Ranger

I said, It is.

He nodded.

He looked back at the stove.

He said,

I had a cousin go missing up in the Wallowas in 89.

They never found him either.

My aunt never got over it.

I said I was sorry.

He said, it's the not knowing, that's what did it to her.

He said it with what sounded like real feeling.

But he was looking at the stove grate, and his hands were resting flat on his knees.

And he was sitting in a way that a tired, grieving man does not sit.

That was the third thing.

I don't know how to explain the next part without making it sound more dramatic than it was.

It wasn't dramatic.

It was quiet.

It was the quiet work of a man sitting on a bunk in a small shelter in a bad storm trying to remember something he had nearly forgotten.

i was looking at clark's face in the low light from the propane lantern he was in profile turned three-quarters toward the stove i was looking at the shape of his jaw and the set of his mouth and the way his beard grew on his cheek-bones

and I was trying to figure out why something about his face was pulling at a part of my memory I had not visited in a long time.

He opened his mouth to take a slow breath, and I saw his front teeth.