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than the crushing hopelessness he had been seeing.
    Ben asked his father to teach him to hunt like that.
    “If you want,” his dad said. “What else have we got to do?”
    For the next two years, Ben hunted with his father and grandfather after whatever was in season. Duck, deer, coons, even bear. Ben’s father built up an impressive array of racks and mounted trophies, including the head of a four-hundred-fifty-pound black bear.
    He also got a job at the Bath Iron Works, and forced himself through the motions of taking care of Ben. At night, Ben’s dad still spent hours in front of the television, smoking cigarettes. Not talking.
    Ben learned to track, he learned how to control the dogs, he learned how to keep upwind of the animal he was stalking. He learned patience. The old Remington became his, and his father told him if he bagged a deer by his thirteenth birthday, he would give him a rifle.
    But it wasn’t until a few weeks before that birthday that Ben fully realized how completely he had conned himself for the sake of his father. They were waiting in a stand the first week of deer season. It was a crisp, cold day with the sun just beginning to lower. A buck emerged from a thicket to drink from the stream. The deer picked its way along a carpet of red maple leaves, sniffing the wind cautiously, before splaying its legs wide to put its muzzle into the water.
    Ben’s dad gestured for him to make the shot. Ben braced himself carefully, took aim … and realized that he had no desire to kill that deer.
    To pull the trigger, yes.
    To capture it, yes.
    To somehow own what he was seeing before him, the liquid brown eyes, the arch of the deer’s powerful neck.
    But to kill it, no.
    And he didn’t want his dad to do it either.
    Ben pointed the barrel off to the left and pulled the trigger. The deer wheeled away and was gone.
    Anger flashed in his dad’s eyes. “What the hell happened?”
    Ben slid down from the stand and walked back to the cabin alone.
    Three weeks later, Ben caught what he believed was the same deer on film. It was a wet, raw November morning. His dad was in another stand about a mile away, unwilling to be part of “this nonsense.”
    Truthfully, the shot was barely a success as a photo. Ben was using his mother’s old Brownie and from the distance away with the relatively wide lens, the deer was just a thumbnail-sized shape on the first prints. He had a camera store in Portland blow the shot up, crop it. He hung it on the wall in his bedroom. The shot was so soft after all the enlargement that it was more symbolic of the deer than representative. Ben knew that most people would find the shot nothing special.
    But he kept coming back to it. The breathless feeling was there for him. The tension in his legs from the long wait. The cold. The soft sunlight filtering through a heavy cloud cover. The pressure to simply take the shot competing against the desire to get the composition right, to wait until the deer turned his way, cocked that rack of antlers in silhouette against the mountain stream.
    Throughout that winter, Ben’s father moved from anger to confusion as Ben turned from hunting magazines to studying the work of Ansel Adams. That spring, the day before bear hunting season, his father told Ben that he would buy him the rifle even though Ben hadn’t bagged the deer.
    Ben told him what he really wanted.
    His dad looked at him silently, then said, “We’ll talk about it.”
    But the next morning, his father postponed the hunting trip until the camera store opened and they went in together to buy a used Nikon. His dad smiled in the background as Ben haggled over a telephoto lens.
    As they drove away in his dad’s old Plymouth, Ben looked at the camera on his lap, the jewel-like finish of the body, the heavy lens. Holding it gave him the same feeling as being out on a winding trail early in the morning. Breath making a white fog in the cold air. Not knowing what was around the next bend, but