murderer, the man who’d run with his rifle into the mountains a dozen years ago and disappeared forever. And there was the man who yet at times stepped from the shadowed edges of Wendell’s memory: the joke teller, the belly-laugher, the mountain trapper who’d take a knee as if in prayer to pluck a spray of Indian paintbrush for Wendell’s mother. Wendell had spent half his life fatherless now, and in his father’s absence he’d never been forced to reconcile these two visions. In the broken landscapes of his heart he could cherish
