Where I was, I didn’t know. Tom was gone and all were gone. Movement of lizard and bird, dry shifts of sound. Home of snake and tick and every insect, and no path. No exit on any side, and the sun bearing down. Small dead leaves knit into sharp points. A weight of sound in that heat.

Clinging close to the skin of the mountain, pressing as flat as possible. A thing learned to crawl again. The mountain a heaving presence that could throw us all at any moment. I felt bulky, too large, not well enough attached. I began to feel afraid, and I wanted my.30-.30. I wanted to lever a shell into the chamber and have it ready. I rolled onto my back and held my breath and listened for movement.

Above me layer upon layer of spines. A place it would not be possible to stand. Live oaks as thick as any I’d seen.

I didn’t want to move. Any movement would only wrap everything more tightly around me. I was trapped, my heart jerking in my chest.

I did the one thing I knew to do when I was lost. I cupped my hands at my mouth, blowing between my thumbs. Sound of an owl, a hollow sound that would carry.

And then I waited. From high to my left came the answer from my father. And then from farther below, my grandfather. Each of us recognizable, no two sounds alike. And then Tom, from near my father.

I rolled back onto my stomach, pulled myself uphill, no longer lost.

False rattles, insects that sounded like snakes. Explosions of birds. The halting movements of lizards in leaves. I was looking everywhere constantly for the shape of a snake. On the earth above and to both sides and in the low branches that brushed over me. Most snakes I’d seen had been wrapped through branches, just off the ground. Same color but thicker. Baby rattlers no wider than your smallest finger and less than a foot long, looking almost identical to a branch, deadliest because they couldn’t gauge their poison yet and had no rattles, gave no warning. I was moving headfirst, so it was my head that would be struck, snake fangs in my forehead or cheek or the back of my neck.

Small movements everywhere, and my fear made me slow. Every few feet I’d stop and look around again. No place I’d ever wanted to be. And I began to think that staying low to the ground was the worst possible way. I began to wonder about trying to get on top of this. But of course I would only fall, ripping down through everything. So I kept crawling.

Hotter and hotter, rising toward noon. My eyes stinging from the salt, all of me covered in sweat, and I heard my father’s call, closer now, impatient, and answered back. I had managed to find the worst patch on the entire mountainside, and it was another twenty minutes of crawling before I was out of there. My bruised shoulder and legs stiffening, my neck kinked like it was broken, the fear all through me.

I was able to stand in brush just over my head, brush that grew like enormous clumps of gray-brown grass but with short trunks beneath. Enough space to push through, and above I could see the rock outcrops. I skirted the base of the lowest one and came up along the far side and found my father.

He was facing away, kneeling and using his rifle as a post to lean against. The barrel in close to his right shoulder and both hands wrapped around it. In his white T-shirt, he was like insect spittle hanging along a stick. The same shape, just as slack, and he didn’t turn to look at me.

Tom stood next to him, crucified by his rifle that lay across his shoulders, both arms hanging up over it, hands loose in the air.

They were both looking down at the ground, and I knew I’d find the poacher there. I didn’t hesitate, though. Some part of me was not right, and the source of that can never be discovered. I was able to walk up and look at that body and somehow I was not upset by it any more than looking at the carcass of a buck. If anything, I was excited. And perhaps this was because I’d seen so many bucks and everything else dead on the ground all my life. We were always killing something, and it seemed we were put here to kill.

He had landed facedown. Much of the middle of his back was missing. The hunting vest was still orange up high at his shoulders but had turned red and brown and black everywhere else. He smelled just like a dead buck, exactly the same, and the same large flies had come to swarm around the wound. Iridescent flashes in the sun, black circular orbits bound magnetically to that place, the sound of dozens combining into one, a sound unnaturally loud in all the stillness around.

The rock above had been sprayed, all of it, a swath ten feet long. I understood this was a man, but what I was thinking was that this was an excellent shot. A perfect shot, from over two hundred yards, with a rifle too big for me, a rifle very difficult to hold steady. If this were a buck, everyone would be grinning. There would be hoots and the high battle cry we made only when a buck was killed. We would not be so unnaturally silent. With my buck knife I’d be opening up the belly, then pulling out the innards and eating the heart and liver, and all of that would be considered good. And what if we had never been told that killing a man was bad? Wouldn’t we feel the same way then toward a man?

No one spoke. My father and Tom hanging on their rifles and I stood just behind them, empty-handed, and the heat of the day increased. No breeze at all. My shirt burning against my upper back. And finally my grandfather appeared. He walked slightly uphill to a clump of brush and sat down heavily at its base, partly in shade. His rifle across his thighs, the way the poacher had sat.

The flies had doubled in number just in the time we waited for my grandfather. They were drawn as if by an enormous gravity at the center of this man’s back. They tried to get away but could not. Every escape bent into an arc that returned. All being pulled down in, the flesh alive now with hundreds of bodies crawling as well as the ones that flew. And we were pulled in the same way, four of us gathered around this man, staring down into that hole.

The flies crawling in short jerks, so that there was never duration, only change. A shifting image, moment to moment and within each moment, but we could never see how or why. I’ve tried to remember what I saw that day, tried to remember many times, but memory insists on causation and meaning, on a story. Each thing that is leads to the next thing, and there’s a reason for that. What I want to recover, though, is that moment in which there was no good or bad but only gravity, and there was no causation but only each moment, separate and whole. Because that was the truth.

My father was the first to speak. That was inevitable. He was the only one with the right and obligation to speak. This can’t be told, he said. What happened here can never be told.

The man’s dead, Tom said.

I know that.

Well.

Well nothing.

Just leave him, my grandfather said. Don’t touch him. Maybe look for the bullet in a tree uphill, see if you can find that and remove it.

My father made a growling sound then, frustration and despair. You’re right, Tom. We need to report this. The man has a family.

We’re not reporting it, my grandfather said.

He’s a monster, Tom said. He’s a terrifying little fucking monster. He doesn’t even feel bad. He’d do it again.

He was a poacher, I said.

My father turned around to look at me.

You’re the one who put the shell in the chamber, I said.

Eleven years old, Tom said. He’s eleven years old. This is unbelievable. My daughter is eleven years old.

My father was studying me. The sun so bright I was squinting, having to blink, but his gaze was steady. The buzzing a thousand voices, high and insistent, making each moment a panic.

You’ve ruined the rest of your life, my father told me. Are you old enough to understand that? You may live another eighty years, and every one of those years is destroyed by this.