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between barns, tending his crops, then the helicopters fanning out overhead, figures crashing through the undergrowth, throwing him to the floor, shutting him down, his face in the papers looking stoic but restless, the DEA agents grinning behind him like anglers measuring their haul.
    They’re still out there, said his friend. Those woods go on forever and the forest’s so dense, he nodded at the impenetrable green in the distance, that it’s near impossible to see them from the sky. They pulled my brother’s friend out eventually: they were working in there for weeks and they still got nothing except for that one guy and his crop.
    They burn the dope, he said, chuckling. Imagine sitting around that bonfire.
    They picked up their truck on the far side of the water and drove a rutted, single-track road up into the mountains.
    Feeling every fucking bump, he muttered, his hand drifting towards a radio that wasn’t there. They reached a plateau that afforded them a view to the west of the glimmering surface of the lake being lit up intermittently by a pallid sun. The rest of the valley fell away below them, green, brown and black; there were patches of white, but the night’s snow had barely settled up here. Occasionally there were sprays of birds that broke the spikes of pine and threw the horizon into chaos. They packed their rifles up onto their shoulders and made the descent into the copse, each heavy step a struggle through the slushy earth. It was cold, even through their gloves; their noses were bright and pink in the freezing air.
    Hey, Karl, he said, you look like Rudolph. The cold was making his eyes moist and he couldn’t stop blinking. His friend hushed him. Christ, he whispered, don’t go mistaking me for a deer. They crouched in spite of themselves and moved slowly forward, eyes darting left and right, as they imagined professional hunters might. They’d been hunting together since they were in their teens, at first with his dad and then once with Karl’s older brother. His father had impressed upon them the importance of the hunting season and the equilibrium of the land, how nature had to have balance. He’d come to understand that, though he’d still cried when his father had first shot a deer. For his part, Karl’s older brother packed beer as a necessity for their trip and when he finally felled a doe he let out a yowl like he’d won the lottery. Later, his father asked him how the trip had gone and when he told him, his father had become so angry that he’d had to leave the room. His mother stood next to him at the window, her arm around him, as they watched his father crush an empty cigarette packet and then toss it to the ground before stomping around in small circles; his features were dark, his fists bunched.
    Karl, he said, your brother still a dick?
    Karl nodded. Still owes me money that I lent him at Christmas, he said.
    It’s almost Christmas now, he replied.
    Last Christmas, said Karl, like the song.
    The light through the fir trees was patchy and the going slow. They’d only seen one doe. In his excitement to signal the creature to Karl, first by waving animatedly and then with one final, defeated, hissed Karl!, he had scared it away. The doe’s head had twitched into life and she’d sprung away on her elegant haunches. Karl glared at him as if he’d just fallen and plunged a knife through his boot.
    You’re so stupid that you’d make a wax effigy of yourself to poke pins in, he said. Karl had said it before, but not for a long time, not really since school. Their bags and rifles were heavy so they stopped and sat on a fallen tree and drank water and ate their food quickly.
    Remember what the guidebook said, said Karl. The smell of food can attract bears. He regarded his tuna and sweetcorn roll and thought to himself that even though bears hunted for salmon, would they know or recognise tuna let alone sweet-corn?