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asked his father to tell him the story many times. The boy’s mother had long before put him to bed upstairs; she was having a late-night snack with Danny’s dad when the bear joined them. The cook and his wife were sharing a mushroom omelet and drinking white wine. When he used to drink, Dominic Baciagalupo had explained to his son, he had often felt compelled to fix late-night snacks for himself and his wife. (Not anymore.)
    Danny’s mother screamed when she saw the bear. That made the bear stand up on its hind legs and squint at her, but Dominic had had quite a lot of wine; at first, he didn’t know it was a bear. He must have thought it was a hairy, drunken logger, coming to assault his beautiful wife.
    On the stove was an eight-inch cast-iron skillet, in which the cook had recently sautéed the mushrooms for the omelet. Dominic picked up the skillet, which was still warm in his hand, and hit the bear in the face—mostly on its nose but also on the broad, flat bridge of its nose between the bear’s small, squinty eyes. The bear dropped to all fours and fled through the kitchen door, leaving the torn screen and the broken wooden slats hanging from the frame.
    Whenever the cook told this story, he always said: “Well, the door had to be fixed, of course, but it still opens the wrong way.” In telling the story to his son, Dominic Baciagalupo usually added: “I would never hit a bear with a cast-iron skillet—I thought it was a man!”
    “But what would you do with a bear?” Danny asked his dad.
    “Try to reason with it, I guess,” the cook replied. “In that sort of situation, you can’t reason with a man.”
    As for what “that sort of situation” was, Dan could only guess. Had his father imagined he was protecting his pretty wife from a dangerous man?
    As for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet, it had acquired a special place for itself in the cookhouse. It no longer made its home in the kitchen with the other pots and pans. The skillet was hung at shoulder height on a hook in the upstairs of the cookhouse, where the bedrooms were—it resided just inside Dominic’s bedroom door. That skillet had proved its worth; it had become the cook’s weapon of choice, should he ever hear someone’s footsteps on the stairs or the sound of an intruder (animal or human) sneaking around in the kitchen.
    Dominic didn’t own a gun; he didn’t want one. For a New Hampshire boy, he had missed out on all the deer hunting—not only because of the ankle injury but because he hadn’t grown up with a dad. As for the loggers and the sawmill men, the deer hunters among them brought the cook their deer; he butchered the deer for them, and kept enough meat for himself so that he could occasionally serve venison in the cookhouse. It wasn’t that Dominic disapproved of hunting; he just didn’t like venison, or guns. He also suffered from a recurrent dream; he’d told Daniel about it. The cook repeatedly dreamed that he was murdered in his sleep—shot to death in his own bed—and whenever he woke from that dream, the sound of the shot was still ringing in his ears.
    So Dominic Baciagalupo slept with a skillet in his bedroom. There were cast-iron skillets of all sizes in the cookhouse kitchen, but the eight-inch size was preferable for self-defense. Even young Dan could manage to swing it with some force. As for the ten-and-a-half-inch skillet, or the eleven-and-a-quarter-inch one, they may have been more accommodating to cook in, but they were too heavy to be reliable weapons; not even Ketchum could swing those bigger skillets quickly enough to take out a lecherous logger, or a bear.
    THE NIGHT AFTER Angel Pope had gone under the logs, Danny Baciagalupo lay in bed in the upstairs of the cookhouse. The boy’s bedroom was above the inside-opening screen door to the kitchen, and the loose-fitting outer door, which he could hear rattling in the wind. He could hear the river, too. In the cookhouse, you could always hear Twisted