For more than two years, he had walked into days and weeks and months without knowing them by calendar, only by season. The season he read in trees—lime-green buds in spring, full-leaf in summer, colors of hot embers in autumn, the dark limbs of winter. He had walked and fished, leaving behind war and the burial ground of his parents and the sadness of his brother and the open and the secret experiences of his boyhood. Walked far enough to stop looking over his shoulder to see if his history tagged after him like a scolded yard dog. Now it was only memory, and memory had a way of rubbing down most of the rough edges.

Still, he had always believed there would be a place to stop the walking, to stay, to become his own forest, show his own seasons.

And there, with the air on his skin, he wondered if he had found that place.

Three weeks earlier—in Kentucky, he believed—he had come upon an old, white-haired man with bowed shoulders fishing from a bridge over a wide, slow-moving river. They had made nods to one another and he had gone below the bridge to the riverbank and made his touch of the water, and then had joined the old man on the bridge and unreeled his own line over the bridge’s railing and they had fished together for a long while, paying more attention to the talking that went on between them than to the fish that swam in the water below them.

The man, who offered his name as Hoke Moore, had put him on the path to the valley. Had said it was a good place to find fish and rest if a person could avoid certain elements of the population. “It’s called the Valley of Light by some, Bowerstown by others. Where I was born,” he had added in a voice that had the sound of longing. “They’s some good people there, and some you’d just as soon not get caught with. Mostly good, though. Mostly good. You need a hand, they’ll give it.”

And then Hoke Moore had begun telling of a great lake called the Chatuge, built some years earlier as part of a government project called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Said word of the lake gave it good enough marks for fishing, though there were still too few fish for all the water pooled up behind the dam. “Takes time for fish to find out where they want to be when they’s so many places to go,” he had speculated.

He had never fished the Chatuge himself, Hoke Moore had admitted. Liked smaller places, something he could walk around and not lose sight of where he’d started the trip. “They’s another little lake over there—twenty or twenty-five acres, I’d guess—that’s got the biggest fish I ever seen in it. A bass, it was. Must have been fifteen pounds. Maybe more. Used to try and catch him, but all he’d do was spit water on me. He’d jump up out of the water, like he was trying to swim through the air, mad as a wet hen. Never seen a bass do that. Not one that big. Not coming out of the water high as he did. It was like he was telling me I weren’t good enough to catch him.”