HUNTER

He hikes his last mile in without thinking. In two days he shot only a few anemic deer, leaving them to rot or freeze, his conduct most certainly unsportsmanlike. He loves the sensation of unleashing a shot at the unsuspecting deer, quick-frozen in fear, just before it turns to leap away. Yet he is not cold-hearted. His pocket warmer has run out of batteries. His feet are cold and numb. He has folded his orange safety vest and wrapped it around his waist. His name is James and he is by trade a plumber, but he only works the larger, industrial jobs, spending months on a project—mainly laying plastic pipe, swiping glue around the joints, inhaling with pleasure—and avoids the small, domestic jobs so that he can go out hunting for weeks at at time. He’s up near Muskegon, in state forest land, on a cool, clear, beautiful winter morning with the smell of pine sap and the windbreak of the tree line fine against the gray winter dawn. He’s in peace. He’s in silence. So the shot that comes out of the woods behind him, from the rifle of a kid just learning to hunt, a.22 shell—making its way, spinning nicely, held steady by its rotations—follows a clear trajectory to his chest through what, if it were slowed down enough, might be the most beautiful moment in Michigan history.

COVE

Just over the bridge, ten miles west of St. Ignace, overlooking the long southward cusp of Lake Michigan, a view stretching all the way down to Chicago, where on certain summer nights the sky mirage of that great city could be seen thrown against the clouds; just up from a row—six in all—of ramshackle summer shacks rented by the week, with their cracked clapboards and warped sandy floors; not far down Route 86, where, at the roadside trinket stand, built in the shape of a giant teepee, standing as testament to the falsity of history, supposedly native artifacts could be bought. There was a long-haired beauty up there working behind the counter for her father, a girl named Sky who had the most exquisite deep pooling eyes and deep brown skin, and who served the customers with a coy softness, a flirtatious energy that sold the goods and made for longing in the stiff sunburned legs of the tourists; up in the cove, below the dune head, below a line of pines that gave into the wind with a soft murmur—a dry windblown hiss that seemed rooted in eternity and, one has to presume, was the last thing s/he heard upon fading away: pine needles succumbing to the whims of the wind, the wind itself bringing in the smell of the lake, not a salty or sea smell but something else, a deeper murk, a place where in the winter the solitude fell down upon the edge of the lake with the towering, crusty collection of waves compiled into ice palaces, where only the sound of water and ice communed with the windblown trees itching the sky. Just over the bridge, to the west, not far from the same place where, years before, Marquette stood staring at the wide vista; just thirty-five miles north of the huge mansions hugging the shore of Little Traverse Bay, fed by Chicago tycoon wealth, with their trimmed manicured yards stretching down to private beachfront; just fifty miles from the small creek draining urgently into Walloon Lake, gurgling and bubbling over stones, the body was found in the cove by the state policeman Warren Graves, who was pretty sure that the case would not be solved because four seasons had passed over the corpse, taking away skin and flesh and evidence. The officer turned away, walked down the cove, crossed the highway to the beach, where he smoked a cigarette and stared with deliberate concentration off into the water, which caught the wind with flecks of waves not more than an inch high, which in turn collected the light of the setting sun in long corrugated sheets of orange-red. Even the most inattentive observer could not help but make the clear-cut connection between the two things: the result of the violence (natural or otherwise) up in the cove behind Warren Graves, and the blood-red aftermath of a day spreading over the water, in front.