It was, he supposed, good walking weather. Warm enough when he was moving, brisk when he sat the seven and a half minutes it took to smoke a cigarette, perched in the ditch the way he’d seen owls sitting on fenceposts in broad daylight, surprised and aloof.

The sun set around seven and by his reckoning he still had at least six miles to go. There was nothing to do but switch over to the other side of the road, onto the shoulder of oncoming traffic, and keep walking. He could hear the cars long before he could see them, the lights gilding the tips of the trees and climbing down, like fire reaching for the ground, and then snapping back toward their source. Simon lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the lights but kept walking, determined to make it to Boo’s.

As he strode deeper into the dark, farther into the reservation, it was as if he were approaching a foreign country. A place that was almost familiar, as if he had stepped onto the shore of a novel. He felt as if he should be more familiar with the road, the long sigh of hills, the guttering of ditch water, the ganglia of service and logging roads that swept off the highway to more remote, forbidden areas. He felt that he should know the terrain. He had been raised here, after all. But nothing came. There was no revelation, no recognition.

By nine o’clock he was getting tired. His feet ached and his hand had cramped from holding the slick plastic garbage bag. Every curve of the road, lit by six stars and a moon, looked the same. He’d begun telling himself that town would appear around every corner. That he was almost there. And there would be more highway canting toward another lake or swamp, the asphalt old and bone pale under his feet. He was out of cigarettes.

As he walked he tried to remember the layout of the reservation, where each of the villages was, the main roads, but his childhood memory was too shallow to contain such cartography. While in prison he’d checked out every atlas in the library and searched them for a detailed map of the reservation, but it always appeared as an undifferentiated shape, mildly square, sometimes colored gray, other times pink. He tried to remember but could not, and instead kept conjuring up two images over and over again.

One is of his father pinned under the tree: how the snow had seemed so soft, the woods respectful and still, like a loud dinner guest finally sated and retiring. His father’s breath coming slower and slower, how the so-soft-snow held the blood that bubbled from his mouth. You’d expect it to burn through, to melt to the bottom and stay there, but the snow held it up. A perfect canvas.