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was gone. I was no threat to it. But I patiently waited for the next year.
    It was early November—in an age before cellphones, or faxes, when electric typewriters seemed a luxury. I was in the rough-boarded camp attempting one of my first stories, one that I would take and read later on to men, professors, who had come from the States and I suppose back then saw both me and my stories as far more exotic than they do now. I was left in camp by a friend who told me he would be back in a day. (He would berate me most of my life for my books while never bothering to read one. Better,I suppose, than being berated for books by those who do read them.)
    A day and then another went by, and I felt very alone. Each tree, cloud, and knocking of woodpecker was an indication of my profound aloneness at that time, and was enough to prompt my realization that we, as men and women, are both always and never really alone. Camps can accomplish this perception very easily. An old stove has been used for thirty years, and sitting alone you remember the men who once were warmed by it on late November evenings, now gone for good, and the nostalgia that overcomes you is profound. Deep, as well, are the thoughts of people who are far away from you at that moment. As are the old pictures that are taken there—of men, yes, but of game as well, in the bush thirty years before. Of deer standing near brooks a lost age ago, looking quietly toward the camera in soul-felt indifference. It is a sad and memorable piece of nostalgia.
    Although I knew my way out, I was obligated to stay for the sake of the man who said he would be back in to collect me. If he travelled back and I was not there it would be something akin to betrayal. However, I really believed, and still do, that he had gone out to see his girlfriend and had forgotten all about me.
    Wind had picked up in small gusts, over the outbuildings and the woodpile under its stable. The window at the back of the camp looked out onto a wilderness scene. In the camp was a stuffed moose head, taken by the man’s uncle in the 1930s. Perhaps a brother of one of the moose that were tagged and taken off to Newfoundland in the early part of the century. Yes, the moose from Newfoundlandcame by way of Miramichi. Though they have flourished and grown bigger, with time, than the average Miramichi moose, they are the sons and daughters of moose snared and boxed and taken to Newfoundland by men hired to do so. I often thought it would be a way to reintroduce the woodland caribou to New Brunswick—by way of Newfoundland. But it hasn’t happened. And when they tried to bring caribou back to the woods of Maine, the animals died.
    Along the road into camp was a cluster of high birch trees where partridge sometimes sat. These birch ran along the camp road out, and then the road picked up again behind the camp. In behind the camp the road became a path and led over the hill to a brook, and then up the other side, through fertile growth where deer travelled most of the year; three or four brooks intersected this one, at various places, all within the next mile, and tamarack and poplar trees grew in abundance. The best way we had found was to wait for the deer to meander down through those poplar growths in late afternoon, though the deer seemed smart enough not to come toward the camp, and it was more to your advantage to get on the downhill slope beyond the camp. There was a grouping of hardwood stands that had grown near a place called Otter Brook, and it was there I was hunting. I had enough knowledge then to know a buck would mark out its territory and travel back and forth in search of doe, but I wasn’t as knowledgeable about this as I was to be later on.
    The days were turning very cold so deer were on the move, and that certain time of day, from about 3:45 until dark, was the best time to see something. At that time of day the woods stops. There is a sudden silence in the air.
    For an hour and a half the woods