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bare feet. I pretended it was Lana Sue. Then I imagined Marcie VanHorn. Then Debra Winger. The Debra Winger fantasy worked pretty well, so I let it float awhile.
    A campfire is the only thing on earth that looks the same as it did a thousand years ago. Everything else, the land, the water, even the color of the sunset has changed this century. The only way to communicate with people from ages gone by is to gaze into the coals of a campfire. That’s why people write books and have babies. We want to communicate.
    I considered masturbation. Lana Sue had been gone four days now, and she hadn’t exactly been eager for mounting all last week. But I’ve never been comfortable with wilderness whack-offs because of my glasses. On, I feel formal, and off, I’m exposed.
    Another coyote answered, five notes, same pattern. Down the gully an owl nailed a rabbit or something. For ten seconds the night filled with screams. I jumped to look, but, naturally, I’d been staring into the coals and couldn’t see diddly for a full minute. The screams passed over my head and into the black. As they did, an entire set of coyotes went off like fire alarms up the ridge. I’ve always wondered if there’s not some Darwinistic reason why coyotes and crying babies sound so much alike.
    â€œMore damn noise here than in Jackson.” I threw a stack of wood on the fire. Built myself a roaring pep-rally of a bonfire so hot I had to scoot back to the corner of the ledge where anything with claws could reach out from the depths of the gully and grab my ass.
    Every time I tried to consider the purpose of the Search, I either got horny or spooked. Time to concentrate. I drank more water, wishing it was Canadian whiskey. I think better on whiskey.
    I considered death: If my span of self-awareness is forty, fifty, at tops eighty years, with frigging eternity stretched out both before and after, then the odds against me sitting in front of this campfire are at least infinity to one. The chance of me being in this moment when the number of moments there are is considered—these odds are much lower than the odds that God lives in a centigrade thermometer in Joplin, Missouri. Any religion, no matter how farfetched, impractical, or flat bizarre, is more likely to be true, if you play the percentages, than the belief that my sixty-year portion of infinity just came up.
    Bring it down to the issues at hand. I was hungry. Some asshole shot at me. I was no closer to resolving the past and future than I’d been at home couch-potatoed by beer and TV baseball. Only now my Search had lost me the reason I started it—Lana Sue.
    I didn’t want to lose Lana Sue. She’s my partner. If I saw a three-legged cat, Lana Sue would be the one I would tell. There’d be no use in finding truth or even a good ice-cream cone if I couldn’t go say to Lana Sue, “Hey, guess what I found today?” Lana Sue thinks the people in Doonesbury are real. We had an argument about it once. She cares about the children of roadkill prairie dogs. She anticipates joy—no matter how bothered she gets by life, death, guilt, and grief, I can never picture Lana Sue losing her love of lunch.
    And purposely, consciously, just three days ago, I said, “Sorry, honey, this thing is more important than you,” and walked away from her.
    What is this thing that was worth starvation, solitude, confusion—now I’m being shot at, for Chrissake? What is all this in the name of? Truth. Am I a murderer? Where does a family go when it dies? Where will I go?
    Hell, let’s capitalize the whole fucking thing. TRUTH. THE SEARCH. GOD. Ta-da, “Loren Paul looks into his campfire and figures it all out .” If it was as simple as driving yourself nuts and wandering into the mountains, wouldn’t someone else have pulled the trick by now?
    Jesus Christ. And, in the process, I’d chased away my only shot at legitimate