He drove the final miles by instinct, following unmarked roads that took him ever deeper into the forested folds of the mountains. A hidden world: where they were going there were no towns, no houses, no people at all. At least that was how he remembered it. The air was cold and smelled of pine. The gas gauge was nearly on empty. They passed a darkened general store that Wolgast recalled vaguely, though the name was not familiar—MILTON’S DRY GOODS/HUNTING, FISHING LIC.—and began their final ascent. Three forks later he was on the verge of panic, thinking he’d gotten them lost, when a series of small details seemed to rise before him out of the past: a certain slope of the roadway, a glimpse of star-dressed sky as they rounded a bend, and then, beneath the Toyota’s wheels, the expansive accoustics of open air as they crossed the river. All just as it had been when he was small, his father beside him, driving him up to camp.

Moments later they came to a break in the trees. By the side of the road stood a weathered sign reading, BEAR MOUNTAIN CAMP, and beneath that, hanging from a pair of rusted chains, FOR SALE, with the name of a real estate agency and a phone number with a Salem exchange. The sign, like many Wolgast had seen along the road, was pocked with bullet holes.

“This is the place,” he said.

The camp’s driveway, a mile long, traced the crest of a high embankment above the river, then hooked right around an outcrop of boulders and took them into the trees. The place, he knew, had been closed up for years. Would the buildings even still be there? What would they find? The charred ruins of a devastating fire? Roofs rotted and collapsed under the weight of winter snow? But then, out of the trees, the camp emerged: the building the boys had called Old Lodge—because it was old even then—and behind and around it, the smaller outbuildings and cabins, about a dozen all told. Beyond lay more woods and a pathway that descended to the lake, two hundred acres of glasslike stillness held in place by an earthen dam and shaped like a kidney bean. As they approached the lodge, the Toyota’s headlights flared across the front windows, momentarily creating the illusion of lights coming on inside, as if their arrival were expected—as if they had traveled not across the width of the country but back through time itself, across the gulf of thirty years to when Wolgast was a boy.