The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass

then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas—and that even more improbable than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had made him hers and she his—the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other’s lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time.
    But belonging to each other, as much in death as in life. Inescapably, and forever. The hunt showing her that.

Yazoo
    The first time I realized that Wejumpka was strong, really strong, was when I slept in late. It was a rainy morning in November, late in the morning—noon. Vern and I had been up drinking, talking, playing records, until well past three-thirty in the morning. The doctors had said that Vern could go any month now, any week, even; that when his liver shut down everything bad was going to start happening, real fast. That was just the way it was, though, and you couldn’t change a man’s whole life.
    â€œIt’s like trying to make a pine tree turn into an oak,” Vern said about his not being able to stop drinking. We weren’t drinking anything hard: just beer, to remind us of when we were young, and because there’d been a sale on it that day at the gas station.
    Vern’s most recent girlfriend, a girl my age, a girl I’d gone to high school with, had left him two days ago, saying she
o didn’t want to be around when he died; but Vern finally understood that he was indeed going to die, that it was coming, no maybes about it, and he had decided that there was a sort of dignity in not changing his movements, his patterns, before it happened. He didn’t want to feel like he was running from it, since it was going to happen, and though I had not agreed with his logic at first, I saw what he was talking about the closer we got to it. Or I thought I did. He said that he did not miss the girl much one way or the other, if that was how she was, and I saw what he meant by that, too.
    It was almost as if it was all happening to me instead of to him; I could see all of it, could see why he was doing things. It was what anyone would have done.
    We kept the beers iced down in a trash can, floated them in water and ice, and they were so cold that they made our teeth hurt. Sometimes Vern would cry out in pain when he got up to go to the restroom. It was a bad thing he had done to himself, all that drinking, but it was done and there wasn’t any going back.
    â€œIt’s like a ski run,” I said, “coming down a long run, near the bottom, where you haven’t fallen yet. You can try jumps, loops, flips, anything. You’re hot, you’re on a roll, you can do anything.”
    â€œI’ve never been skiing before,” Vern said. He looked down at his beer. He was fifty, but looked sixty-five. His face was loose on him, and his eyes were sad and red, and his hair had gone all to hell, shot through with gray where it wasn’t falling out; but he still had Wejumpka, his youngest, and always would. Instead of talking about dying, we talked about Wejumpka whenever the subject of Vern’s health came up. I was Wejumpka’s godfather, next in line, and it scared me.
    â€œHow’re you doing, big guy?” I’d ask, putting a hand on Vern’s shoulder. I’m thirty, but feel older.
    And Vern would grin, glad I was gripping his shoulder, and he’d look down and say something like, “That Wejumpka, he’s something else.”
    Â 
    Wejumpka was twelve. Vern had another son, Austin, who was eighteen by then, but Austin was different. Austin had run away from home when he was sixteen to Arizona to live on an Indian reservation and take peyote; Austin drank like a fish, had a marijuana plant growing in the backyard of his mother’s house, sassed