When he drove off I was alone in the mountains and that was how I wanted it to be. I was waterproofed from head to toe and had some candy bars in my pocket.

I walked down through the trees, trying to kick a deer out of the dry thickets, but it didn’t really make any difference if I saw one or not.

I just wanted the awareness of hunting. The thought of the deer being there was just as good as the deer actually being there.

There was nothing stirring in the thickets. I didn’t see any sign of a deer or the sign of a bird or the sign of a rabbit or anything.

Sometimes I would just stand there. The trees were dripping. There was only the sign of myself: alone, so I ate a candy bar.

I had no idea of the time. The sky was dark with winter rain. I only had a couple of hours when I started and I could feel that they were nearly at an end and soon it would be night.

I came out of a thicket into a patch of stumps and a logging road that curved down into the valley. They were new stumps. The trees had been cut sometime that year. Perhaps in the spring. The road curved into the valley.

The rain slackened off, then stopped and a strange kind of silence settled over everything. It was twilight and wouldn’t last long.

There was a turn in the logging road and suddenly, without warning, there was a house right there in the middle of my private nowhere. I didn’t like it.

The house was more of a large shack than anything else with a lot of old cars surrounding it and there was all sorts of logging junk and things that you need and then abandon after using.

I didn’t want the house to be there. The rain mist lifted and I looked back up the mountain. I’d come down only about half a mile, thinking all the time I was alone.

That was a joke.

There was a window in the house-shack facing up the road towards me. I couldn’t see anything in the window. Even though it was starting to get night, they hadn’t turned their lights on yet. I knew there was somebody home because heavy black smoke was coming out of the chimney.

As I got closer to the house, the front door slammed open and a kid ran out onto a crude makeshift porch. He didn’t have any shoes or a coat on. He was about nine years old and his blond hair was dishevelled as if the wind were blowing all the time in his hair.