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would be tangy and sweet at the same time.
    The rifle was in the rack by the door and he took it down, as well as the box of shells from the shelf on the gun rack. John knew he wouldn’t need the whole box so he just took out five cartridges, brassy and shiny with copper bullets tipped in silver, and dumped them in the top pocket of his jacket. He decided he would load in the woods.
    He waited.
    â€œâ€¦ It’s going to be all right.”
    He thought about that and knew that she was wrong. It wasn’t going to be all right. A part of him knew that his grandfather was going to end, end and be gone. But there was that small edge of hope in her voice, hope which she held the way a drowning person holds a stick. And John would not damage that hope, so he nodded and smiled. “I know, I know. I’ll see you when I get back.”
    Outside, the cold hit him again, harder because he’d been in and his body had gotten used to the warm kitchen and the warm food. He felt it come in around his cuffs past the mittens, around the back of his neck.
    By the barn he could see the glow from the lantern and he thought of going to say goodbye to his grandfather, but he would be busy and it would bother him.
    Instead John wheeled left off the porch and walked straight north from the house across the pasture until he came to the trees that marked the edge of the woods.
    Just inside the tree line he stopped and loaded the rifle, sliding the cartridges into the side-loading gate slowly, carefully. When all five were in the tube magazine he worked the lever once and brought a shell up into the chamber. Then he let the hammer down to the safety half cock and cradled the gun in the crook of his arm and paused, getting a feel for the morning and the woods.
    It had stopped snowing and there was a gray light from false dawn coming off the snow. It still wasn’t light enough for hunting, but close, very close, and he knew that by the time he reached the edges of the great swamp there would be enough light to see the sights of the rifle.
    The woods were still. The new snow took down sound the way a blanket would, holding sound low and muffled, and with the freshness for tracking and the quiet it was nearly a perfect morning for hunting deer.
    He turned his back on the farm and headed into the woods.

SIX

    John knew there were many ways to hunt deer. Some hunters drove them into other men who were posted with guns. Others walked around until they saw a deer and tried to shoot it. Still others picked a spot near a deer trail and stood and waited for a deer to come along.
    And now and then a hunter would use thestalking method—move quietly on fresh tracks and try to catch a deer off guard. This final method was very difficult to do successfully and demanded total concentration and complete knowledge of deer.
    John used a combination of methods—he did some stalking and some standing. He would move through the woods as quietly as possible for a distance—perhaps a quarter of a mile—and then he would stop and stand for a time, usually half an hour or so.
    He had learned it from his grandfather.
    â€œYou have to think deer,” Clay had told him. “You have to think deer, you have to be deer inside your head. Be quiet, move quiet, and be deer.”
    The country he was hunting was very good deer country but hard to hunt. His grandfather’s farm lay on the edge of a huge peat swamp-bog that covered all of northern central Minnesota. The bog extended over two counties, and in the spring and summer it was a mucky quagmire that had defied people forever. Ducks and geese nested there by the thousands; moose and timber wolves and deer lived on spruce “islands” that stuck above the level of the swamp.
    It was not a place, in the summer, where life was easy. Even the deer and moose and small game had trouble. Deer were discovered wandering blind from the ravaging flies that chewed at their eyes, and