They showed up on the sixteenth of July and set up their tents in a pattern that appeared deliberate. He stood on the corner of his lot and observed the little society take shape. The youth stand in knots between the tents and jostle each other. They shout when they walk to and from the portajohns. He has the sense that the village regards them as a miracle, but the miracle is noisy. When it’s time for it to sleep, it runs around on the dirt roads, it hides in the bushes and undergrowth. It stands about rooting around in its mouth on the path to the school and whispering in the light of smartphones. Already on the second evening, he stood in the dark and listened to their animal sounds. Their shrieking echoed among the farmer’s​ 112pig barns, and they didn’t stop making noise till almost eleven. Then he stood on the edge of the field and watched the light from their phones flickering in the tents.

There’s a place out on the flats, a small cabin. The summer deer season’s over, he could go out there. It’s a hunting cabin, no doubt, but he doesn’t know whose, and the locals insist on their property rights. They don’t understand that he’s alone either. It’s a pity he can’t find someone, they think. But the person that you pity is a person in your power. He knows that, and now they’re screaming. Other people’s kids, teenagers. One of them appeared in his driveway the night before last. He was standing up by the garage when the kid, a girl, turned up with her head tilted to one side. “Who are you?” she asked, to show she was brave enough to be impudent. He could easily have answered, but he didn’t. Then she kicked the gravel, disappeared.

He isn’t being overrun, but it’s hard nevertheless to keep people away from his door. In the beginning, when he was first living here, a woman with a little dog would come by now and then. She’d find some pretext to stop in front of the house. Mona, she was called. She came by with peeled windfall apples and recipes for venison. Once he gave her a cup of coffee in the kitchen. She said he had a nice place and examined the walls for portraits. Then she said there was a community dinner the following Thursday, and would he come? He couldn’t, he said.