“I don’t get it, Gray. I’ve seen you club and gut a thousand fish. More. You think elk have feelings but fish don’t? You don’t seem to mind when you’re eating the meat.”

  Rebuked, she says nothing, but he attacks again while she’s on the ropes. It’s his instinct, his training, something he does without thought.

  “What did you think we came here to do? We’re part of the food chain. The top of it. We’re not going to shoot that bull out of spite, and we’re not going to shoot him for fun. We’re going to shoot him because he’ll feed us for a whole year.”

  “I know that.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Despite the weak late-season sun, she can feel the heat of a mild sunburn on her neck and ears, on her nose. Maybe it’s the elevation. The air is thinner, the sun closer. She takes a deep breath, hoping the fresh air will help her thoughts, but her breath is toxic after two nights in camp, no showers, no toothbrush, and her teeth feel like they need a shave.

  Why can’t she just tell him the truth? That she’s lost her taste for this, for hunting, for killing, ever since that day in the woods with the dog. Maybe it’s only temporary. Maybe it’s not. She doesn’t know how to tell him without disappointing him. She doesn’t know how to tell him without making it sound like blame.

  “This is why we’re here, Gray. This is why we came.”

  “I thought we came for time alone. For time together. I thought we came here to be surrounded by nature.”

  “This is nature.”

  She can hear the annoyance in his voice, but something else too: finality. The conversation is over. He grabs his rifle, brings it into shooting position, and leans into it with his eye against the scope.

  “Get the Ruger and sight him in. Aim just above and behind the forelegs. That’s where the lungs are, hanging like large pink fruit. If my shot doesn’t drop him, you hit him again.”

  She knows he’s regulating his breathing, relaxing his muscles, just like he taught her to do.

  “Let me know when you’re ready, Gray.”

  She picks up her rifle. Instead of aiming at the bull, she gets to her feet, slings it over her shoulder, and starts walking back to camp. She’s fifty feet away before her father notices. Though she can hear him swearing, she keeps walking, faster and faster, the rifle banging against the back of her thigh, her heart beating louder and more quickly until it fills her head like a war drum. The gunshot behind her is loud enough to drown it out. Impossibly loud. It echoes off the rock around them, creating what sounds like other gunshots that all echo together, joined by the memory of the gunshot that ended Johnson’s life. Gray holds her hands over her ears, but it’s too late to block them out, any of them, and as she runs back to camp, she knows she will hear them echoing for a long time to come.

  30

  Gray stokes the fire needlessly high and hangs the percolator over the flames. When it starts to boil she pours herself a cup. Then she sits down with the book she brought with her—her English teacher assigned it over the summer, and it’s due next week—and reads it to pass the time while she waits for her father to return from the hunt.

  He does so noisily, stomping around the camp, his anger as evident as that of a kid in the throes of a tantrum. She does not ask about the elk. He pours himself coffee and joins her. Right away she sees his hands are shaking. Coffee splashes over the rim of his mug in fracture waves, spilling onto his boots. His legs are shaking too.

  It’s not anger; it’s something else.

  “Are you OK, Pop?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m fine,” he says again, sharply, but backpedals when he sees the concern on her face. “I think I’m coming down with something. A fever, maybe. It came out of nowhere.”

  She puts down her book.

  “It’s just a chill, Gray. That’s all.” He takes a sharp breath, and it seems to hurt him.

  “The coffee will help,” she says. But it doesn’t. After a few minutes he gets up and roots around in his pack for his flask. Gray returns to her book half-heartedly, lifting her eyes to study him between paragraphs as he pulls out the rest of his clothes and puts them on piece by piece: a lined flannel shirt over his vest, a wool halibut jacket, his raincoat. She’s wearing only a light fleece over a T-shirt. He’s bundled in layers, hugging himself for warmth.

  By nightfall he’s shaking too violently to open the cans for dinner without dropping them. When Gray takes them, it frightens her that he does not protest.

  “Dinner’s good.” It’s an effort toward normalcy, a baited hook to see if he will respond. He does.

  “Fresh elk would be better.”

  Gray gets to her feet and tosses the empty cans into the flames. “I’m going to bed,” she says, and he waves her off.

  Later she hears him scraping around in the darkness. Then she smells his breath on her face, the whiskey, the beans, and knows he’s just inches away, checking if she’s asleep. She pretends she’s asleep because something tells her it would be worse not to.

  His bag rustles from his shivering. What if he’s really sick? What if he gets worse? It’s a long hike out, and she’s not confident she could find the way. How would she even get him down the mountain? She wishes she had her phone, wishes she could call her mother or her uncle. As she listens to his shaking, she’s slow to recognize that it’s not all that she’s hearing. His breath comes in short, stuttered gasps, muffled by his sleeping bag. He’s not just shivering—he’s crying.

  Gray slips out of her bag and crouches over him. He recoils from the light of her headlamp, the muscles around his mouth and eyes puckered and tense. She’s never seen her father cry before. There’s fear in his eyes, and she’s never seen that before, either. She hadn’t even thought him capable of it. It shocks her that he doesn’t roll away, doesn’t cover himself. It’s as if he’s defenseless—something else she’s never seen before. As if he believes it too late to hide from whatever is causing his fear. Or too late to hide it from her.

  “Pop, what’s wrong?”

  He says nothing and rolls on his side, crying loudly. When she tries to touch him, to comfort him, he jerks away.

  She does not sleep the rest of the night, sitting wrapped in her sleeping bag with her back against one of the small trees they’ve lashed their tarps to, watching over her father. His crying does not stop. It doesn’t even slow.

  “It’s OK,” she says occasionally, though she is not sure that it is. “It’s OK, Pop. It’s OK.”

  The morning sunlight fails to warm or console him. In the light of day he looks smaller, his bulk shrunken, as if he’s cried away water weight and trembled away pounds. Maybe it’s just in Gray’s mind, her image of him diminished.

  She tries to engage him with coffee, food, conversation. He ignores it all. The coffee grows cold and the food sits uneaten until a brigade of ants discovers it, little black soldiers marching up and into the can.

  “An army,” she says. “A colony. A nest. A swarm.”

  His wet eyes show no understanding, and he does not respond. Something in him has broken. Snapped.

  Did I do this to him?

  By nightfall the crying stops and her father falls asleep. Relieved and exhausted, she eats dinner straight out of a can warmed over the fire. She’s wound up with fear, from her mind wandering like an unleashed animal, but the fatigue weighs her down, so she pulls herself into her sleeping bag beside him. His breathing is steady. Regular. He’s better, she thinks. Within a few minutes, she falls asleep too.

  During the night she wakes to find the stars gone, the sky not just dark but smothering. Airless. For a moment she does not remember where she is and does not understand. Then it comes back to her, and she holds her breath and listens for her father.

  She can hear insects, the retreating wingbeats of a night bird, branches rattling like bones. She can hear her heartbeat. And then she can hear her father too. He’s moving around on the other side of camp, the sound muffled by distance.

  Gray gets up and follows the sound. As she gets closer, she can hear that he’s begun to cry again. She turns on her headlamp and sees him sitting in the dirt, his back against the big rock, holding the Winchester in his shaking hands. The rifle’s stock is in the dirt between his boots and the barrel rests beneath his chin. Without hesitating, she takes it from him, slides open the bolt, and ejects the lone shell from the chamber. It falls to the dewy grass with a thud. She picks it up and throws it as far as she can, and does not hear it land.

  “Pop?” she says.

  “Gray,” he says.

  And then it begins to rain.

  31

  The first time he took her hunting she was too young to carry a gun. They spent the day walking through deep grass on a client’s ranch in Eastern Washington. His dogs, a symmetrical pair of English setters, nosed ahead of them like bird-flushing bookends. When they got into birds around lunchtime, the hunters fired, the pheasants fell, and the dogs retrieved them. Instead of returning it to the shooter, one of them brought one of the birds to Gray. Unsure what to do, she looked at her father.

  “Hold your hands out,” he said. The dog dropped the still-warm pheasant into them. The golden feathers shimmered in the sun, the deep green of the neck, a pinprick of blood the color of the bird’s wattle. But the bird was still alive and began to thrash in her hands.

  “It’s OK,” her father said, either to her or to the bird. He closed her hands in one of his own, holding the bird still, and with the other, twisted its beautiful neck until it popped. The bundle of feathers went limp in her hands.

  Her tears arrived without warning.

  “Don’t cry.” Her father repositioned himself between her and the other hunters so they could not see her. “It’s OK to be sad. Just keep it to yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “As a girl, you’re always going to have to work twice as hard to prove yourself. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. Don’t ever let anyone see your weakness. Better to let them think you’re heartless than weak. Men like this respect heartless, but they’ll never forgive weak.”

  Now his own tears are as ceaseless as the rain soaking them until the ground beneath them feels unstable, shifting, fragile. Time blurs as days pass and neither stops.

  Gray is covered in mud and chilled to the bone. She gathers firewood she cannot keep dry and huddles beneath the tarp, watching her father with growing dread as the rain gathers volume and strength. They’re almost out of food. Their campsite, which once felt like the pinnacle of freedom, has become a watery prison. The rain feels like a sign. The rain feels like punishment.

  This is her fault, she thinks. She wasn’t strong enough when he needed her to be. She’s still not strong enough. The rain does not stop and neither does her father, and she does not know what to do about any of it.

  They’re days overdue. Gray imagines her mother growing frantic, calling Uncle Fenwick, calling hospitals, calling the police. She wishes they’d brought phones, wishes they’d brought more food, wishes they’d brought a tent. She wishes she knew what to do.

  The rain soaks through her jacket, soaks through the flannel and wool she wears beneath it, soaks through her Carhartts and long johns, soaks through her skin until even her heart and soul are wet. She can’t get any more wet. There’s no such thing, she thinks. As if to prove her wrong, the wind rises up, the sky ignites, and thunder cracks open the night. She feels the lightning lifting the wet hair from her neck, feels the wet ground tremble beneath her.

  “Please,” she says. To her father, maybe. Or to herself. “Please.”

  She says it again.

  “Please.”

  And then again and again and again, begging, pleading, repeating it over and over until it becomes a mantra, a way of breathing, an incantation, and still the rain does not stop. Still the wind does not stop. Still her father’s tears do not stop.

  “Please. Please. Please.” She says it until her voice is hoarse, until her throat hurts, says it until she can’t hear herself anymore.

  “Please. Please. Please. Please.”

  She does not know how long she says it for and does not know how much longer she can continue—she knows only the word. Please.

  “Please,” she says. “Please. Please. Please.” She can barely form the word before the rain washes it away.

  Her father opens his eyes. He looks around like he’s seeing the rain for the first time. The tarp stretched over them is shredded by the wind like the wings of an ancient dragon, and water pours off the corners in waves, pours through the holes and weaknesses in the nylon and runs all around them, too much of it to be confined to the shallow trenches he dug around their camp. It runs beneath their sleeping bags and the thin foam pads, it soaks the foam and the down, soaking them. Another flash of lightning, another shatter of thunder.

  Her father looks lost. Helpless. But he’s awake. The incantation has worked.

  “Please,” she says. “I need you. I don’t know what to do.”

  The rain and tears streak the dirt on his face like the makeup of some dark clown. Gray is crying too. She’s desperate. Frightened.

  “Please,” she says again. “Please.”

  The beating rain steals her voice and gives it to the wind. The wind hurls it into the sky for the lightning to pierce and the thunder to swallow.

  She reaches for her father, for what’s left of him, and hugs him tightly. She feels like a little girl again, small despite her own size and strength. She puts her head to his like he used to do with the dog, hands on either side of it so their foreheads touch.

  “Please.”

  “It’s OK, Gray. I’m here.”

  Wind hurls the rain like stones. It whips the tarps, the battered flags of a nation whose borders have been breached. Trees bend. Branches snap. The mountains are under siege.

  “Do we hike out?” She yells to be heard over the storm.

  “No.”

  “But we’re almost out of food. The storm. And you’re . . .” she says, but cannot finish her sentence.

  “It’s too far to the truck. We might find worse trouble. Better to wait it out.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing?” Frayed by exhaustion and fear and panic, her voice cuts him.

  “I’m sorry, Gray.” He nods, a quick tilt of the head. She returns it.

  Lightning cleaves the sky, illuminating his face as the thunder hammers at them, and he does not even flinch. This is her father, she thinks, recognizing him for the first time in days. She called him and he came. Everything’s going to be OK.

  He gets up and aims his headlamp into the night. It has no chance against the rain, caught and refracted by millions of droplets, so he shines it at the ground, which looks like it is moving, the dirt turned to mud, the mud turned to water, the water rushing down the mountain toward the rivers. If it keeps raining, the water will carry them with it. Water will always find its way.

  “Wait here,” he says.

  “Pop.”

  “Wait here, Gray. It’s OK.”

  She watches him turn and stumble, unused to his own feet, upright for the first time in days. He looks weak. Atrophied. He’s not eaten, not washed, barely slept. He’s inhuman, a rag doll. Something broken.

  But he’s still her father. Lewis Yaw, King of the Jungle.

  He disappears into the storm and reemerges with their packs, which he lashes together over a branch and hoists off the flooding ground.

  “Where are the rifles?”

  Gray does not answer.

  “The rifles, Gray. Where are they?”

  She retrieves them from the moss-covered downfall where she has hidden them and hands him one. He gives her a curious look. When he tries to work the bolts to make sure it’s not loaded, he finds the bolts missing. She’s removed them both and hidden them in the foot of her sleeping bag. He looks at her again but says nothing as he tucks the rifles into the carry straps on their hanging packs.

  “Get back in your sleeping bag, Gray.”

  “It’s soaked.”

  “It’ll keep you warm enough to avoid hypothermia. Get back in.”

  They duck beneath the remains of the tarp, a useless gesture, the tarp itself no longer a form of shelter but a visual measurement of the velocity of the wind, and slide into their bags. The wet down feels like a heavy, sopping grave. He rolls against her, pressing himself against her shaking body, spooning front to back as the night splinters into glass around them.

  “We’ll be warmer this way.”

  She grabs his arms and hugs him. There’s panic in her grip, but love too. Relief. This time he does not tense, he does not withdraw. This time, her father hugs her back.

  “How long have I . . . What day is it?”

  They left Friday. They were supposed to be home Monday.

  “It’s Thursday.”

  “Thursday? We’ve been here six days?”

  Gray nods, afraid to speak.

  “I’m back now, Gray. It’s OK. I’m back.”

  “I’m sorry if I panicked. I was scared. You scared me.”

  “Six days is not panicking, Gray.”

  “It came out of nowhere.” She means the storm.

  “That’s how it happens,” he says, and holds her tight.

  32

  The storm passes sometime before morning. It’s too dark to see anything, but Gray can sense a loosening in the ground and air, the world itself a fist opening.

  “Are you awake?” her father asks.

  “How could I sleep through that?”

  “Have you slept at all this week?”

  Gray does not answer, which is enough.

  “Now’s your chance,” he says, and she closes her eyes.

 

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