the hermit whispered. “Can I call you Jason for a little while?” He sat in a chair sipping his whiskey, listening to the light snoring of the child. The hermit was being careful not to swallow too much whiskey. The man he’d seen at the burial place might come back, and the hermit wanted to be ready. He was: His lever-action .30-30 lay across his lap. The hermit reached down and patted Wolf on the head. The dog liked Jason; it wasn’t jealous at all. Good. The hermit kept his rifle clean. Every so often, he killed a deer, even though he hated to do it. Over the years (he had been in the woods a long time), he had learned to cook the deer and store it so it lasted. No matter how hard he thought about it, the hermit could not understand how the boy had come to be put in the ground like that. Had someone meant to keep him there for a long time? Like some kind of pet? Did the boy belong to the man the hermit had seen in the woods? No, that made no sense. Sometimes it was hard to separate what was memory and what was nightmare, what was real and what was wish.
