Once I’d gotten home and sipped a tall whiskey, I considered the implications. It’s no evolutionary mistake that men default to stupidity and aggression. No accident that they overestimate their capabilities, recklessly court danger, and are reliably delusional regarding the hazards involved. Nature greases the gears of progress with blood. I’m a believer in omens and auguries, except by different names—pattern recognition and quantum entanglement. Reality is a frequency, time is a ring, and gravity bleeds through a membrane that cocoons this universe from its neighbors; cells gently colliding within an infinite superstructure.

Which is to say, I’d scaled a mountain summit and instead of finding a wise man in a cave, Death looked me in the eye and winked. Guru Death compelled me to consider my allotted span in less than romantic terms—the phases of an animal’s life cycle. Maybe that’s the reason I’d recently obsessed over werewolf movies. The popular legend of the lycanthrope featured a surcease of mortal weakness. Werewolves shrugged off disease and lead. They shunned personal responsibility, and that might’ve represented their most attractive quality. Loping through a night forest, howling in bloodlust, and doing what comes naturally without remorse.

■■■

Since my ouster from Alaska, home was a cabin on a sprawling farm-slash-commune near the rural outskirts of New Paltz. I enjoyed the abiding quiet of Hawk Mountain Farm at night, after the tourists who came for the sweat lodge or the meditation circles or the folksy seminars drifted away and the animals were dreaming in the barn. I yearned for the scent of green bark after a hard rain and the rush of wind in the trees. Darkness was truly dark on the edge of the forest—a security lamp hanging from the barn center beam and the porch light of the main house up the hill floated in a void. On those occasions when a storm knocked out the power, we were instantly transported to an epoch of peasants who took shelter behind barred doors, praying for sunrise when all the beasts withdrew into the forest.

I savored it because I knew change was inevitable. Much sooner than later, Meg would demand a gesture of commitment and that gesture would entail wholesale changes by yours truly. She and her son, Devlin, wanted me to move in. Or I assumed they did. They loved me and my faithful hound, Minerva. We’d edged around the subject and watched it grow into the proverbial elephant in the room. Even I couldn’t feign obliviousness forever.

Lionel inhabited a shack not far from mine through the woods. He acted as farm roustabout for Virgil and Jade Walker, the elderly New Age hippie gurus who owned the property and dazzled clients from around the globe with their peppy mysticism. Evenings, he bunkered with a case of cheap beer, or, if feeling sociable, went hell-raising in town. In the manner of the ancient Greeks confronted with an epic dilemma, I knocked on his door to seek his wise, albeit booze-soaked counsel. I explained my worries—physical and spiritual.