table of rock and took off his backpack.
A five-foot rattlesnake was sunning on another flat rock fifty feet away. It
raised its mean wedge-shaped head and studied him.
As a boy, he had killed scores of rattlers in these hills. He withdrew the gun
from the backpack and rose from the rock. He took a couple of steps toward the
snake.
The rattler rose farther off the ground and stared intensely.
Travis took another step, another, and assumed a shooter’s stance, with both
hands on the gun.
The rattler began to coil. Soon it would realize that it could not strike at
such a distance, and would attempt to retreat.
Although Travis was certain his shot was clear and easy, he was surprised to
discover that he could not squeeze the trigger. He had come to these foothills
not merely to attempt to recall a time when he had been glad to be alive, but
also to kill snakes if he saw any. Lately, alternately depressed and angered by
the loneliness and sheer pointlessness of his life, he had been wound as tight
as a crossbow spring. He needed to release that tension through violent action,
and the killing of a few snakes—no loss to anyone—seemed the perfect
prescription for his distress. However, as he stared at this rattler, he
realized that its existence was less pointless than his own: it filled an
ecological niche, and it probably took more pleasure in life than he had in a
long time. He began to shake, and the gun kept straying from the target, and he
could not find the will to fire. He was not a worthy executioner, so he lowered
the gun and returned to the rock where he had left his backpack.
The snake was evidently in a peaceable mood, for its head lowered sinuously to
the stone once more, and it lay still.
After a while, Travis tore open the package of Oreos, which had been his
favorite treat when he was young. He had not eaten one in fifteen years.
They were almost as good as he remembered them. He drank Kool-Aid from the
canteen, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the cookies. To his adult palate, the
stuff was far too sweet.
The innocence, enthusiasms, joys, and voracities of youth can be recalled but
perhaps never fully regained, he thought.
Leaving the rattlesnake in communion with the sun, shouldering his backpack once
more, he went down the southern slope of the ridge into the shadows of the trees
at the head of the canyon, where the air was freshened by the fragrant spring
growth of the evergreens. On the west-sloping floor of the canyon, in deep
gloom, he turned west and followed a deer trail.
A few minutes later, passing between a pair of large California sycamores that
bent together to form an archway, he came to a place where sunlight poured into
a break in the forest. At the far side of the clearing, the deer trail led into
another section of woods in which spruces, laurels and sycamores grew closer
together than elsewhere. Ahead, the land dropped steeply as the canyon sought
bottom. When he stood at the edge of the sunfall with the toes of his boots in
shadow, looking down that sloped path, he could see only fifteen yards before a
surprisingly seamless darkness fell across the trail.
As Travis was about to step out of the sun and continue, a dog burst from the
dry brush on his right and ran straight to him, panting and chuffing. It was a
golden retriever, pure of breed by the look of it. A male. He figured it was
little more than a year old, for though it had attained the better part of its
full growth, it retained some of the sprightliness of a puppy. Its thick coat
was damp, dirty, tangled, snarled, full of burrs and broken bits of weeds and
leaves. It stopped in front of him, sat, cocked its head, and looked up at him
with an undeniably friendly expression.
Filthy as it was, the animal was nonetheless appealing. Travis stooped, patted
its head, and scratched behind its ears.
He half-expected an owner, gasping and perhaps angry at this runaway, to follow