Side roads heading down to our left, lower on the mountain, to switchbacks and several enormous glades and the burn and bear wallow and another reservoir. We owned this entire realm. It was ours. From this point, we could hike in any direction and not have to cross onto another’s land.

I’d like to remember what that felt like, to own and to belong. I’ve lost the sense of it. I have no land now, and I can no longer visit our history.

We drove through that familiar landscape and believed it would always be ours. It was so certain it was never even a thought.

4

OUR CAMP IN A LARGE STAND OF PONDEROSA PINES, COOL and shaded. Always a breeze and the sound of that breeze in the treetops. A spring that ran cold and pure. Ferns and moss and mushroom. Miner’s lettuce we could pluck and eat fresh, bounty of the land. As close as we’d know to Eden, as close as we’d come to being able to return.

My grandfather had built small waterwheels here, and several had survived the winter. Turning still in the stream, miniature engines of imagined villages, all built for me, and before that, for my father. Each made from only three small slats and two nails, but animated beyond that. The water shallow and clear across a wide delta of small islands, an entire land, a region twelve feet across, not yet carved into deeper channels or bends, a world too new to have left a mark.

Downstream, at an impossibly larger scale, a pole lashed high between two trees, hooks hanging down by chains, one of them a scale for weighing bucks.

From my earliest memories, all features of this camp had been in place and nothing changed. The spring fed into a black plastic hose that gushed without ceasing into a white basin, the stream three inches thick. Beside this, high wooden countertops, freestanding, for the Coleman stove and griddle and boxes of provisions, Tom’s place, the camp cook from before I could remember. All of it open to the pines above and the sky.

Just down from this kitchen, close along the land of the waterwheel islands, a picnic table between two trees and a steep corrugated roof above. The primary structure of the camp, without walls, this open table, the place we gathered, where lanterns were hung and stories told.

And that was it. Off in the trees, generations before me had left old rusty box springs, turned as brown as the pine needles, and farther off, a few pieces of plywood tacked between two trees for an outhouse.

The camp an outpost in an enormity. The slope of pines extending above, gradual at first and then rising much higher along the mountain. We could see only the bases of dozens of trunks as they rose, a contour of land still to be discovered. And below us, the stream curled around and left a fringe of fern and pine and then a wide meadow. Dry yellow grass baking in the sun and filling this forest with light.

All was ideal: the cool shade and breeze, the light, the sound of the stream and pines, the smell of sap and grass and fern, the history and feeling of arrival, of belonging. To me, this was the best part of every trip, the moment we found ourselves here again, the moment all the time between collapsed.

I hopped down from that mattress. I was ready to set up camp.

But my father and grandfather and Tom remained in the cab. There was no sound of talking. They were only sitting there. And when they emerged, finally, they didn’t look at me. They gathered at the back of the pickup and looked at the dead man, who lay still with his face to the sky and arms flung above and mouth and eyes open. As if he would take in all the world, all at once.

I’m not touching him, Tom said. I’m no part of this.

I wasn’t asking you, my father said.

You had one chance to not be a part of this, my grandfather said. You could have walked back down that road. Not gone through the gate. That was your one chance. Now it’s the same as if you pulled the trigger. It’s the same for all of us.

That’s bullshit, Tom said. I haven’t done anything.

What you’ve done or not done doesn’t matter now. Where you are is what matters.

My father grabbed the dead man’s hands. Fuck this, he said. And he pulled the dead man from that mattress overboard to whump hard onto the earth and kept pulling and dragging him toward the hooks.

You can’t do that, Tom said, but my father kept dragging.

He’s not a piece of meat, Tom said.

He is now, my father said, and he dragged across pine needles and the dead man with his open mouth seemed amused and a little drunk, his chin on his chest, and then his head lolled back as if he were laughing. On his way to some new place of hilarity and chains and hooks.

My father dropped him at the base of those trunks, at the edge of the stream. The place all our bucks had hung. He reached up for a dark hook that had several extra feet of chain trailing. Help me lift him, he said.

I’m not doing that, Tom said. He held his rifle in both hands before his chest, barrel aimed upward. At the ready, as if he planned to take aim at any moment. He was one step from panic. I could see he was breathing fast.

It doesn’t matter whether you help now or not, my grandfather said. You’ve already grabbed that man’s wrist and helped drag him to the truck.

You shut up, Tom said. I’m sorry. I know I’ve never said that to you before, sir. But please just don’t say anything more.

It doesn’t matter what I say or don’t say.

Time to do this, my father said.

Tom’s glasses made him weaker. The fact that his own eyes couldn’t see, the fact that he was always relying on help. And the stock of his rifle was held together with packing tape, a thick brown wad of it, where the stock met barrel. An old.243 Winchester Savage, a light rifle for deer, small caliber, faster but with far less impact than my own.30-.30. It was a gun to be despised, a gun to be ashamed of.

I’ll help, I said.

You stay away, my father said. I’ll do this myself. He walked over to the trunk where several ropes were lashed. He loosened the one tied to this chain and hook and let them lower to the ground. Then he knelt at the dead man’s feet. Work boots, not hiking boots, and jeans. My father lay the hook between these boots and then wrapped the chain around the man’s ankles, pulled each wrap tight and then skewered the chain on the hook, anchoring it in place. His face intent, studying his task, a jeweler setting a stone.

Okay, he said, and then he went back to the trunk and heaved on that rope. The sound of chain links sliding over the crossbeam above. The dead man’s feet rising up, legs coming off the ground. He kept his legs straight, cooperating, not wanting to make a fuss.

My father wrapped the rope around the trunk and held it with one hand, used the other to sweat the line. And so the legs of the dead man rose in jerks that caved but each time found him a little higher, until his waist was off the ground and the pale skin of his stomach exposed as his shirt fell away.

Dried caked blood on his skin but the whiteness apparent anyway. An illumination beneath. We were at the edge of that forest, the dry yellow grass of the meadow just beyond us radiating, a brightness that severed that part of the world, and the dead man belonged to that place already. He was not where we found him but could trick the eye. And he was turning now, a slow spin as his shoulders came free.

My father heaved at the line as the weight increased. Hard jerks, and the dead man turned until his back showed to us, the shirt and vest fallen away, and that cavern a dark eye iridescent and moving. His head was free then jammed back into the ground then free again and lifting, and his arms lifting, and he kept turning and we saw again the white luminous belly covered in a dried dark film.

My father heaving backward on that rope, pulling at an enormous bow, facing away from the dead man as if they had separate labors. The dead man’s arms swirling against the ground dreamily, mouth open in rapture. And then he was gone to us again and again we saw that cavernous eye in glints blue and green.