The dog sat down in the snow and licked at her blood. Grat made slings for the rifle and the canteen and walked eighteen miles in cold, squelching boots, through flannelbush and larkspur and vertical shafts of sunlight, until he got to a flatlands farm in Harmon’s Valley where a man with a neck beard named Judd Elwood was squatted against a fence post peeling the brown skin off an apple and into a paper sack. He had a two-horse team harnessed to traces and a heavy logging chain that was wrapped around an axe-trimmed sequoia. He turned when he heard Grat walk out of the forest and he looked on a mountain man, all coat and stubble and broad hat pulled down on his head, his rifle at slant on his arm.

“Did a posse stop by here the other night?” Grat asked.

The farmer squatted in snow and looked at the axe still stuck in the tree. “I suppose it was you they was cross with.”

Grat said, “Unhook your team and strip the harness off that near horse.”

The farmer grumbled and slammed his apple into the paper sack and did as he was told. My brother then stole a frozen gunnysack from the farmer’s shed and jars of preserves from the farmhouse cellar, dust puffing out from the sack when he tossed the plunder in.

So he could find out about himself, Grat rode the farmer’s horse from Merced to Tulare on the dirt road that is now concrete and Highway 99 and traveled by black Chevrolet coupes at 35 miles per hour. He had a skunk smell to him, his scalp hair was knotted, and his bristle beard had yellow seeds in it, so he could clomp down the board sidewalks of Tulare, raincoat over his mackinaw, and not be recognized by anyone but kin. Sheriffs stepped out of his way.

That afternoon a boy ran up to him with a note telling him to situate himself in the rear of a blue hotel that night. There he discovered an Indian pony with saddlebags crammed with hard biscuits and beef jerky and three canteens on the saddle horn. He gazed up to a second-storey window and nodded to my brother Bill who sat by a kerosene lamp.