The bus no longer served the reservation, and instead, dropped him at the town nearest the border. He had told no one of his plans, had no mail to be forwarded or anyone to explain himself to or greet him. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, late March. He had been out of jail for a day, out of prison for two years. With nothing else to do, no other options, he started walking.

It had been an easy winter. The snow was already gone, but the beaver ponds along the highway were still skimmed with ice, slushy and black, rotted from the sun and the water that flowed onto them from higher ground, from broken dams in more remote, secret swamps. The ground looked wasted, battered by the snow and palimpsested with the soggy cardboard of twelve-packs, hubcaps, and the tufted remnants of a winter’s worth of roadkill racked by the wind and scavenging dogs and skunks that had begun to waddle from their burrows into the warmer air in search of food.

Cars passed him, rattling out of the distance and slapping by. No one bothered to stop. They either didn’t notice him or didn’t care, perhaps mistaking him for a can picker scouring the ditches for aluminum. But he knew not of the wealth that lay crusted in the ditches and passed on. He didn’t try to hitch, was unwilling to endure conversation that would inevitably turn to either his past (not something he wanted to talk about) or his future (equally uncomfortable). He carried within him no surplus of small talk because he had not accumulated the requisite data about the weather or sports scores or local politics and he was too stunned by his jail time to fake it. He was like a dynamited fish that had floated to the surface and was thrown mercilessly on the bank.

The only connection he did have with the place involved the two people lost to him; his father and his brother. He couldn’t help losing his father, but Lester’s death weighed on him doubly because in addition to his guilt he has been deprived of his brother’s company every day for twelve years. He not only took away Lester’s life, he has had to do without it. Lester would have been there, would have made walking an event instead of a chore.

The sun still rode low along the skirt of the southern sky, weighted toward the horizon by the lingering cold. The wind blew warm off the fields of turned mud and just when he was getting used to the temperature, colder wind coasted in from over the lakes and large swamps screened from the road by leaf-bare poplar and tamarack.