, then pa.s.sed and climbed the b.u.mper.

My father backed and turned and we rumbled onto the road again, and I didn't know where we were headed. A hunt an evasion, an attempt to stall everything else.

The air ten degrees hotter the moment we left the trees. The sun bright off the top of the cab, and I was squinting. Usually the afternoon hunt was later, when the sun was lower. Everything off balance this trip. My father and I were supposed to have taken a nap, but all my father wanted now was movement.

Each tree trapped in its own heavy shadow, pinned down. Every open area blasted and washed out in white. Gra.s.shoppers flung like small rocks heated until they popped. Dragonflies cruising on solar wings.

I tried to look for bucks, but a buck here would be no more than a mirage. Shadow form stamped into the white and then fading almost instantly. Thrum of cicadas overwhelming, rubbing at the air and dissolving shape, making it nearly impossible to see.

White manzanita, each bush of it a thousand velvety mirrors, arrayed on both sides of the road, hung separate from the earth, winking among green manzanita with leaves almost as bright. Their only intent confusion. The road lost somewhere in that maze.

We fell into the draw below the reservoir, and the leaves of the wild grape had all fused into one brightness, hot mantle of a lantern flung and grown. Shade then, and my eyes with no time to adjust before we emerged in light again, and we pa.s.sed the road to bear wallow. My father driving us on.

No blue to this sky. All blue burned away. Heat waves risen over the blackened arms of fallen ponderosa pines, melting in waves amid dry brown sedge. Thick clumps of it on all sides, resisting erasure, spiking through the melt. The road before us a memory of water, dry now but rutted with scabs grown inward.

Falling downward always, this road the beginning of what would become a canyon, our stamp left on the earth. And my father took the next turnoff, a little-used track overgrown with thistle purple and green amid the brown, a road leading to the burn, the lowest section of the ranch where a wildfire had swept through and laid waste to all. A place where the ground itself was red and black as if still on fire and might cave away beneath you as you walked. False diamonds there, clear shards and chips as thick as your finger lying everywhere on the surface, as if all might be given, formed under pressure in some earlier time and now simply offered up.

23.

FORKED RIDGES BRACED AGAINST THE VALLEY BELOW, Satan's hoof, leverage for his rise. We stood at the top of that fork, the four of us at the edge, a place soundless except for the rise of air from that superheated ground, dark bare surface armored in exposed black rock.

Charred skeletons of every tree and bush twisting below us. Manzanita in blackened baskets reaching upward, oak branches burrowing sideways through the air, tips whitened, no green, no leaves. All seeming to writhe, still in motion. We stood at the tip of the flame, both slopes curling inward orange and red like the surface of the sun drawn upward. Immolation if it weren't for time, and mirages still boiling.

Something red to that ground, small bits of red rock or something transformed, no vein of it or anything solid, and maybe it was only the red of the manzanita, some sheen to that even when dead or dormant, changing the light.

Snake, Tom said, and then I saw it, not twenty feet away downslope, coiled behind a dark stump of ruined buckbrush. Fat and slack, deflated against the ground, light brown diamonds all along it, rattles up but motionless, still considering, head levered just enough in the air to flick that tongue and smell.

At the end of a hunt, we would have shot it, but not the beginning. All deer would instantly be gone.

f.u.c.ker thinks he can take us, my father said. Not even sure we're worth the effort.

Dry dull skin of the snake. Shadow so black, so sharp and thin along the borders he seemed separate from the ground, not touching. The flattening of him a lie, flattened against nothing. He might reappear anywhere along this slope. And I began to see the buckbrush beside him the same, shadowed at the surface and no roots below, the entire black slope a hard plate, impenetrable, and every object floating and shifting upon it.

No gravity here. Nothing to pull downward. An object might rise along the slope as well as fall. Hard to know which way we tilted. No direction, either, the sun directly above. A compa.s.s would only spin.

My grandfather stepped onto that slope and seemed to hang at right angles to it, moving fast, and the snake uncoiled, long slack rope fleeing without challenge or rattle or even much of a curve, flown almost in a straight panicked line, an S no more than memory, and the rough sound of its heavy body rubbing against the earth a memory also, dragging of scales already gone. It knew what to fear.

My grandfather's boots now where the snake had lain, and he peered up at us looking for reaction, face buried in shadow beneath his cap, bulk erased by that enormous hunting jacket, rifle strapped over his shoulder. I stood there in full sweat in that heat, my entire body slick, and he made no sense to me.

The three of us against him, but there was nothing substantial in us. We were made of nothing.

You're a crazy f.u.c.k, Tom finally said. I'll give you that.

My grandfather expressionless, waiting, but waiting for what?

Just go on your hunt, my father said.

My grandfather become one of the burned trees, only another shape that might slide along the surface of that slope. What I saw was him biting a giant chunk out of rock and speaking at us in crushed bits of stone, but what happened was that he dropped to his knees, mouth open in a rough grunt of pain, then rolled over and sat facing downslope, taking the seat of the snake.

I was encased in poison oak now, red welts everywhere across my body on fire, a burning thing, layers of immolation: my skin, the boils and welts, my clothing, the superheated air. Even my sweat a kind of oil ignited.

I guess I'll go down and flush out any bucks, Tom said. Since no one else seems ready to do anything.

Fair enough, my father said, and Tom went down that tilted slope and gave my grandfather wide berth. Footsteps that left no mark. A surface that could not be broken. Tom wearing camouflage green in a place where there was no green, and yet that place swallowed him anyway, dark green against black. Angling off to the right and the hillside growing as he became smaller. My father and I sat at the lip, uphill of my grandfather, keeping him in view.

Pointless, my father said. You won't be able to hit anything that far away with a .30-.30, and I don't even have a gun.

My grandfather with his .308 across his knees, sitting cross-legged now.

Tom changed course, cut to his left into the center of the draw, where great boulders had fallen or been exposed and a large stand of pine waited, trunks blackened and become white-gray above, dead sentinels with bare arms and no heads.

He's going for cover, my grandfather said.

What? my father asked.

He's running, and he's going for cover, those pine snags and boulders and falls. He can find cover most of the way down.

You're crazy, just like he said.

My grandfather raised his rifle to his shoulder, aiming downslope, braced his elbows on his knees in firing position.

What are you doing? my father asked. His voice quiet, dry, and I was holding my breath, waiting for the explosion. My grandfather capable of anything.

I can see him in the scope. He's taking glances up here and moving fast. He's running. He wouldn't be looking up here if he was hunting.

He's just flushing bucks.

Nope. And he's still close enough. Not more than two hundred and fifty yards. Still big enough in the scope.

Big enough for what?

You knew there was going to be consequence. You knew that all along.

My father raised his hands to his mouth and blew, the call of an owl, his signature. We waited, and we heard the hollow sound of Tom's answering call float up toward us. See? He's just flushing bucks.

He's heading down to the valley, where he'll hitch a ride or just keep walking, and he's going to report all that we've done. We're going to swing, our entire family, because you didn't do what you needed to. Because you're weak and you refuse to see what's coming.

My grandfather still aiming at Tom through that scope. Tom threading down through the snags.

You're not pulling that trigger. My father's hand on my .30-.30, taking it from me quietly.

You're right. Your son is going to pull the trigger.

The entire mountainside below moving toward me, ridges curling back, a rushing sound in my head. The skin of the earth stretching. We called it buck fever. Blindness, loss of hearing, heart clenching as if it would rip itself free, surge of each pump through arteries yanking stumps of legs and arms. The pure thrill of killing, even more magnificent when it's a man and not an animal. Adrenaline. A surge within that takes us all the way back, before Jesus, before the written word or even the spoken word, before we think of ourselves as being, before we walk upright, before we enter this world as anything that can be called us, this surge when we kill, mark of Cain before there is even an idea of Cain or the possibility of Abel. That heart yanking is truth.

My father slumped over beside me, broken. He would not stop this. I knew that. His head between his knees, rifle low in both hands, resting on his boots. His eyes closed. Same surge in him, and felt as ruin.

Come down here, my grandfather said, but I could not move. I could hardly breathe.

You don't want me to come get you, he said.

My hands braced on rock to either side so that I would not fall, and even rock was caving away. My grandfather had paralyzed us both. It was not possible to run from him. I could only watch as he rose on those spindles and the earth swung but he remained upright.

I don't know what to call him now. Beyond any name. He rose toward me the same as law, as whatever made adrenaline. As close as I can know to the creation itself, and he grabbed the top of my head, fingers clenched in my hair, and dragged me down that slope face-first.

Torn across black scab and outcrop, glittering of Lake County diamonds emerged from nowhere, lying on the surface, and no ash. No ash anywhere, all blown and gone, but a thousand blackened seeds and bits of bark and stone. Carried and I might have been carried forever, facedown to see all, every landscape and what it held or might become.

Brought to where the snake had coiled, dropped and then yanked upright into a sitting position and the rifle in my hands.

Shoot him, my grandfather said.

Rifle I had never held before, a kind of sacrament, dark oiled wood and black bolt, black scope. Knees up in a wide base and my elbows braced on them, and the stock in tight against my shoulder, all unthinking, all trained for as many years as I had memory. Aiming without the scope first, as I'd been taught, sighting a landmark, a large snag, then finding this in the scope and shifting downward to find Tom.

Tom in the crosshairs, hustling over rocky ground, hopping as if his feet were on fire, getting close to that snag and a large boulder, cover. The scope shrinking and flattening the world. That boulder could have been five feet past him or twenty-five feet. The way my grandfather saw us always, magnified and up close and distances gone and always seeing our backs, running away.

Every jigsaw piece of camouflage on Tom's back sharp and clear, and the scope hovering around him, shaken by each pump of blood.

Shoot him, my grandfather said, and I held my breath, pulled that rifle in tight, but I did not want to kill. I was done with killing.