“I finished this in one ravenous gulp. Part Evan Connell, part Wendell Berry and part Elmore Leonard, the characters are so striking, evolve so wonderfully and the book is full of woods wisdom and lore. The plot swells symphonically, all its recognizable parts annealing in a completely satisfying form.”

Peter Coyote
Actor and author

Near the book’s beginning, our narrator finds the carcass of a bear just across the little river bordering his property in the Piedmont at the base of the Blue Ridge. He knew this bear. His lover, the woman he’d just buried, had watched this bear mother her cubs. The bear died slowly, painfully, from an errant arrow, from a hunter who wouldn’t track the wounded animal and put her mercifully down.

The writer knows where the arrow should have gone, higher and between the ribs. The bear would have died within minutes. The writer further knows that the precision steel arrowhead was too heavy for the shaft, forcing the arrow down below its target.