Mickey kills the engine. You ready? he asks.

I nod, eyeing his moustache, the glow of the sun rising in the rearview mirror.

It's cold.  There's steam coming out of the Chevy's hood when Mickey and I get out. I listen to the silence of wilderness, and to copper-tipped rounds clicking into the magazine of the .22 Mick bought for me a few weeks ago. It won't bring down a boar, he says smiling a little.  But it'll give you a feel for shooting a gun.

We're a hundred yards off the road, a part of the state highway that hasn't been paved. Most of the roads in the hunting area are dirt, with a stripe of scrub coming up out of the middle. You bounce around in the potholes in trucks loaded with racks full of firearms, enough room free for god willing a decent animal carcass. That's what hunting is. Mickey would shell out $200 to the park authorities if he killed a pig. At an average of 150 pounds per animal, that's a better price than you could get at the market.  It's obvious to me, though, that money is a non-issue. Mickey seems to get less satisfaction out of cooking the pigs than in finishing them off, if you get me.

On the way up, he tells me about how years ago he and my dad snuck half a dozen waterfowl through a gap in the wire fence at the southern edge, before the ground's owners got smart enough to put up brick walls. Real crazy bastard, your old man, he says.

He hands me the rifle.  It's surprisingly heavy, the way I imagine a limb detached from the body would be. He touches the pistol he has holstered against his hip, holding his Remington up, barrel to the sky, like he's celebrating early.  When he fires the first shot some of the gunpowder catches the wind and settles on my face.  I can feel the weight of it there if I try.

You know what we do first, Mickey says.  Follow me.  And I do, into a big cluster of evergreens.  Some of the trees have lookout posts attached near the top, where you lay out your blanket and keep an eye on the terrain.  They look rickety, scary-rickety, but they hold Mickey's fat ass well enough, which is enough for most anyone, I guess.  I should stop here.  I don't make a habit of talking bad about people who don't deserve it, you know?  I guess what I'm trying to say is that Mickey deserves it.  So as he's climbing up into this one lookout with a little thatched roof the rungs pull out of the tree trunk a little.  When I follow him up I kick them back in one at a time.

I know it's different without your old man, he says.  But try to have a good time.  Take something home for your mom to cook.  He says your mom instead of just mom; that's how I know he hasn't settled in all the way yet.  She's mine; she's not his, least not all the way.  Slip-ups like that tell you where grownups' minds are.  Like when I asked him the other day, you still smell daddy in the bed-sheets?  Think I found some of his blood on my shoes, wanna wash it out?  He didn't say anything to that.

I can see some pigs grazing about a mile off.  They don't smell us yet.  Dad taught me to shit a good quarter-mile from where you're shooting, and bury it good.  Pigs have good noses, he said.  That was the last time we hunted pigs together.  If I could talk to him now, I'd ask him if he could smell Mick after he came around; did Mom bury that shit far enough away?  Dad knew for awhile, I don't know how, but long enough for the waiting period on the .45 he fired only once, that Mick now keeps somewhere neither he or my Mom can remember to find it (though sometimes, at night, she does, always quietly).

I aim for the pigs and start firing.  The .22 makes little sniffing sounds, sad and weak.  The bullets are so small I can't even see them hit the dirt.  What are you doing, Mick says, trying to be gentle.  You're not gonna hit 'em that way.  The main thing about hunting is that you've got to be stealth.  You know?

I don't answer.  I just think about what I'm gonna do next time he turns his back.  He's not as stupid as I take him for, because for the next day and a half, while we hunt, and even for a little time afterward, he watches me close.  And Mom asks, did you shoot any pigs?  And I say, Not this time.