Thad had just shot a black bear out of season. It was a small yearling sow, and the rancid stink of it settled like a fog over the clearing where it died. The smell of a bear, Thad thought, had the flavor of nightmare about it. Putrefying flesh, fresh shit, all held together with something cloying and sweet, like smashed huckleberries just starting to ferment. This was the third one they’d killed this week, and Thad figured they could start heading home. Three heads attached to three pelts, twelve paws, three gallbladders, on top of all their other gear—it was going to be a backbreaking hump over the mountain. He and his brother, Hazen, were twenty miles from the logging road where their truck waited, a cooler in the back with a block of ice and a twelve-pack of Coors. Just thinking of the beer made Thad swallow reflexively.

Hazen was over at the edge of the timber splashing around in a small creek that looped through a stand of alders and meandered across the clearing. It was late summer, the grass was long and dry, and the creek running through it looked like a crooked part in a shock of thick blond hair.

“Quit messing around. When we get this one cut up, we’re out of here,” Thad said.

“There’s trout.”

“We’re not fishing. Get over here. I’d like to be home tomorrow morning.”

Hazen stomped out of the creek. Thad could hear him grumbling as he set to work. Although he tended to stray from the task at hand, Thad had to admit that his brother was faster at butchering than he was. Hazen could break down an animal so quick it was almost unnatural. It was like he had some strange elemental knowledge of how the parts all fit together. Sometimes he didn’t even use his knife. Just got the cut started and then used his hands and fingernails to divide muscles and separate flesh from bone. Thad had seen him using his teeth to snap a particularly stubborn ligament or tendon.

Thad was a year older, but they could almost pass for twins. They had the same lanky arms and legs. They weren’t really all that tall, although there was something about their proportions that made them look like short men who’d been stretched. A couple years ago, Thad had started growing his hair out and Hazen had copied him. They now had shoulder-length brown ponytails that they tied back with thin strips of tanned deer hide. They both had veins that stood out in stark relief on their forearms. Their front teeth protruded slightly. It was only side by side that the differences between them became noticeable. Hazen was an inch shorter, his hair a shade lighter. His laugh came quick and stayed a beat too long. Thad was twenty-seven, Hazen twenty-six, and already they had crow’s feet at the corners of their eyes. Over the years these marks would only deepen, their gazes hardening into perpetual squints. Their father’s visage had been cast this way, and his father before him. Theirs were faces made for the weather, for looking into it. Hatchet chins, angled cheekbones, faces around which the high-country wind could pass with minimal resistance. Though they possessed no great strength, the men in their line had been shaped—by environment and circumstance—for tremendous acts of myopic endurance.

As Thad watched, Hazen made a quick incision up the bear’s rounded gut and then plunged in up to his elbows, the bloody butt of his knife clenched between his teeth like a stogie. The gallbladder on a small black bear like this one was about the size of a golf ball. Hazen could find and excise this organ by feel, his face pointed up and away, his eyes closed with concentration, his hands moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer. Thad hadn’t the slightest idea what function a gallbladder performed inside the body. Humans had one, too, he was pretty sure. All he knew was that one of decent size would go for fifteen hundred dollars, and fifteen hundred dollars was the equivalent of a half a dozen cords of firewood, cut, split, stacked, and delivered. If they wanted to be efficient, he knew that they should just go for the gallbladders and leave the rest of the animal where it lay. For the skull and the claws and the skin they could get another four or five hundred dollars, decent money until you factored in the weight and additional time it took to skin one. He knew it made no logical sense, but the extra effort and risk involved in keeping the other bear parts did something to move the whole enterprise slightly closer to hunting, something respectable. Before this trip he’d visited the computer at the library to look up likely punishments if they were to get caught. Maybe that hadn’t been a good idea. As far as he could tell, what they were involved in was considered wanton waste, a severe violation of the Lacey Act, punishable by fines of up to one hundred thousand dollars. Guaranteed felonies, potential jail time.

It was easier to think that in a wilderness area this large, a person could get away with whatever he wanted, but Thad knew that wasn’t true. How many times had they been deep in the backcountry only to come across a troop of Eagle Scouts from Cincinnati, a crunchy honeymooning couple, a Forest Service trail crew? It was a large wilderness area, but all sorts of people were drawn to it for that very reason. All it would take was one Sierra Club member working on his life list with a Sibley’s and a pair of binoculars and they’d be completely screwed.

Across the clearing, Hazen was pulling the hide off the bear, the skin separating from the carcass with a sound like tape being pulled off a roll. He’d gotten in the habit of carrying a spent .22 shell casing in his mouth, and now he was pursing his lips to blow air over it, making the chirruping bird whistle he did when he was concentrating. Eventually Thad went to help. The quicker this got done, the quicker they could get the hell out of there, collect their money, and put this whole thing behind them.