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bundle. A fistful of small bills for a long day’s hard work. Miranda wondered why her father ever thought to buy a house here.
    “Just four hours from home. Easy highway drive. Stunning mountains. Great hiking. Wonderful fly-fishing. Good deer hunting,” she’d overheard him tell people.
    Only he didn’t do those things. Had never done those things. He had hiking boots that he wore around the property and into town, not into the mountains. Took a fly-fishing lesson once, then left the rod in the garage. They ate venison and trout, but these were bought from others, not acquired by his own hook or gun. He had camping gear, which her brother had used a few times with friends, but just on their own property, down by the river so they could smoke pot away from her parents. Alcohol was approved; marijuana was not. As far as Miranda could tell, mostly what her father had done when he was in the mountains was golf, read the paper, work at spreadsheets on his computer, and sip bourbon. The same things he did back in Connecticut.
    As she drove, Miranda remembered coming to these mountains for the first time when she was in grade school. Back then it was for summer camp, her memories a blur of other children, endless mostly competitive activities, and the overarching wish that she could just be alone. When she tried, wandering away from the hoots and howls, bathing suits and archery, campfires and cabins, into the cool woods nearby, she got in trouble and a counselor would yank her back with a firm grip on her arm as if she was about to fall off the edge of something. Then, after she stopped going to camp, sometime in her middle school years, her father bought land and began the protracted process of building their own “cabin.” The project ballooned into a three-thousand-square-foot, traditionally built log home with every modern convenience and significant nods to the great camp style. Real logs. Hand hewn. Notched. Chinked with old-fashioned oakum.
    Her father got no pleasure from the process, she recalled, continually damning the architect, the contractor, the site, the blackflies and mosquitoes, the schedule, the delays, the very land itself. But he stubbornly persevered, apparently determined to win against them all. Then, finally, it was done, their grand camp miraculously rising in stately fashion from two acres of cleared land hemmed in by the forest, with a garage and workshop adjacent and a path to a traditional lean-to down by the stream.
    For Miranda, the house was a kind of living, intimidating thing. She would place her palms on the logs, feel the warmth emanating from them, and imagine they had somehow stored the heat of the men’s hands who had worked on them. She appreciated that the home was handmade, but she did not like its imposition into a landscape she was falling in love with. She began to spend hours hiking whatever sloppy, root-riddled path she could find. She never tired of the deep comfort of the black mud and dark trees. She loved the subtle surprise of a clump of bright mushrooms, a patch of dogtooth violets, the scramble of a deer fleeing, the grock of a raven, or the wail of a distant loon. She marveled at the quantity of hidden ponds and quiet streams, the salamanders and frogs that reemerged from the silent winter into the damp spring, the gift of an unexpected vantage point at the crest of a tree-crowded hillside suddenly unveiling a new vista. She even admired the blackflies because, she reasoned, they kept other people away. Well, they kept summer people, tourists, people from the tristate area away. The locals and year-round residents just swatted at the bugs and waited for the clouds of irritants to dissipate.
    Even though she had been on these roads many times, Miranda drove carefully. She knew the dangers: sharp turns, leaping deer, drunk teenagers. She came into the small town nearest what she now thought of as her true home. Passed the Fishing Hole diner. The golf course and club.