It was always different when his mother was gone and the house was full of men. The air was cooler and it was quieter and you didn’t eat the same. There was less talking and more doing and if he was honest with himself he didn’t know which he liked more or which was worse—a house full of men or one without the presence of a woman. He just knew that he thought more carefully when his house was a house without a woman. You just did what you did and you didn’t talk much about it. You tried to be the same but you were different. And then you thought about what was different. Not just about you, but about everything. Everything was different. It let you see things for what things were.

In town the meat of deer and rabbit and pheasant hung in butchers’ windows like in laboratories, skinned and taut and wiry, like you were peeking behind a curtain, glancing where you weren’t supposed to—and that was different. Cow’s milk clinked in bottles at the foot of doors, and boys like Barstow Little (though not Barstow) ran the frothy liquid from cart to step, stacking empties, swabbing sweat, trudging road, waving; at neighbors folding newspaper; at nipping dogs; at eyes on their deliveries, for the poor were many. And that, too, was different. Women purchased parts and pieces of fowl—breast, wing, thigh, neck bone, wattle, hackle—but In Jackson the parts remained intact, limbed to the creatures from which they grew. Jackson was not in town and in town was not Jackson. In town you took the back roads on gizzards and keratinized claws, lizard-skin feet and shiny cartilage toes, and the blood of animals did not seep below your fingernails. In Jackson death was not unnatural. Death was, and Barstow lived in the world of was. In fact, most of the families in Jackson lived there too.

That outside the window Barstow’s goat Petunia stood stiff under the snow, then, was not unnatural, even if it was premature. He had raised Petunia from when she’d been a kid until the previous evening, when one of his uncles slit Petunia’s throat, let the life bleed out of her. The blood drained, neck to dirt, black-black in the moonlight. Petunia had gone to one knee then both. Like she was setting down for the evening. Barstow had put his palm on her belly, felt her go. Soon the warmth went. Now there was just her without her, white and black, a spattering of crimson along a hedge.

Petunia, if she wasn’t Petunia, would have been dressed. But the way it happened, none of it was right. And so it was wrong. They buried her out behind the hog pens, stamped the dirt, shimmied a boulder on top. Wasted meat. They all knew it. But Barstow’s father said, What’s right is right. So they buried her in the ground. And for the rest of his life he did not know which uncle was the worse of the two.

He had not slept half the night, thinking of Petunia, glancing out the window, hoping she would rise, dust herself, trot to the barn. He’d been told to forget about it. He stared out the window for a long while, waking, watching frost build, listening to nothing, falling asleep, thinking of the goat.

Before dawn it snowed. The Douglas firs iced up, turned white. They stole the view of the horizon. The cold put hurt in the air, made your fingers taut like bone. Froze the lake. The cows wobbled over the grazing land, slipping on hardened earth. They struggled. But they had struggled before.

Barstow rubbed his wrists over his eyes. His breath gray in front of his face. His feet, the tip of his nose, cold and numb. He sat up, stretched his spine to cracking. The snowflakes shimmered like confetti. Flitted like silver leaf in the slits of light from the kitchen.

He forgot about Petunia. Icicles fell from carts that lay in the yard, blown along the road. Bison down on haunches, you didn’t look direct. Sometimes he imagined they were bison, not carts, stiff calves, heat sucked out and gone. Sometimes he dreamed steam rising from the pelage. Sometimes could be all times.

And there were noises. Crackling. Crashing. Sounds all his life. Plangent rustling—of colt muzzles in troughs; of metal buckles; of sodden wood; of the splashing of ebon water puffing dully on powder dirt. The sound glass made when it shattered. He had seen this, or he had heard it. A man thrown through a window. Another man, sticky-faced, staring out, bloodshot, frost-cheeked, torn, pulled like strop. Falling chunks of heavy ice. Thumps. Smashing. Something of these a fear lolling in his chest. The dread of the night. As if it could walk right into the day. These were the sounds of what was. His was.

It was dark. It warmed. The sun rose, and the frost on the awnings thawed. Dripping, black, sad sagging pine. Barstow rubbed his nose, yawned. His knee cracked as he straightened it. Voices crept through slender gaps in the planks below his feet.

He rubbed his elbow over the window, peeked out through the frost. The light from the kitchen a sharp triangle on the snow. Downstairs, heavy boots. Clunked from the stove (There was coffee—always coffee) to the sink to the ice box to the table, back and forth. Joseph, Nathan, his father’s brothers, sitting to breakfast. His mother gone to MomMom’s in Sampson, thirty miles to the hills. Barstow’s father said leave the boy, Joseph and Nathan visiting. They would go hunting. Barstow had been, was, excited. This was the day. It had finally come after so long of not coming.

Barstow’s father and uncles were talking, their voices long, drawn out, syrupy from too little sleep. A grumbling, toads in mason jars. Later, their throats smooth, woken, Joseph and Nathan would laugh and guffaw, tell dirty jokes Barstow would laugh at even when he did not understand. It was like that with them. Forever it had been this way.

“Boy thinks it’s funny,” Joseph would say.

“Bet he does,” his father would say. And they would look at each other.

Barstow took a deep breath, rose from under the covers. Wiggled into his overalls.

At the bottom of the stairs the double barrel leaned against the wall. The double barrel with his grandfather’s and father’s initials carved in the stock. His father left it ready. Later that day, at the end of the day, maybe his name beside theirs.

The door, ajar, light from the kitchen onto the brown of the shotgun’s forearm. Barstow could think of nothing else. Not Petunia nor the cold nor anything.

He had come from behind the door without the double barrel when Joseph said Morning from behind his coffee. The room was badly lit; steam hissed over the stove. Barstow shuffled his socked feet over the cold floor. He wiped his eyes, said morning to his father and uncles. The light by the table, so bright from his room, was dim and yellow. His toes were cold, throbbed. He looked to the door; his boots were on the front porch, where he had left them the night before.

He walked to the kitchen table, a small hole in his wool sock at the right ankle. Nathan mussed his hair, tangled it more than it was; his father put a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of coffee before him, fussed in the icebox. Outside, the brittle leaves rattled, scattered along the ground. Made the sound of rain.  Tumbleweed rolled along, caught dead on chicken wire.

“Eat,” said Nathan, his hands pressed against a steaming mug. “Hunger’ll be buildin up afore you know it. Ain’t time later.”

“Sir,” said Barstow.

His uncles, as a rule, gregarious. Unlike his father. Different. Barstow in trouble, his uncles lessened the trouble. Kidded him. Joshed him. Passed him lumps of rock candy, sweets from their towns, towns they’d ridden through.

“Old bitch Ree, she’ll stay skinny fetching, but you, you’ll need every hunk of meat on you you can get.”

Nathan had a full beard that was red and black and blonde. The beard unkempt, long, coarse ragweed; the moustache did not connect with the rest of the beard. Looked liked he shaved below his lips, above his chin. His legs were long, bold-legged, chest half a drum. His body met his head with no neck. A dusty Stetson, wide brim, barbless hook on one side, lain by his feet. Scar split his lip, climbed the right side of his cheek like shelving. An accident. An altercation in a saloon. Many things. Mostly the product of life lived in shadow.

Nathan lived in Wapiti, visited like clockwork. Always empty pockets, needing loans on this, that. Always strident. Always blusterous. Joseph, the responsible of the two, eased up, let the lead for Nathan to bark and peacock, tiresome as it was—and it was. All he’s got, Joseph said. Big mouth, garrulous as a hen mid-pluck. Could be he goes out, mouth gets lost in the woods.

But Nathan was good to Barstow. While Joseph and his father put up fencing and branded animals, tended to goats, sheep, cut wood for the fire, tilled the earth, Nathan walked with Barstow and sometimes his mother, out on the trails overlooking the farm. With Nathan Barstow saw his mother smile, saw the happy and silly and jovial faces she made when she pet and nuzzled him as a child, laughing when Nathan pretended to lose footing on the slippery rocks in the creek, when he talked to the chickens like they were people, kneeling down, bent his arms like wings, clucking Hellos and How-are-you’s to the hens running scared. Nathan had good ways.

The walks went on for a long time. But once Barstow took to carving squirrel and pika with his knife to sell in town and at the fairs, the walks were mostly just Nathan and Barstow’s mother, until one day Joseph said something to Nathan loud and his mother walked away like she forgot something on the stove. And then there were no more walks. From then on, when Nathan was around, his mother tied her apron tight around her waist, set a pot to cook, headed to the barn. Sat for long stints, milking cows, gathering eggs, sweeping the coop. Found things to do until the pot was done and she fed everyone and went to her room to read from different verses, different chapters, until it was time to blow out the candles and turn in for the evening, Barstow’s father sitting quiet by the stairs smoking in the dark. The walks with Nathan faded away. The smiles faded too. Time passed, but still this was not long ago.

The morning was bitter and empty, felt abandoned. Tobacco spit sat heavy on the kitchen sill, half-frozen in a crushed tin. Wind swept the plains, through rows of corn stalk, fluttering clothes lines hung between the trunks and branches of Poplar. Grass that was thick in summer gathered cow-licked, honey-combed and stiff.

Joseph walked outside bare-chested, pale white skin at dawn, tied a string to the dash rail of a crippled wagon. He was the only person Barstow knew tied anything to carriages for luck. Did it every year. Every year seemed to work. Always did well. Always brought home the lot of the ducks.

Joseph, the oldest Little, a cattleman’s cattleman. Earned his living, kept what he had, never loaned Nathan a nickel. Barstow’s father the one threw Nathan charity. Never excess. That he could not do. Excess or not, the only rub this, between he and Joseph.

Barstow stirred the oatmeal in front of him. He looked out the window. Ash black ebbing blue. The snowmelt trill along aluminum siding a frisson in his ears. The siding on the doghouse. Sagging oak, rusted tack and nail. Pushed in a slump beneath a shed. Basho, a hunting poet said his father, got the cancer—stomach, pancreatic, blood, who knew, all the lumps and pain in her—and was gone; Miss Ree, Nathan’s female black Lab pup, now sat behind a winter flap of old scrap sac material, ears rising, falling, waiting for Up…Up, until Miss Ree ran up, got in back of a wagon or clunker, whatever they headed out in. How Nathan came to have acquired Miss Ree a question. A question left unasked. The dog was too loved.

Joseph eyed Barstow, raised his palms. He said, “Where’s it at?” His teeth yellow, capped brown.

Barstow tried to smile. It was difficult to rise his cheeks. He was not awake. Not fully.

“Back a the door,” said Barstow. “I left it there for I got to get the case yet.”

“Give us a looksee,” said Joseph.

Nathan interrupted. He said, “Eat your breakfast first. Joseph will wait till your plate’s clean.”

Joseph looked at Nathan, at Barstow.

He said, “Nathan is right. You need to finish what’s on your plate afore you get from the table.”

He took a bite of toast and a sip of coffee. He said, “I ain’t never been no good at them type things way Nathan seems to be.”

Joseph sucked his teeth, took a long breath, long exhale. Leveled his eyes at the window. Barstow did not think Joseph sincere. Something in the way he’d gestured to Nathan, chin lifted, mouth pinching one side.

Joseph’s face was clean and shaven and pink. His face looked the same in the cold or in the heat, as if he were embarrassed or just pulled from a cold river. His cheeks sloped outward from his jaw in smooth, round mounds; had the look of a man who never grew old, could be fifty or twenty and no one would ever know which.

When Barstow was younger Joseph played Santa Claus on Christmas morning at The Church of the Pines, children gathered before him like the Pied Piper. But that was long in the past, even now. Make believe was gone. Barstow forgot the red and the white and he forgot the beard too. Strong constitutions prevailed. Fairy tales, forget them. His father, a hand on his cheek. Calloused. Warm. Direct.

And so he stopped dreaming. He took trips to the world outside, trees and bark, musty winds, deep pools of drowned leaves turned yellow and brown. Afternoons of silence. A harsh world; a real world. Their world.

Barstow sipped his coffee, looked at his father. His body solid and strong. Not what it had been, only enough. His father, laying ham and cheese and bacon on hard bread, wrapping the sandwiches in paper, stacking one atop the other. Stuffed and pressed into a leather sack. When he was done with the sandwiches he slapped the crumbs from his battered palms, took a sip of his coffee, gazed at the black out the window. Blue eyes watered at the corners. Crow’s feet slicing leather skin. Other men, the blue maybe indifference. In him, knowledge. Understanding. In the rustling and howling beyond, Barstow’s father watched the invisible; a quiet moment, an understanding, him and what looked back. Nothing else.

Barstow blew on his coffee, watched his father, his uncles. Their hands so big, so strong, calloused. Inured. Torn up hands of labored men, labored rough, all their lives. Memories of their hands slick with elk and hare and pheasant blood, tearing hides, plucking feathers, yanking innards. He could see it all now, a painting from a book—seasons changing, men with sweating bodies covered in entrails; beer bottles scattered about; cigarette smoke whirling in the wind as the men from whose lips they hung cut away at the hard bodies of still beasts taken from deep within the woods. But they were not men in paintings; they were his uncles, his father. All the men who lived and worked in a world they struggled to keep some part of.

Barstow placed his bowl and cup into the sink, swished water over them. His father and uncles were now round back, loading shotguns, jackets, boxes of shot, jugs of water. Barstow walked to the porch, sat on the bench. Laced his boots. In the lightless morning, his breath blew out cold and gray. His hands were stiff and hurt and slow. The wind blew on his neck. He body shivered. He went back inside, grabbed the double barrel from behind the door, went to the barn to get its case. The double barrel was heavy, the steel cold in his hands, but he’d held it many times before, imagining and looking forward to this day, which had come so quickly. Too quickly, maybe. Maybe the day was still in his dreams, maybe he would awake and it would be yesterday and maybe he would still be as excited as he’d thought he’d be now. Maybe Petunia would be alive, her gray whiskers, coal-black eyes, looking at him stupidly.

He put the double barrel into its case and buttoned it up at the bottom. He joined his father and uncles, who were finishing loading up.

Barstow sat by Nathan in the back seat, his father driving, his uncle Joseph in the passenger seat. Joseph’s hand on his chin. Staring at the turned leaves falling off the trees. The sun rising over Camel’s Hump to the east. Scrub brush in darkened patches along the hillsides.

They bumped over rocks and branches. They saw the woods and boulders along the road, but they could not dodge all of it, and though they were under a fog of dark and shade, the light was getting brighter, illuminating the green and orange and yellow and browns all around. The men did not speak for a long while. Then Nathan asked if he could smoke.

Barstow’s father said no. Nathan looked at Barstow, smiled. Shook his head. Smoked an invisible cigarette. He put his hand over his heart, bent over pretending to be in pain. Barstow smiled, looked back out the window, to the base of Camel’s Hump, where he saw movement just a ways up. A buck and two does scampering toward a cluster of aspen beyond the road, below a broken, fenced-in wooden blind someone had built and forgotten. For a second the animals stood, peering down at the road like mythical beasts from far far away, the sockets of their eyes black beads on their faces, the length of their bodies sleek, insipid beige against the hill, the sagebrush. A few quick trots and gone into the brush.

Barstow looked ahead. He looked at the back of his father’s head. Thick, short, graying hair. Solid tree-trunk neck. He rubbed his hands on the denim of his overalls. The truck slowed down, bobbled, skidded over a rocky dirt road. The black waters of Kincaid’s reservoir, a fog over its glassy skin. Fifty ducks—mallards, wood ducks, green-winged teal, waded from one bank to the other.

Barstow’s father eased the vehicle to a small opening thirty yards from the road. Before approaching the reservoir, the three men and Barstow walked to a cluster of headstones tucked under brush and weeds a good walk into the woods. Joseph eased himself to one knee. Tangled foliage over stone. He brushed branches and leaves and snow from one of the stones with his coat sleeve. Said something that could not be heard.

“That’s your Great-Grand daddy,” said Nathan. He nodded, motioned Barstow to go nearer. “This here man, damn he fought in the war of eighteen-twelve.”

Joseph spit into his hands, wiped faint lettering on the stone.

Nathan said, “E’er an American patriot, he here’s it.” He looked at Barstow, slapped the boy’s back. Smiled at his big eyes.

Joseph put a finger on the base of Barstow’s neck. “Old man got shot in right there, right near his spine. Lived another thirty years. Tough son of a bitch, your gran’daddy.”

Joseph stood up, tapped another headstone. He wiped his knees with his hands.

His father and Joseph touched his Great Grand-Daddy’s stone. Barstow’s father looked at Joseph. Joseph was looking at the smaller stone. Joseph nodded for a long time. He turned away and they began towards the reservoir, dark shadows walking to the fog on the surface.

Barstow squatted in front of the stone, brushed a patch of dirt from the date. He smoothed his fingers over the broken, dark stone, over the words Lucas Marshall Little, Veteran of The War Of 1812. Under that: 1784-1842. Barstow pulled vines off the smaller gravestone beside his Great-Grandfather’s. He tried to read the names, the dates. Jos—it read, but was worn away. The grave of a child. He cut his fingers on thorns pushing apart the obstruction of leaves and vine. His father said Hey, boy, and Barstow knew he had to go. He started through the woods, then ran back. Chipped a piece of Lucas Little’s stone. He put the piece of stone into his sock, where he would keep it until they returned home later that night.

The three men and the boy approached the reservoir slowly. They kneeled behind trees and brush. Barstow’s father led the group, pushed through the green as quiet as he could. The brush and grasses were damp and cold and quickly soaked up into all of their trousers. Cooled their wrists under their sleeves. Barstow’s father stood on his toes and panned the reservoir. His eyes one end to the other. His eyes slow, memorizing the brush, the weedy surface, the dips along the bank. He pointed to the east end, where beige, dried up stalks of corn listed like scarecrows. He looked back at Nathan, at Joseph.

“That way,” he said. “No damn sound. Me and the boy coming round here.”

He pointed to a path enshrouded by tall stalks and thick bundles of saltbush.

“We’ll take the first shots. You’ll get them heading your way, take your shots. If

them ducks are dumb ducks, they’ll swing right back to me and Barstow, and we’ll get a few more.” He looked at Joseph, then Nathan.

“Understood,” said Joseph.

“All right,” said Nathan.

Barstow’s father turned, looked him in the eyes. Blue as ice, face without expression. He said, “You ready for your first teal, boy?”

“Sir,” said Barstow.

“Load your shells,” said his father.

The Little men began with teals, had for generations. They were smaller than mallards, harder to shoot, and it was just nicer to have shot a teal as your first duck. It wasn’t that difficult, but if he walked out of there with at least one teal the day was going to be a good one.

They walked into the weeds. The wind blew strong and howled and Barstow cinched his jacket up as far as it would go. He unbuttoned the long, forest-green case, pulled the double barrel from it. He pushed the hammer to the right and lowered the barrel gently, pointing it at the packed dirt at his feet. He reached inside his pocket, pulled shells from its depths, holding the shotgun by the action. He looked at the red casings, the smooth folds of the crimping, the bronze of the base, where underneath he knew his father had packed the wad, the pellets, the charge, the primer. How many times had his father let him watch him load cartridges in the barn, his father standing before a long wood table, tools laid out all over, him on a stool at his side, breathing in the smell of oil, burnt wood, the tinge of adhesives ablaze in his nostrils.

They set off two and two around the reservoir. Joseph led Nathan by a few yards, taking long, hard strides to make it to the other side before Barstow and his father made it to the make-shift blind on the west end of the reservoir. Nathan scratched his neck as he walked, rubbed behind his ear with the brim of his cap. Held his shotgun like he wasn’t supposed to, like Barstow’s father said never to hold it ever.

They saw the blind once they were up along the side of the reservoir; two big pieces of broke-up plywood nailed together by wood braces, covered in duckweed and branches. From up above the ducks could not tell the difference between it and the dry, desolate wasteland. An old brace lay half off half on gray-black weeds flanking the thin bank.

Barstow’s father put a finger to his lips. Waved Barstow around in front.

“Walk along on the outside of those weeds,” he said. “I wave you on, cut towards the lip.”

“Um-hm,” said Barstow.

Miss Ree stood motionless at Barstow’s father’s side. When he tapped his thigh, Miss Ree approached with prudence. She took slow steps, crept on the trampled weeds and broken twigs and bent stalks. Her black body brushed the bushes; prickly white flowers gathered by her ears, on her upper thighs. Her coat reflected what little there was of a weak sun.

“Up a ways,” whispered Barstow’s father. “Cut’em off.”

Barstow crept like Miss Ree, slow through the toughened weeds that poked at his legs. He tottered after stepping on a hidden rock, caught his balance with the barrel of the shotgun. Barstow opened the action, checked the barrels were clear.

His father motioned to the lip. Barstow changed direction. Even with the low haze of fog snaking the bank, Barstow could see clearly across the dirty water Nathan holding a section of barbed wire tall enough for Joseph to lean down over, then Joseph doing the same for Nathan. They passed through the wire, made their way close to some bushes where they could duck down and hide and wait for ducks overheard.

Barstow’s father made straightaway for the water and the ducks, lifting his legs over the shorter weeds and bushes. The ducks were dipping their heads under the water, sticking their bottoms in the air. He did not tell Barstow to rush, but Barstow rushed and when he brushed the weeds with his jacket the ducks heard him and popped out of the water. A monstrous flapping of wings that sounded like someone beating a thousand rugs.

His father took a shot and a duck fell and then he took another shot and another duck fell. Barstow shot up in a crowd of ducks, but he did not focus on any duck and he did not lead any of them either. The BBs flew behind their wings, out into open sky. Then he saw a lone mallard a ways from the other birds. It was smaller than the other mallards that were in the air. He led it and shot, and to his surprise the duck froze in the air, hit a wall. The duck fluttered into a patch of brush.

“Down!” yelled Barstow’s father, hiding himself in a squat. “Reload, boy.

Reload!”

Barstow heard his father and obeyed. He kneeled down, opened the action on the shotgun. A spent case popped out into the weeds in a whirl of smoke. He pulled the other casing from the barrel. He took two shells from his jacket pocket, loaded the barrel, closed the action and waited. He looked out past the bushes to where his uncles now shot, watched the ducks fall from the sky into the water and onto the ground. He looked over to where his mallard had fallen. He could not see the duck, but the weeds were quivering and he did not know if it was the wind or the dying duck that made them quiver. He was excited about taking his first duck even if it was not a teal.

“Get ready,” his father said.

Barstow gripped the forearm of the shotgun, put his finger over the trigger guard. The ducks were swinging back now, heading south in their arc, away from them. But then they turned and swooped back in towards them. Barstow’s father said “Wait, wait…” and then stood up and yelled “Now!” but though Barstow stood up, and though he could have taken more ducks pretty easily, he pointed behind the ducks to make sure he didn’t hit any and then shot. He turned back, pretending to lead the ducks. But again he followed them from behind instead of leading them from where they would go and again he shot behind them. His father took two shots also, but only one duck fell, and Barstow knew it was a large male mallard his father had killed.

“Down!” yelled his father again. “Down and reload!”

Again Barstow knelt to the ground. Again he popped the spent cases and reloaded. But this time the ducks flew off into the horizon and eventually they were out of sight completely.

Miss Ree was sitting, but she was wagging her tail and jerking her head all over and he could see she was anxious to hunt.

Barstow’s father panned the sky and Nathan and Joseph stood.  Barstow’s father looked at him and smiled. He said, “Tell’er H-U-N-T, boy. Go’head.”

Barstow said, “Miss Ree,” and Miss Ree looked at Barstow and stood, but did not move. He yelled, “Hunt, girl, hunt,” and Miss Ree sprinted down the lip of the reservoir and jumped into the water in a splash, holding her chin up. She swam out to a wood duck flapping one of its wings in a pathetic slap against the surface of the water. Miss Ree snatched the duck in her mouth and started for another duck that was trying to swim towards some weeds, but Barstow’s father yelled, “Get…get…,” and Miss Ree turned in a circle and swam back to him where he stood at the edge of the bank.

Barstow walked to his father, who pulled the duck from Miss Ree’s mouth. “Hunt,” he said, and Miss Ree ran back and jumped into the water.

“Good dog,” said Barstow’s father. “Doesn’t never puncture skin.”

His father held the shot duck in front of him. The duck was shot in the back and flapped its wing, its bill slightly open; bright red blood dripped slowly from its lower bill in thick drops. Barstow’s father banged the duck’s head on the stock of his shotgun. The duck’s neck went limp. He held the duck by its webbed feet, where he would not get any blood on his hands.

“Let’s get the rest of them ducks,” he said. “Then we’ll go sit in that blind and wait for the next bunch to come up over.”

They gathered the ducks and Miss Ree seemed as happy as Barstow had ever seen her. This was Miss Ree’s second year of hunting, even though it was Barstow’s first. Miss Ree knew exactly what to do, even if in her excitement she took to disobeying what she was told.

Nine ducks so far, five mallards, two wood ducks, two green-winged teal. Both of the teals had been taken by Joseph. The mallards were the largest. Their plumage was the prettiest. Their breasts were plump and firm and malleable.

Barstow thought of his mother. She would think the ducks were pretty, even if they were dead. Or because of it. She found the oddest things pretty always. When people admired the bright oranges of mountain dandelions, the soft pinks of red pussytoes, his mother plucked them for their fuzzy white leaves, threw away the flowers whose colors, she said, would fade. When salesmen called with their black cases, wagons bursting with Chinese tea sets of jade and gold, ornate hat boxes with their fancy contents, she admired the shelves that folded out like steps, the wheels that supported the heavy loads. The salesman always nodded politely, sorry to have wasted her time. Packed up and left without a sale.

Barstow grabbed two of the ducks by their necks. He put them down after their sickly warmth crept into his hands. He had not expected them to be warm, though it made sense they would be. They placed the ducks in the weeds on top of the blind. The four of them sat inside the blind, happy to have taken so many ducks. The men spoke few words, but many filled Barstow’s thoughts. The bloodied bill of one of the wood ducks hung over the blind, peeking, Barstow thought, at the men who had ended its life.

“You don’t get a teal, take one of your uncle’s,” said Nathan.

“The boy will get his own,” said his father.

“Just saying,” said Nathan.

“A man earns his own,” said Joseph. He looked at Nathan.

“The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,” said Nathan.

That morning, three more teals and a lone mallard flew over the blind. All were taken by Joseph and Nathan. No one said anything about Barstow’s misses on any of them, only that he needed to lead the birds if he were to become any good. The sun began warming and the fog that lingered over the surface of the reservoir slowly melted away and soon the sky darkened with clouds and it began to rain. Again, the ducks began landing, flapping their wings and putting their feet forward as they hit the water.

Joseph told Nathan follow him back to the other side of the reservoir.

“That’s just foolish,” said Nathan. “I ain’t looking to get soppin wet.”

“Leave the boy and his pa to the blind,” said Joseph. “We’ll all of us have us a better shoot if we close off the reservoir from both sides like before.”

Nathan shook his head and took a deep breath and stood. “Gonna get a damn ammonia,” he said. “Then what?”

“Stop your whining and get,” said Joseph.

“Stop your whining and get,” said Nathan.

Joseph and Nathan walked out of the blind as the rain started coming down. It seemed to Barstow only a minute had gone by from when they were in the sunlight to now, where it was dark as night. Thunder cracked once off in the distance, but mostly it was just heavy rain and clouds. He watched his uncles pull their hats down over their faces, tighten up their coats. Joseph pointed for Nathan to go off in one direction, and he burrowed through heavy weeds off to the north.

The rain let up some, slowed to a fine drizzle. There was still little light out and plenty of ducks and his father told him to start shooting. All at once everyone started shooting, but Barstow had had enough and he aimed right at the ducks knowing he would miss them. Instead he shot in the air and watched his father, who seemed to be hitting everything he aimed at. He looked across the reservoir, saw Nathan. Nathan pointed up with his shotgun and took a large duck, squatted down to reload. Barstow ducked down into the bushes to reload as well, his father now back a ways, having walked from the blind with Miss Ree to collect some ducks that had fallen off into some corn stalks over to the east of where they were. He wanted to stay in the blind where he could sit, but chose to do as everyone else had and so he reloaded and made towards his uncles.

He could hear his father shooting, could hear shots coming from where his uncles had taken their spots. Soon he came to see Nathan again. He was standing in a small clearing in the weeds, leaning over two dead ducks, pulling spent shells from his shotgun and reloading. A teal popped up out of the water and was flying right towards his uncles, but before it reached them Barstow raised his shotgun and pulled the trigger and his eyes blinked, but he saw the teal hit the wall and he knew he’d hit it. I hit a teal, he thought. Well I’ll be.

The teal fell forward, not fifteen feet from his uncle. But Nathan did not seem to hear it; the rain was coming down hard. He was about to yell to Nathan, about to say Uncle Nathan, I hit my teal! when a rustling came from some weeds off to Nathan’s left. Nathan looked up, raised his shotgun, put it down when he saw it was Joseph. Nathan leaned down to pick up the ducks, and when he rose, a shot rang out and then another, but this one had come from Joseph’s direction and Nathan was no longer standing. It happened very fast.

Barstow was not sure he knew what had happened. Everything told him he saw something he could not have seen.

He looked over to where his father was, then back at his uncles. Nathan was on his back, splayed against some brush, his body pressing the small bushes down onto themselves. Joseph looked up with his eyes and saw Barstow, who let the shotgun dangle barrel down into the weeds and dirt, then looked back at Nathan, who lifted an arm to his chest, let it down again.

The clouds overhead thickened and the sky was dark and rain began falling heavier now. Barstow could hear his father and now saw him striding through the rain, unaware and happy. Bloodied mallards with beautiful plumage swayed at his side, dark green and blue and brown, their heads banging together as they stared down away from the sun that was hiding somewhere in the black of the sky. He called Barstow, who was holding a wood duck by its neck, holding the shotgun like he told him to never hold it. Barstow, he said. But the boy did not move. Barstow kneeled to the ground, looked up at his father, and looked back to where his teal had gone crashing down into the bushes and out of sight.