Goat Mountain by David Vann

of you.
    My father opened the driver’s door and the light came on. The only light on that entire mountainside, and my father’s thin hair as he tilted in. Then Tom scooting into the center with his rifle barrel leaned back against his shoulder, and then my grandfather.
    I sat down in the bed, kept low against the cold as the truck twisted and the four-wheel drive moaned, and we were back in camp quickly.
    My father fired up the lantern first thing, pumping at it in darkness and then lighting the wicks, like tea bags on fire, and then the flames sucked in and grew white-hot as he opened the valve more, the sound of a furnace, a soft roar.
    He set this near the griddle and then made a fire in the pit just before the table. Big Blue Tip kitchen matches and newspaper, smaller sticks and then the split wood he had brought. We sat on log rounds as Tom worked on dinner. The fire grown and the heat coming off it, the three of us leaning in as close as we could. The sparks lifting up into the pines. The fire setting us apart from all else. The first thing to distinguish man. Hunting in a group was older but shared by animals.
    There’s not much we can do that is older and more human than sitting at a fire. The way a flame surrounds a piece of wood and illuminates, how soft that flame looks, and how it seems nothing at all will happen to the wood. Blond still beneath, visible through flame, and the transformation to black is something unnoticed until it’s already done.
    No edge of a flame ever breaks or tears. It can take any shape at all, but every change is fluid, every edge rounded, each new wave born of the last and complete and vanished. It’s only in fire or water that we can find a corollary to felt mystery, a face to who we might be, but fire is the more immediate. In fire, we never feel alone. Fire is our first god.
    We could hunt the glades tomorrow, my grandfather said.
    We should go back for that buck, my father said.
    You know there’s no buck, my grandfather said.
    Three generations of us staring into that fire, into the first coals, radiating orange, a deeper color to the heat. The wood organizing itself as it was consumed, segmenting into rectangular coals. And where did this order come from?
    You don’t know that, my father finally said.
    What I know is that he’s not right, my grandfather said. Something in him is not right. And what we should be doing is killing him right now and burning him in this fire.
    You’re talking about my son, my father said. Your grandson.
    That’s why we should be the ones to take care of it.
    Neither of them were looking at me. They spoke about me as if I were a million miles away.
    I’d kill you first, my father said.
    I know that, my grandfather said.
    In firelight, their faces two versions of the same, separated only by time. Same eyes staring down into the coals, same hands outstretched, only the surface different. Older skin, and my grandfather swollen and infirm. But if you could cut away the fat, go back in years, you’d find the same man.
    What I can’t remember is what I understood. I know my own grandfather said I should be killed and burned, but I can’t remember what I felt when he said that. I think I felt nothing, because I remember nothing. Anger might have been possible. When there’s no understanding, anger is always possible. But I could not have felt any recognition, and for some reason I don’t understand now, I felt no fear.
    With every moment, things are getting worse for us, my grandfather said. Every minute that passes. That body hanging is like a clock.
    That’s true, Tom said. His voice from outside, unwelcome. The smell of steaks and onions on the griddle, popping of grease just audible beyond the drier sounds of our fire.
    Maybe stay out of this, my father said.
    I wish, Tom said. I do wish that. I wish I could erase when I met you. I’d lose all the years to avoid this now.
    We met before