I don’t know how long this should be, but I could keep going forever, linking one thought to the next, one image to the other. Ha—I can see the faces three weeks in the future and the collective look of horror at the idea that the speaker’s sheaf of papers might be endless, self-perpetuating. The sheaf is not, but the story is. And I hope you’ll notice also that there is no story. It’s simply thinking, focused thinking, with words attached to memories attached to images and the images linked to form the elusive, still-blurry idea at its core. I can’t yet separate it from the background.

Once at Yellowstone I sat on the ground to focus my scope on a pack of wolves off in the distance, and one of the scientists I was there with said in a snobby, disgusted voice, “When you’re on the ground, to a bear you look like an animal struggling.” Same shitty guy who acted surprised when I was the only one who could rock their Jeep out of the snowbank. Just because you live in New York doesn’t mean you weren’t born in the Midwest, fuckwad, where the wind is so cold you scream silently walking from your house to the car, battery under your arm, between snowbanks as tall as your tall father.

And there we are, back to the subject at hand? My father, telling me about the Kodiak bears, how he and his buddy saw them using their claws to spear a fish and then sharing it, back and forth. “Claws this long, honey,” he said, crooking his finger.

Weren’t you scared? I asked him.

“Well, we had our guns,” he admitted.

The pack of wolves in their radio collars, picked off one by one in the shoot-shovel-and-shut-up atmosphere outside the park. My own father, heading out each winter on a daylong hunting expedition with our dog, a little terrier otherwise found sleeping on the heating vent. Coming back with rabbits and squirrels, turning me into a vegetarian at a very young age. Once he fell through a lake that he thought was snow. We were round-eyed, listening to the story of our dad dropping through the ice, the terrier barking wildly at the hole, bubbles rising and him reaching upward for the edge and hauling himself out, building a fire and stripping naked—our dad naked! outside in the snow!—to dry himself and his clothes before he could make the long walk back to the car, carrying Yimmer, as always, because she wore out halfway through. And then another time, a few years later, him coming home from hunting and handing the gun to my mother. “You might as well sell it,” he said grimly, “because I’ll never use it again.”