She extended her arm toward the edge of the clearcut where the stone wall followed the road. “Is that a deer down there?”

My father hadn’t been blessed with much in life, but he’d always had spectacular eyesight. He could make a headshot on a buck, without a fixed scope, from a distance of half a mile. I’d inherited his blue eyes and his 20/10 vision.

“It’s a man,” I said.

He was too distant for me to make out beyond his form (short and wiry) and the color of his clothing (navy blue), but those details were all I needed to make an identification.

“It’s Bruce Jewett.”

“I shouldn’t say this,” Felice said, “but I’m almost glad they made a mess of his land. The racist piece of shit. I tell Levi not to go down there because he’s probably got it landmined. That’s not legal, is it? To booby-trap your property?”

“No, it isn’t.”

Not that it didn’t happen. Years earlier, I had been present when a fellow warden tripped a wire strung along the perimeter of a marijuana grow and set off an improvised explosive device. The horrific memory—of a man torn in half—still visited me on bad nights.

The nightmarish image stuck in my mind now. Earlier I had been reminded of that botched raid on the dealers’ compound. It must have been the horror stories people had been telling me about Pill Hill. There was something of the same hateful vibe here as I’d encountered in those trip-wired woods.

From the top of the bluff, Felice and I watched the solitary figure standing amid the stumps and waste. In Jewett’s stillness I saw the posture of a man trying to process a sight that defied belief.

He didn’t want this to happen.

“What else do you know about Jewett?” I asked.

“His crazy mother lives with him. She got out once and was running around naked. People still laugh about it. Misfortune is cause for great merriment among the Dillons.”

“You disapprove?”

“Of course I disapprove. I’m not a monster.”

Jewett wandered out of view. A minute later, I heard a four-stroke engine roar to life. A yellowish snowmobile appeared and disappeared where the road curved below the woodlot.

“I’m surprised he dared leave her alone again,” Felice said. “Although maybe it would have been for the best if she’d frozen to death.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“My worst fear is that my dad becomes like that—although maybe it’s not the worst thing, to forget the pain of your life.”

I was having a hard time taking the measure of this woman. On the one hand, I enjoyed our conversation. She was witty and intelligent, and although she was more cynical than I was, her life story made a compelling case for her worldview.