One night in March, a year after we stopped going to school and Tim stopping bringing women home, Max warned us about a new danger. Tim was snoring away on the couch, and we had just turned off the bedroom light when Max started. It was a bunch of quick barks on a string of growls—the alarm.

“Wolves?”

We went to the window. He stopped sudden, and we knew something was wrong. Turned out these predators had hands that held knives and no sense of what was right, and they cut his throat mid-howl while he was on his lead. No animal would do that. It wasn’t fair. Max never had a chance. If he’d been loose, he could have chosen to stand his ground or run into the bush. These predators had a crooked sense of fair.

There was movement out by his pen, just past the vegetable patch. We went down the stairs and shook Tim awake.

“Huh, whatisit?” He rubbed his eyes, sitting up.

“Max,” we said together.

“Shit’s sake.” Tim threw the crocheted blanket off his lap and pushed past us to the door. He grabbed the rifle from the umbrella stand and a jacket off the hook, the screen door slamming behind him. We watched from the side window, his dark body lumbering across the grass toward the back corner where the trees began. We waited. After almost an hour, we found Max, throat slit, blood already thick in the gravel. No Uncle Tim. We walked the tree line, flashlights bouncing back to us off the trunks—nothing. We went back to the cabin and waited some more.

When the sun was up but behind clouds so the air itself was grey, we went back out. We walked for hours, weaving into each other’s paths through the bush, into a neighbor’s abandoned cornfield, the stalks all crispy so they broke when we pushed against them. Empty.

We stayed on the couch that night, TV volume turned down, listening for him cussing, dirty and maybe with a few pelts, making his way across the yard. We fell asleep there. Sometime near midnight, we heard them: footsteps. We watched at the window, but there was nothing to see.

“Might be hurt.”

We decided to go out, to meet him where he needed us. One went out the front door, the other out the back. We’d meet up and head to the back if we didn’t come across him. Neither one of us expected the way your neck crunches when you’re hit on the top of your head. The last thing we heard was:

“Got one!”

And then a loud whoop.

And then static.

We woke up hanging from ropes in a barn that still smelled of horseshit even though the horses were long gone. Maybe the voices woke us up, talking just outside the gapped walls.

“ Wasn’t enough for one family.”

“You wasted it.”

“We gotta get better at it. Take our time.”

“Spoiled the whole midsection when the guts were punctured. Gotta treat it like a deer.”