I flopped onto my side and enjoyed the squish and ooze. I had just been a bigfoot, was a bear cub now, and I even thought of dinosaurs. Bogs and marshes and mud pits just like this were where they went to be remembered. Dying out on dry ground you could only vanish, but if you crawled into the mud, you might make it into a museum exhibit a hundred million or two hundred million years later. Truth is fairy tale. We can’t really believe there were dinosaurs, because we can’t imagine that span of time. We can see their bones and tell ourselves we know a brontosaurus walked and that huge neck swung through the air, but that’s not the same as belief. Belief is much closer, more intimate, than knowledge. Dinosaurs happened in a different world. But killing is still with us. Killing is a past world that overlaps with ours, and if we can reach back into it, our lives are doubled.

9

THE BIBLE CELEBRATES MANY KILLINGS. GOLIATH IS A bigfoot, an earlier and more beastly form of human, and this is what we most want to kill, our competitors, the Neanderthals and giants and other monstrous forms of our earlier selves. Killing the poacher, I was just like David, defending my family and our land and the law. I was on the side of god. “This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a god in Israel,” David says. The act of killing might even be the act that creates god.

There are times I get excited and think I did something beautiful in killing that poacher. A triumph. I wander around my small apartment like a thing possessed, pacing, and I can feel my righteousness. But then I think he was only a man, only one lousy guy back in the fall of 1978, long ago, some hunter out to kill a buck on someone else’s land, insignificant. And that makes me only an ordinary killer, with no special claims.

Wallowing in that mud, playing the bear cub, I had a frightening innocence. Born into a world of butchery, a child will embrace butchery and find it normal. Or at least I did. And this was before the testosterone would kick in, before puberty. I was a monster even before I was remade into another kind of monster.

My father never did tell me to get out of that mud. He grabbed his.300 magnum from behind the seat and held its barrel pointing to the sky, pulled back the bolt partway to check that nothing was in the chamber. Then he slung it over his shoulder and began walking. My grandfather and Tom followed. We were going to hunt right here, down through brush and these hills that had no view. There was no chance we’d see a buck, and everyone knew that and began the hunt anyway.

I grabbed my rifle, followed over a lip at the edge of the wallow, and entered a different land entirely, a land dry again, a land with no hint of water. Live oak, my least favorite tree, and the shade from it spotty and low. We were traversing a wide choked hillside, not going down into the egg-crate hills, and I had never been here before. I would have lost track of the men if it hadn’t been for the enormous sounds my grandfather made tearing through live oak and buckbrush. If you hadn’t yet seen him, and you heard only these sounds, you’d have the most terrifying imaginings.

The sun hot and blinding, and the mud on me pulling at my skin as it dried. The spines of the live oak leaves. My jeans and jacket caked and heavy. I was thirsty, and there was no water. There was never any water. A kind of test in my family, to hike all day in the brush in the California sun and drink nothing.

I emerged in an area of gray pines. The men waiting for me, two ridges forking off below.

You can each take a ridge, my father said. We’ll wait fifteen minutes and then go down through the center to flush.

My grandfather walked the ridge on the left, Tom to the right. Their rifles no longer slung but held before them, ready, and both men alert. The canyon below fell off suddenly, bits of cliff and loose rock. Tall thin darker ponderosa pines rising along steep slopes.

The canyon still in shadow. The bottom of it would see sun for no more than a few hours each day. A place that looked smaller than it was. Once we were down there, it would grow considerably. I knew that.

There’s nothing I can do, my father said. You’ve put me in a situation where there’s nothing I can do.

My father standing at the edge of an outcrop of rock, looking down. You imagine all that could happen in your life, he said. You imagine all that could happen to your son. You worry about him breaking a leg or not getting along in school, or not wanting to hunt, or maybe even what kind of man he’ll turn out to be, if you ever look ahead that far. But you never see this. There’s no way of seeing this, especially at eleven years old. It’s just not something that happens.

Sorry, I said.

My father laughed, a bitter strange sound like strangling. Yeah, he finally said. You’re sorry. Well that fixes it.

The cicadas pulsing around us, pressurizing the air. My father stepped to the side, top of a chute, and went down fast. Almost like surfing, his right hand out and touching rocks as he slid down the face. Steps that sank ten feet. Rifle slung diagonally across his back, right side tucked into the hill. White T-shirt, brown Carhartt pants and boots. He made a slalom course of that slide of rock, traversing down and then twisting in the air, planting his feet again, left hand now to the hill.

Below him, a cliff edge. This run of loose rock ended in a deadfall I couldn’t see past. Only air beyond.

I couldn’t move or speak. I could only watch as he tucked in closer and planted his feet hard, hopped once more, twisting to the right. Still sliding as he stepped onto solid rock and grabbed at small scrub with his hands. His momentum should have carried him past, but he managed to cling there. And then he traversed that rock and made it to a tree that grew at a crazy angle, some twisted thin thing heading out into space, and there he rested. He leaned against it and looked up at me.

Come on, he said. It was against the rules to speak that loudly on a hunt. But our role was to flush, and maybe he just didn’t care.

What I thought, standing there on that lip, was that he wanted me to die. He knew I wouldn’t make it down that slide onto rock the way he had. I’d keep going over the cliff edge and then I’d be gone. He’d no longer have the problem of what to do with me.

He waved for me to come, and I almost did it. I almost stepped down into the slide. But then I just kept walking along the rim, keeping to higher ground, following the path Tom had taken, and I looked for an easier way down.

I was afraid to look at my father, but when I took a glance, I thought I saw him grin. Just one side of his mouth, but a grin, and then he was traversing again, getting away from those cliffs, crossing into a steep patch of pines that leaned in close to the slope. He disappeared into the trees, and I began my descent above them. If I fell, I’d have those trunks to reach for.

My boots sliding downward, rifle in one hand and the other clawing at plants and rock, trying to slow. Small flowers and low-growing weeds like vines but all too thin, ripping through my fingers, and I slid full body, shirt and jacket riding up, my side scratched. And still I couldn’t stop. I hit pine needles, slippery, fell faster, aimed for a trunk and hit with my boots, collapsed against it.

I was breathing hard from fright. My father far below surfing through trees, and I couldn’t imagine doing that. Wide spaces between trunks, plenty of room to fall through, the rocks of the creek a long ways off.

I didn’t want to move. I thought about just letting my rifle go, so that I’d have both hands, but a rifle had to be taken care of always.