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whenever I feel stuck in my life or myself, I try to shiver or remember shivering.
    Everyone in town is asleep now but me, out here in this little shack on stilts where the cornfield meets the world, my own special private place at night. Oh, I know something that happened today. I was in the pantry alone in the late afternoon, separating the skin of a squirrel from its meat for a squirrel custard for the big pre-hunt banquet tomorrow night, which I will tell you more about later, when who should walk in but the Big Cheese or Chief, my father. “Daddy!” I said, and flung my arms around his neck. Though we’re both too old for it, he encircled my upper arms with his massive hands and swung me around the pantry. My feet swept three skinned squirrels to the pantry’s dirt floor. “Daddy, precious, could you do your Pocahontas a favor and fill the squirrel-rinsing bucket with fresh water?” He gave me a look that said, “I’m the commander in chief of an army of five hundred men.” I gave him a look that said, “I know, but it’d be really sweet if you would, it’d make me feel special.” He gave me a look that said, “It’s already a compromise for me to visit you in a pantry.” I gave him a look that said, “Pretty, pretty please?” He filled the bucket. I rinsed the squirrels. He said, “How are you?” I told you there are a million ways to say How are you? in the phatic language of my people, and yet my father chose your basic bland How are you? to signal he wasn’t there to put pressure on my ovaries, though why he was there I didn’t know, and still don’t.
    â€œI’m good,” I said. “How are you?”
    â€œI’m good.” You’re probably going, “Why’s she telling us they said how are you I’m good to each other?” but you have to understand how every little thing my dad does is always at least a little bit awesome, this enormous guy, king of all he looks at, Dad, so much more different from the air that surrounds him than are most people, who walk down the street and allow the air that’s in front of them to become them, even as the air in back of them ceases to be them. My dad is so not the air; it parts for him. Whatever he is standing near—sky, trees, houses, people—seems to organize itself in space around his body.
    â€œWell, I’m maybe not so good,” he said.
    My dad is not so good! Remember just now when I said how enormous my dad is? Well sometimes he’s so enormous that it’s like I’m inside him, which means that when he’s not so good, I’m not so good. “What’s the matter?”
    â€œI’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired of the hunt,” said Dad. “Can it all amount to something good?”
    â€œIt could.”
    â€œAre you answering me in rhyme now?”
    â€œAre you really asking me the question?”
    â€œYes. I don’t know. No. I’m tired. Another hunt. More running, throwing, shooting, stabbing, carrying, running.”
    â€œWhy don’t you ride a bike instead of running?”
    â€œI’m emotionally tired, is what I meant. Something bad is going to happen. Not on this hunt, maybe, but soon. We should be saving our strength for what’s coming but we can’t, we have to go on the hunt. The hunt is inevitable. What will follow the hunt is inevitable. Our fatigue and unpreparedness for what follows the hunt are inevitable. We are free to choose what to do, and our freedom is real, and our destiny is open and free, and each decision we make is inevitable.”
    â€œWant a neck massage?” I went to my dad and stood on a stool beside him and massaged his giant, hard neck, which was like massaging a cliff. “You smell sweet, like lavender,” I said.
    â€œYou smell like dead squirrel meat,” he said.
    My dad’s chief advisor, Dr. Sidney Feingold, the