Tracker by Gary Paulsen Page B

simply end. His grandmother took a plate of meat and potatoes from the oven and put it in front of him. She had known somehow that he was coming because it wasn’t stale food, still fresh. Or maybe she’d just kept a different plate warm each night. No, he thought, she’d known somehow—just as she always knows.
    His grandfather put his pipe down. He never smoked when anybody was eating. He looked at John, then out the window. “You touched her? You really touched a live deer?”
    John nodded. “I walked and walked and touched her. She couldn’t get up.”
    Another long pause.
    â€œAin’t that something, Aggie?” his grandfathersaid. “He walked one down. Ain’t that something?”
    And there was a thing in his voice that John had never heard before. A touch of pride, perhaps; a building of something.
    â€œI’ll take that with me,” his grandfather went on. “That’s something I’ll just take with me.”
    John had a forkful of meat halfway to his mouth and he stopped, put the fork down. He was surprised to see that his grandfather was crying, crying as he looked at his reflection in the window—or just looked out the window—and two thoughts cut through the tiredness in his mind, burned into his brain.
    The first was that his grandfather was going to die. He would die and there was nothing John could do about it—nothing touching the doe could do about it. Death would come.
    And the second thing was that death was a part of it all, a part of living. It was awful, a taking of life, but it happened to all things, as his grandfather said, would happen to John someday. Dying was just as much a part of Clay Borne as living.
    â€œTomorrow, I do the chores,” John said. “You take it easy.”
    After that there was just the food and keeping his eyes open until he went up the stairs to bedwhere he dreamt of the doe and his grandfather and awakened in sweat when the dream became too real.
    But he made no sound and went back to sleep evenly, even thoughts of the doe washed from his mind.

Keep reading for a sneak peek of This Side of Wild!

• CHAPTER ONE •
A Confusion of Horses, a Border Collie named Josh, a Grizzly Bear Who Liked Holes, and a Poodle with Three Teeth

    First, a hugely diversionary trail:
    Very few paths are completely direct, and this one seemed at first to be almost insanely devious.
    The doctor diagnosed various problems, some lethal, all apparently debilitating, and left me taking various medications and endless rituals of check-ins and checkouts and tests and retests. . . .
    Which drove me almost directly away from the whole process. I moved first to Wyoming, a small town called Story, near Sheridan, where I kept staring at the beauty of the Bighorn Mountains, accessed by a trail out of Story, and at last succumbed to the idea of two horses, one for riding and one for packing.
    The reasoning was this: I simply could not stand what I had become—stale, perhaps, or stalemated by what appeared to be my faltering body. Clearly I could not hike the Bighorns, or at least I thought I could not (hiking, in any case, was something I had come to dislike—hate—courtesy of the army), and so to horses.
    My experience with riding horses was most decidedly limited. As a child on farms in northern Minnesota, I had worked with workhorse teams—mowing and raking hay, cleaning barns with crude sleds and manure forks—and in the summer we would sometimes ride these workhorses.
    They were great, massive (weighing more than a ton), gentle animals and so huge that to get on their backs we either had to climb their legs—like shinnying up a living, hair-covered tree—or get them to stand near a board fence or the side of a hayrack (a wagon with tall wheels and a flatbed used for hauling hay from the field to the barn) so we could jump up and over onto their backs.
    Once we were on their