His wife (soon to be ex-wife) Jerri was a grade-A bitch. Her nagging had built slowly over the years, and Pete was reminded of the story someone had told him about frogs, where if you threw one into a pot of boiling water it would jump right out, and yet if you put it in cold water and slowly turned up the heat, it would just sit there until it boiled to death. His marriage had been like that.

Finally he’d had enough, and apparently so had she, because when he announced he was leaving her, she hadn’t shed a single tear. He imagined that she might have even thrown a party, although he had no proof of that. It just seemed like something she would do.

Jerri had wanted to meet with the mediator this afternoon, but he’d told her he was feeling under the weather. He told his boss at the Lowe’s where he managed inventory the same thing. And then he climbed into his truck and headed north with his hunting rifle and fishing gear in the back, along with a tent, pack, sleeping bag and a cooler full of booze and cold cuts.

It was high time to escape for a little R & R (my little divorce party), and Dana damn well better be right about this spot up near the border. Dana worked stocking shelves in kitchen and bath, and he was often, although not always, drunk. Pete had resisted firing him the first time he’d smelled the booze on Dana’s breath, and the two had formed a friendship of sorts over the past few months as Pete’s marriage had gone south. Dana could sympathize, as he’d been twice divorced himself. The two of them had gotten to talking about hunting, and Pete opined about how when he was just a kid growing up in Waterville, his father had taken him out into the woods every other weekend with a couple of rifles and a box of ammo, and they’d shot at deer or bear or anything else that crossed their path for the next six hours. No permits, no wardens, no waiting for the right season or some such foolishness. These days you couldn’t even go fishing without applying for a goddamned license. As far as Pete was concerned, the only things you should need a license for were driving or getting married, and the former ought to be a damn sight easier to get than the latter.

On a slow day at the store a few weeks back, Dana had started talking about how he’d been up in the deep woods near the Canadian border with some high school buddies a couple of years ago, and how the woods around there were full of wild game of all shapes and sizes. Hell, they’d brought back three carloads full of deer meat and the head of a 600-pound black bear. Pete knew this last was true, because he’d seen the head himself in Dana’s basement, mounted on a piece of plywood. The only reason they hadn’t brought back the moose they’d killed was that they couldn’t fit it in the trunk.