Only the Dead by Vidar Sundstøl Read Free Book Online

blankets over the forest—those were the best. Then the chances were greater for getting close to a deer.
    Lance stopped at the top of a small rise with a view of the river. He was breathing hard. He wiped the mixture of rain and sweat from his brow and proceeded to examine the terrain, in particular several clearings along the river. But he didn’t see anything of interest. The only thing moving was a small flock of songbirds, apparently searching for food in the birch trees. Then the birds moved to a fir tree only a few yards away. One of them crept headfirst down along the slippery trunk. Lance knew that only a nuthatch could do that. The flock looked to be a mixture of nuthatches and black-capped chickadees, with maybe a few boreal chickadees or brown creepers.
    He thought of his mother holding up the palms of her hands, the way someone does to catch the first drops of rain. They had been standing outside a small house on a secluded street in Two Harbors, where she and Lance’s father had lived during the first year of their marriage. One morning she had gone to the kitchen window to look outside. It was snowing, and snow had already covered the trees and the fence. Oscar was out there feeding the birds, as he did every morning. But Inga said this time a little bird had landed on his hand. And soon more did the same. They were swarming around her husband as he stood there in the yard with the snow falling all around. When she saw how surprised Lance was to hear about this incident, Inga asked him whether he’d ever seen his father feeding birds from his hand. No, Lance had told her. His mother thought this was strange, because she said Oscar used to feed the birds in their yard in Duluth when Lance was growing up. But he couldn’t recall seeing anything like that, and it had bothered him ever since. If he’d really seen his father do something as special as that, why didn’t he have even the slightest memory of it? And if he’d forgotten about his father’s ability to attract the birds, what else might he have forgotten?
    The flock of birds now flew over to a tree farther away. How long had he been standing here, thinking about his parents? Maybe a couple of minutes. But that wasn’t good. It had broken his concentration. He started walking again, but the thought of his father and the songbirds soon returned, along with the memory of the day when his mother told him the story. Afterward they had stopped at a rest area because her knees were starting to ache. And there . . . down by the lake . . . Lance had seen the back of a man sitting near the water. Apparently his mother hadn’t noticed him, even though she was standing right next to Lance. An Ojibwe Indian. He didn’t belong in the same world as Lance and his mother. And yet Lance had seen him. He looked as if he’d wandered out of a black-and-white photograph from sometime around 1900. And Lance knew who he was. It was Swamper Caribou.
    A shot rang out in the woods. It came from the correct direction. Andy had fired a shot. Lance raised his rifle to chest level and stared at the clearings down by the river. If his brother had missed, it was conceivable that the deer might turn around and run back, away from the gunfire. In that case, it would pass very close to where Lance was standing. But if his brother had brought the deer down, he would soon call on his cell to say so.
    But nothing else happened. No deer came bounding past, no more shots were fired, his cell phone didn’t start vibrating. Andy must have missed, and then the deer took off in another direction.
    Lance lowered his rifle and began walking again, on the alert the whole time. Maybe Andy had hit the deer but didn’t kill it. Sometimes merely wounding an animal couldn’t be helped. Soon he’d reach the power line. Before he got there, he had to call Andy to warn him, but for the next few minutes he could still focus all his attention on the hunt.
    He enjoyed the supremely goal-oriented