“Hey, Uncle Rye.”
Another few more seconds of stink-eye, then Rye broke his brother’s stare and squatted down to acknowledge his nephew. “Hey, there, young man.” Rye reached out to hug the boy, but Cooper shuffled his son past him and up the front steps of the cabin. Rye stood, dropped his arms, and tucked his hands into his coat. He took another solemn look out at the sawtooth oaks and clusters of maple, and thought again on his grandfather. Picturing him standing there, doing the same thing Rye was doing now. Looking at the same trees. Feeling the same ache in his bones. It was going to be a long morning.
3.
“You got to keep stirrin’ those eggs,” Cooper said, taking the wooden spoon from his son. He carved off a chunk of butter and dropped it into the bubbling yellow mixture. “You keep stirrin’ it ’til it ain’t wet no more. Like this. See?”
“Yessir.” Gareth took the spoon back and did as he was shown.
Cooper fried some fatback and bacon in a cast-iron skillet and then served it up to his son and brother as if that pissing contest outside hadn’t just happened. That’s the way brothers do things. Gareth was the first to speak.
“Deddy said you killed a grizzly out by this ridge back in the day.”
“He said that, did he?” Rye looked at his brother, who sat shoveling eggs and fried meat into his mouth.
“Well, your deddy ain’t right. It wasn’t no grizzly. It was a brown bear.”
“Deddy said you killed it with one shot. He said nobody else could’a done that.”
“Well, I don’t reckon that’s true. You could’a took it down just the same.”
“How come you don’t got the head hanging up in here? That would sure be something to see.”
Rye waited for Cooper to answer that, but he didn’t look up from his food.
“Gareth, listen to me real good. That bear? I didn’t want to kill it. I didn’t do it to have something to see, or a story to tell. I killed it so we could make it through the winter. If you kill something on this mountain, you better have a damn good reason. We hunt for necessity up here. Fools hunt for sport. That bear kept us warm and fed us for months. I owed it that much. You understand what I mean by ‘I owed it’?”
“I think so.”
“I mean that I would have dishonored the life it led if I killed it just to have a trophy on that wall. That ain’t our way. We used every bit of it.”
“Even the head?”
“Even the head.”
Cooper piped up. “You hearing what your uncle is telling you, boy?”
Gareth nodded at his pa. “Yessir.”
“Good, ’cause that’s a lesson worth learnin’. Now, enough talking. Eat your breakfast so we can get on with it.”
They finished the rest of the meal in silence. As they ate, Rye studied Gareth’s face. It was perfectly round, with cheeks that stayed rosy no matter the weather, peppered with freckles. His eyes were set deep and narrow like his father’s. He’d have to open them real wide just for someone to tell the color. They were Cooper’s eyes. It was Cooper’s face, without the calico beard, or the grit . . . or the anger. Rye remembered when his brother looked like that. It felt like a hundred years ago.
When their bellies were full, the two older men grabbed their rifles and stretched cold-morning muscles. Cooper leaned down and adjusted the wool cap on his son’s head to cover the boy’s ears.
“You stay warm, and you stay close,” he said. “You get sick on me, your mama will have my ass in a sling.”
The boy nodded, but his excitement was setting in and his eyes were fixed on the long guns. His father had let him practice with the .22, to get used to the recoil and feel of the scope, but he wanted to carry a man’s gun.
“Do I get to carry a rifle, Deddy?” he said, scratching at the wool cap where his father had pulled at it.
“Well, I don’t reckon you can shoot anything without one,” Cooper said, and lifted a .30-30 rifle down from the stone mantel. The gun wasn’t new, but it was heavy and solid. Gareth took the weapon and inspected it like his father had taught him. He made a show of it to prove the lessons had stuck.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the three of them took to the woods.
4.
Cold dirt. That’s what morning smelled like on the mountain. The air was so thick with the smell of wet earth, it clogged Gareth’s nose. He tried breathing through his mouth, but within minutes he was licking grit off his teeth.
“Here,” Cooper said, and handed his son a blue bandana. “Tie this around your face, and breathe through it.”