The Wilding by Benjamin Percy Page A

during the holidays are inevitably followed by arguments followed by long silences followed by making peace.
    Which is why, when November nears and his father calls and invites Justin to join him camping and hunting in Echo Canyon, he only hesitates a moment before saying yes.
    “You’re sure?” his father says.
    “Sure I’m sure.” And suddenly he is. He looks forward to leaving behind the traffic that hums through the town, the exhaust-spewing trucks and SUVs. He looks forward to getting some clean air in him and some motion under him. And he looks forward to spending one last weekend in Echo Canyon, so that he might say good-bye, as Bobby Fremont plans to break ground next week.
    “Good. I think . . .” His father’s voice falls off a cliff here, uncharacteristically uncertain.
    Justin tries to fill in the sentence for him. “Some guy time would definitely be healthy.”
    “Exactly,” his father says, relieved, his voice rising to a manly pitch reserved for taverns and locker rooms. “We’ll drink some beers and raise some hell!” He clears his throat. “And, you know, shoot the bull.”
    Several silent seconds pass as Justin wonders what kind of conversation qualifies as bull: hunting stories, dirty jokes, drywalling advice?
    “And bring that kid of yours,” his father says before hanging up. “I’ll make a man out of him yet.”
    That night Justin dreams a dream he has not had in a long time.
    He is in a meadow lit by silvery moonlight. From the surrounding forest a song plays, a children’s song, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” It sounds muted and scratchy, as if played on an old gramophone. “If you go down in the woods today, you better not go alone. It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.” The lyrics, sung in a lazy baritone, have always bothered him. His mother claims he howled and clapped his hands over his ears and ran from the room every time she tried to play it for him as a child.
    From the trees, a half circle of black hunchbacked figures emerges, advancing into the meadow. Their shapes seem to waver, shifting like smoke. After a few loping paces they stop and sway to the music and lower themselves, as if crouching. From them comes a noise Justin recognizes—a scream—a scream of pain brought on by an animal caught in barbed wire while his father roughly whispered, Shoot, shoot, shoot. He is flinching, as if subject to some blunt force, flinching before the shadows of the forest of his mind.
    The figures move forward again. As they come closer, he recognizes them as bears, all of them walking upright, wobbly-legged. Strands of barbed wire hang from them like the wires of a lurid marionette. Their fur is damp with blood. Their eyes are black. Together their chests swell in a collective breath, the prelude to another scream that goes on and on as they continue forward, spreading out into an irregular crescent that will, in a black knot, enclose him.
    He jerks awake with the song still looping through his head and his father’s face taking shape in every shadow of the room. Outside the moon creeps higher in the sky and his fear gives way to an uneasy state of anticipation as he thinks about the trip—his ability to steady his rifle and his father.

KAREN
    Tonight she grills steaks. She thinks her husband ought to do this—she thinks he ought to do a number of things, like lift weights and scream at football games and take a wrench to leaky faucets. These are, after all, things that men do. But he isn’t very handy and doesn’t have time for the gym and the only sport he watches with any interest is soccer. She doesn’t know what the right word is for him. Tame? Maybe this is why he doesn’t have many friends?
    Whenever she asks him to grill, he plays dumb, fumbling with the knobs and dropping the tongs and sighing loudly, saying he doesn’t remember the temperature for pork, questioning whether he needs all the burners on and how high. The meat is