ALLEGHENY FRONT HAS FEW SENTIMENTAL TRAPPINGS. Traveling salesmen meet up with the guns of the landed poor; tourists die, loggers die, cranky uncles are pulverized. But as often as men kill each other in Matthew Neill Null’s singular, strong collection, they kill animals more. And not just game animals, either: black bears are massacred, bald eagles killed and crucified. In these intelligent and unpretentious stories, men’s stubbornness is a rock face, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill.

In an era where even the more esoteric of literary fictions tend to have moved away from the rural, away from the beasts of the forests and fields, away from land-based individual sustenance and the rhythms of seasons and tide, Null’s stories are remarkable for both their sharp relevance and their otherness. They seem to uncover a texture of living that’s increasingly alien to urban readers, who, for better or worse, make up the lion’s share of buyers and borrowers of contemporary literary fiction in the United States. It’s a gritty texture precisely defined by the details of natural places, without the slickness and bright primary colors of highly engineered, exclusively human habitats. Null’s subtler palette is browns and greens, yellows and grays, the blues of sky and water.

It’d be disingenuous of me to call these stories “authentic,” since I’m frankly unqualified to judge the authenticity of foreign cultural representations — and make no mistake, the divide between rural and urban life in this country in 2016 is stark enough to make one foreign to the other. Of course, it’s not a literal divide and is far more nuanced than this reductive formulation (for instance, I live in the middle of the desert in a warm, red state, but I grew up urban and cold, and I don’t change my own flats).

Still, we who live it know it instinctively: there are at least two nations at odds with each other here and now, a profound schism dividing their dominant cultures. (Journalist Colin Woodard has famously, and with fairly minimal controversy, put the number of geocultural nations within our formal national boundaries higher, in fact, at eleven — and in Woodard’s scheme Null’s literary homeland of West Virginia is itself split into three cultures, two rural-based and only one small northern part “Yankee.”)

So, like much of my reading demographic, I know almost as little of hardscrabble country life in West Virginia as it’s possible to know. But I know a bit about land-use policy, a smidgeon about wildlife management, and a fair amount about natural resource conflicts, and Null’s stories have an extensive grounding in all of these. They interest themselves in the brutality with which we’ve plundered our legacy of wild places, in the excruciating social limits that drive personal choices, and the economic corners into which we paint each other and ourselves. Almost every piece touches on some part of the class enmity that festers between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, those who understand the land as a treasure to be protected and those who eke out a tough living directly from it.

Yet Allegheny Front is anything but one-sided or simplistically dualistic. It remains at a distance from judgment, at a remove from easy definitions, unspooling a lucid and often painful history of appetite, exploitation, and bereavement.

— Lydia Millet

THREADGILL HAD BEEN ONE OF THEM, or something like it. This part of the world hadn’t been penetrated by the Company in four seasons, ever since they lost him, their ace drummer, on the Blackwater River, where he’d been shot off a farmer’s wife by the farmer himself. While the man fumbled a fresh shell into the breech of his shotgun, Threadgill ran flopping out the back door and tumbled down the sheer cliff behind the cabin. There he came to rest in the arms of a mighty spruce. The tree held him like a babe till they rigged up a block and tackle to lift him out. They said he had nothing but socks on, argyle. The image bored into Cartwright’s brain like a weevil. The week the Company hired Cartwright on as a drummer, he found the dead man’s sucker list wrapped in oilskin and tacked under the wagon tongue. It was the secret of Cartwright’s success. He grew flush off commission in no time.

Polishing a new gold tooth with his tongue, Cartwright clattered down the road in a buckboard wagon. He followed the split-rail fence that wormed along the trace. Ironweed and seven sisters grew between the ruts, tickling the horses — a gelded pair of blood bays. The farther he traveled, the more the roadbed degraded. The spring rains had gnawed small ravines into it all the way down to the shining black chert; he kept his horses to a low canter, should they come upon a slip. The tunnel of rain-lush forest gave way, finally, to cleared farmland around the bend.

The only thing Cartwright knew about McBride, today’s prospect, was that the farmer was a sucker, though the few neighbors around there would have told Cartwright that no one knew the valley better than honest Sherman McBride — the creeks that bred trout, the caves that held flint — except for the two boys he raised off those mouthfuls of corn that rose from the fields and strained for sun. Even so, honesty would be the man’s downfall. Cartwright gazed up at the Allegheny Mountains that were a series of blue lines on the horizon. This was long before the forests were scoured off the mountains and the coal chipped from their bellies, before blight withered the chestnut stands. A dozen passenger pigeons trickled through the sky, the first Cartwright had seen that year despite all his travels. The cherry of his cigarette tumbled, and he jumped and slapped it out of his lap.

Ah! The passenger pigeons he remembered best of all. Every fall, his family had waited for the black shrieking cloud. Word was passed down from northern towns — Anthem, Mouth of Seneca — and there they were, a pitch river of millions undulating in the sky. When they touched down to rest, they toppled the crowns from oaks. They plucked any living plant and then the roiling swarm fell to the ground and tore at grass. Under them, no one could tell field from road.

“Whoever cut this grade,” Cartwright said to the horses, “must have followed a snake up the hollow. Followed a damned snake!” He roomed near the courthouse in Anthem, but he hadn’t been there in seven weeks. He was deep into the summer swing through the highland counties, all the way up to Job and Corinth, the old towns once called Salt Creek and Beartown until a religious fervor inspired their rechristening. Cartwright glanced at the crate jostling under the tarp. He said, “Damn, boys. I’d almost buy it myself to get shut of this situation.”

He swabbed his face with his tie. Soon, the sun burned off the fog and hoisted itself into the sky. “Horses, it’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. I tell you that much.”

He took another little drink. Bottle-flies turned their emerald backs in the sun. Young monarchs gathered to tongue the green horseshit and clap their wings.

Before the Company hired him, Cartwright had sold funeral insurance, apprenticed himself to a farrier, and, in his youth, worked his father’s acres. To hear his father tell it, Anthem was a profane place, and the family would do well to keep ground between their children and such ways. But a month after she buried her husband, Cartwright’s mother closed the deed on their land and moved them to Anthem without debate. Her sister lived by the railroad depot.

Though it had been years since he’d swung a scythe or sheathed his arms in the hot blood of stock, Cartwright’s boyhood helped him build a quick rapport, or so he said, with the farmers who bought his wares. Truthfully, he bullied them into buying the tools, or, if they would not be bullied, he casually insulted the farmers’ methods in front of their wives. “That’s one way of doing things,” he said to the hard sells. “Gets it done sure as any other. Yessir. Hard labor! Of course, you don’t see many men doing it that way anymore. Last season, I found blue-gums down in Greenbrier County working like that.”

“You don’t say.”

“No, excuse me. Season before last. And they might have been Melungeons. Ma’am, could you spare some water for a wayfaring traveler?”

Cartwright would bid them good night and retreat to the hayloft, and, as often as not, be greeted in the morning by the farmer with a fistful of wrinkled dollars and watery, red-rimmed eyes, having been flayed the night long for stubborn habits that clashed with the progressive spirit of the times.

Like his own father, the people Cartwright sold to worked rocky mountain acres, wresting little more than subsistence from the ground. None had owned slaves. Some abstained from the practice out of moral doctrine; most abstained for lack of money. They carded their own wool, cured their own tobacco, and died young or back-bent, withered and brown as ginseng roots twisted from the soil. A handful of affluent farmers in the river bottoms owned early Ford tractors, odd and exoskeletal; the rest still worked mules and single-footed plows. Cartwright had seen acres of corn on hillsides canting more than forty-five degrees.

To even the humblest farmers, still he managed to sell a few harrow teeth or ax-heads.

Success ensnared him: the more he found, the more desolate the places the Company sent him to, and the higher the profits they came to expect. He was the rare man to wring dollars from these scanty places, and he’d grown tired of the counties they cast him farther and farther into like a bass plug. A man couldn’t even buy a fresh newspaper where he roamed. Cartwright brought these people the first word of laws and statutes that a young state government was trying to filigree over the backcountry. He should have said no, but the Company representative appealed to his vanity: “I’ll be straight with you. We’re in the middle of a recession and”—the man was a veteran of the Spanish War—“we need our best on the ramparts. We know you can make quota, buddy. You done proved yourself.” The praise flooded Cartwright’s belly with a singing warmth, sure as a shot of clean bourbon. Only now did he realize the Company had taken advantage of his loyalty. As soon as he hit Anthem, he’d demand a promotion.

Cartwright took the last hit of whiskey and licked his lips. “My ass hurts,” he told the horses through a sly, sidelong grin. “Do your feet hurt? Huh now?”

Now there was the trouble of the last plow; never had he returned with inventory, and he wasn’t about to start. Had to make quota. Cartwright lobbed the jar into a roadside holly bush, where it left a quivering hole in the leaves. “Hup,” he said, slapping the horses’ haunches with the reins. The sweat went flying. A swarm of insects gathered to sup at the horses’ soft eyes, nostrils, assholes. He began to doze, but a furry gray deerfly tagged him on the neck. He slapped it away and cursed softly, so not to spook the horses. Blood formed, round and perfect as a one-carat ruby. Again, he lifted his tie.

McBride seemed to be getting up a small orchard of thorny apples along the road. The split rails of the fence became fresher till they gave out — around the bend, Cartwright found two boys planing and setting lengths of locust by the roadside. Fresh from the adze, the cut lumber gleamed silver in the sun, if marred in places by heartshakes and spalting. The boys wore a coarse homespun, bearing the scurvy look of those who live without women. Their long hair was cut severely, as if it had been chopped with a mattock.

Over the chip-chop-thunk of the adze, the twins spoke to each other in a fluttering brogue, the voice of orioles. They saw the wagon and fell dumb, tools gone limp in their hands. They openly stared. Cartwright reined his horses and said, “Hello there, fellows. You the men of the place?”

While one answered, the other spat on the blade of the scrub plane and ran it grating over a stone. The boy said, “English barn a quarter mile up. Ought to find him there. You a preacher?”

“No.”

“Ah. That’s too bad. We haven’t heard good preaching in a while.” Cartwright wouldn’t have guessed it, but both of the boys could cipher well. The eldest had read the family Bible seven times through. The one on the left asked, “You play music?”

“No.”

“Not the taxman, are you?”

“I’m a salesman.”

The boy had no comment for this. Waving Cartwright on, he opened a mouthful of teeth so black and broken they looked serrated. He stuffed tobacco inside. Cartwright thanked both boys and slapped his horses forward. The wagon went rattling on.

When the drummer was out of earshot, one asked, “What do you think?”

“I expect he’ll expect us to feed him dinner.”

His brother sighted down the scrub plane, eyeing it for flaws. “Need that like a hot nail in the foot.”

“Least he’s not here for taxes.”

“At least.”

The twins turned away, shouldered a rail in tandem, set it atop another.

Catholic Irish, Cartwright thought, like his mother’s father, who’d been converted to the Southern Methodist Church when the preacher said how the Pope’s Catholics was little better than cannibals, eating up the body of Christ and carving the thumbs off of saints. The body is profane, the spirit real! As a boy, he had heard a Catholic in an infirmary pray to beads. They had come here to dig railroad tunnels, but, like exotic flowers, never quite took to the place and died about as quickly as the land would have them.

Soon he came upon a sharp-shouldered man plowing up earth with acres to go. The farmer’s face was sallow and long-whiskered under a broad-brimmed felt hat, but his hands and arms were the color of leaf tobacco. His boots had been mended with baling twine. McBride, for sure. He whoa’d the mule to a stop. The animal was stout and gleamed wetly in the sun, like a doused ingot of iron. Waves of salt had dried on its shoulders.

“Hi,” the drummer said, lifting a hand from the reins. “Good-looking animal you got there.”

“Ought to be,” McBride said. He took off his crushed felt hat and swept it across his forehead like a bandanna. “We paid big on him at the auction. My last mule lived to be thirty-two years old. Hell, my neighbor just give him to me on trade and we worked him swaybacked. After the war, it was. Know how much the price on a mule goes up in thirty-two years?”

Cartwright wanted to say, It’s called capital, old buddy. Instead, he politely inquired as to what the years could do to the price of a mule.

“Enough to take a belt of the good stuff before raising my bidding hand.”

Cartwright shook his head knowingly. “It’s an animal you can’t do without.”

“Indeed. Like I tell my boys, you can’t do without a mule no more than you can do without legs. You’re a cripple without one. Don’t I, boys? Don’t I say you can’t do without a mule no more than legs?”

“Yes. He says it all the damn time.” The boys had stalked up from behind. Cartwright couldn’t help but jump.

“I told you,” McBride said. “All the damn time I say it.”

Cartwright regained his composure. The pitch: “You speak with a lot of sense and experience. Fellows, a mule is important and so’s a man’s tools. I was a farmer for many years and indeed I know that a farmer is only good as his tools. Let the harness match the hide, as they say. You need something to equal that good mule.”

McBride flinched. A less experienced drummer might think this the wrong tack, but Cartwright knew his trade, and his trade was talk. In his mind’s eye he saw the contents of the Irishman’s barn: cracked and broken harnesses, homemade harrows, antiquated briar hoes — all tools of the Old World. They might even shell corn by hand. “Yessir,” he continued, “I got something here that will double, if not triple, a man’s yield at harvest with only half the effort. Half the effort, twice the yield. Powerful math. Now how about that?”

McBride said nothing. The good mule stood in the furrow, radiating a potent silence. The best draft animals have no discernible personality, and this one seemed such a beast.

“Now me,” Cartwright said, “I’d say you couldn’t beat that with a stick. This tool a man can’t afford to be without. Latest from Virginia Progressive Agriculture. Help me, boys.”

The twins pitched forward. Cartwright dismounted, whispered into the horses’ toggling ears, and walked around to the wagon-bed. He peeled back a yellow oilskin, revealing a rectangular crate. He took out a small pry bar and removed a series of staples. The twins helped him lift the lid off a steel-pointed, double-footed plow packed in straw. It had been polished to a violent gleam, and the sun caught and danced like hooked minnows on every point and angle. McBride didn’t dare look back, imagining his own single-footed plow: crude, hand-forged, nicked and dull as any kitchen blade.

“Brand new, our latest model. This here is the McCrory Reaper,” Cartwright said, “but I call it the Miracle Plow. Our engineers have designed it to render a maximum harvest as far as crops go, clearing twice as much land in the same amount of hours and cutting a deeper furrow, turning up fresher soil and more nutrients. We guarantee better crops or your money back. It’s been tested by a scientist at the state college for three years and the results have been proved.

“Look. I’m not the first drummer to come down the road and won’t be the last, but I sell no snake oil. I’m a farm boy myself, grew up on a spread the size of this one. I know what it’s like to rise with the last star and work under the light of the first. We lost that farm because we had two bad years running.” Cartwright licked his mouth with the moisture of the lie. “That’s all it took: two bad ones. I say with confidence, if we’d’ve had the McCrory Reaper, we’d still be farming my dad’s acres. But my dad wasn’t progressive. Wouldn’t change with the times. Now another’s working our land — successfully, with the Miracle Plow. Sold it to him myself. Broke my heart, too. Probably shouldn’t be telling it, but I did. You got to get that dollar. Boys, help me move this thing. If you don’t mind, Mr. McBride, let’s unbuckle your old plow and hitch up this one. You got a singletree? No? That’s okay. Let’s run a couple furrows with it, free of charge, and see how it measures up. Break a half-acre. Would you be averse?”

The question hung there. The twins looked to McBride for instruction, eyes black and hard. Cartwright saw one boy had only nine fingers — a way to tell them apart. McBride gave them a slight nod. They harnessed the Miracle Plow.

Tucking his tie between the buttons of his shirt, Cartwright approached the mule as the Irishmen sat on their haunches in an outbuilding’s shade. It was awkward for them to watch another man work without falling in line behind him. They rebelled against their jittering tendons, forced themselves still.

Cupping the mule’s nose, Cartwright said, “You got to get to know a mule, right? What’s his name? Ronald? Is that right? Ronald, do I have a treat for you. This thing’s going to feel light as a vest.” He moved behind the double-footed plow, leaned forward, and slapped the mule on its ass with a sharp tack fitted on the inside of his ring. The mule surged forward, the leather harness yanked with such force it began to groan.

“Jesus,” McBride whispered. “Look at Ronald pull.”

THE DEER’S HAUNCH SHIVERED IN THE crosshairs. The hide was winter’s gray, and the air didn’t feel like November. Cold had come early this year, indifferent as the sharpest scythe.

The haunch moved: a doe. Crosshairs swung after.

Revealing the white underthroat that men seldom see, she balanced artfully on hind legs to pluck the wine-dark fruit hanging in the sumac. Her weight tugged off a fist of berries. Each bone-colored limb quivered in the air. Snow sifted down, snow that would be gone by noon.

Sull Mercer eased the.270 into the cleft of his shoulder and took a rest off one knee. His rifle was scoped with a 3x9 Leupold — an expensive piece of equipment — but Sull would have told you it was anything but a luxury. It found the tuck behind the doe’s shoulder, that corridor to heart and lung. When she passed into a notch between shagbarks, a chance would flicker. For three decades now, this rifle had been comfort in his hands — the bolt worn smooth of its checkering, the burled walnut dark with weather and age. A twig popped under his shifting heel. No more than the crack of a finch’s bone.

The doe stamped a foot. Moments ticked by. She performed an elaborate dance, dropping her head and bobbing it up, then back down again and on and on, ears switching, goading him to move. She was an old doe, barren now, and knew threat by its first name. If the flag of Sull’s face rustled in the greenbriers, she’d crash through the brush. He held.

His wife craved the liver. He pictured the doe bearing it to them in her body, a gift.

She took a step, with a slight slew-footed twist of the foreleg. Sull flinched. He knew this deer! Before his son Eric had gone to the penitentiary, Sull helped stalk her at the abandoned quarry, where she’d bedded with a lone fawn. This dance had saved her life then. Eric was young, impatient. He tossed four careening shots as she ran. A wild clean miss, each one. It was everything Sull told him not to do. All three sons had learned it over the years, a psalm: One cartridge, one kill. The rest is just slop. In a voice chilly as spring water, Sull had told him, “You work that bolt like an automatic, don’t you? Maybe they drafted the wrong one of you.”

Eric didn’t speak to him after that. It made Sull bite his lip to think it now. But Sull was calm, even as the doe’s stormy eyes slid over his body. He’d killed enough deer to hang every hook in a slaughterhouse, and few things excited him now that his children had gone on. The doe put forth a tentative hoof. The crosshairs leapt and a peal of thunder rattled the woods. Wrens vanished from the sumac into that pure balance: receding echoes, an expanding silence.

A fox had taken five of the Rockinghams Sull raised as a crib against lean winter months. They didn’t need the hens, really, with the grocery selling them on the cheap, but he nursed their absence like a blister. The thought of a deer hanging — the lactic acid breaking down, the meat’s surface curing to a glossy black rind — made him feel confident in his sustenance.

She didn’t travel a yard. The bullet had ripped a wet socket through the heart, and the doe collapsed as if her knees had turned to stove ash. Hind legs kicked convulsively, brooming leaves. Sull kept the scope on her as she seized, then thumbed on the safety when death was sure. Approaching, he checked his pocket for the familiar heft of the Schrade. She was hoary with age across the muzzle and shanks. Nicked, scalloped hooves. A fleeting regret: perhaps he should have killed something tender and young. Her muskiness drifted up to him. The body had a catatonic beauty, a still life. The exit wound, a slight red star, told a perfect shot. Shame no one else would see it. Marion would be happy for the liver, though, and maybe the twins would come down from Michigan to hunt Thanksgiving. After their discharges, Joel first and Jeffrey eight months later, they had found good union jobs in an auto plant and married Midwestern women about as quick as boys can find them. Sull and Marion couldn’t blame them. Anyone here with any ambition did the same. Ambition, they all said, chewing the word.

Sull was pleased and sad the hunt had ended so early, but it would give him time that evening to open the gilt-edged King James and glean its comfort. But the day itself comforted more. A windless cold, the kind that keens the senses and brings a gift of ice to the lungs. He’d have Marion write about the doe in her letter to Eric. After pulling the doe onto a rotten quilt of snow, Sull shucked gloves and jacket and rolled his sleeves. He gutted as if he were trying to ration motion itself. After years of fieldwork, he performed the ritual with surgical efficiency. The heart belched a ragged last beat. He fished out a rope, tied it round her neck, and quartered uphill. Innards left her body with a wet sigh and steamed. Arms gloved in blood, he plucked leaves off her eyes and mouth and smoothed the fur tenderly. Pooling blood began to congeal and maroon. He rubbed snow on his knife and hands. Foxes would find the gut-pile and stick their muzzles into the rich leavings, all the way up to their eyeballs. They would eat the pink snow itself. Then buzzards, considerately stripping earth of the dead.

Dragging the body, he thought of his hens. No tracks printed on the raked earth, no cabbage-sized hole marring the drywall. After three nights yawning with a snake-charmer.410 in his arms, Sull dug the rusty leg-hold traps out of the attic, a pair of size two double-coilsprings and a big Newhouse Three. The hinges ached. With a steel brush, he brought iron back to life and nursed the springs with beeswax in the worst, twangiest spots. He baited them with meat scraps, which shriveled untouched till they resembled dried mushrooms. This fox was awful.

A grouse flushed from an upturned washing machine. Snow gave way to leaves and a dump where greenbrier stitched the work of generations: bald tires and log-chains rusted into solid piles, gallon jugs and stripped sedans. He skidded the deer onto a logging road that died into the slope behind his house. Pausing to catch his breath, he saw the silhouette of a great dark hawk that lit on the electric pole near the drive. It shook its vast wings of parasites and tucked them back. Sull’s face grew hot. Dead hens. No tracks. He’d been a fool.

He dropped the rope and leaned into his shot. When he pulled the trigger, the hawk stiffened and fell. Sull ran with an old man’s jauntiness and found it buckling in the gravel. Scaly, cadmium talons gripped for empty air like palsied hands. Guard feathers obscured the chest, but his bullet had torn a red void out its back. A wing flapped. Turning the bird over with his boot, he saw it was a mature bald eagle. He grinned. It died then.

With a dull hammer, Sull nailed the eagle to the side of the barn, a derelict creamery, to ward off other predators. The parchment skull gave easily under the sixteen-penny nail, its honed point shining, and the sharp wedge of beak caved to the hammer-blow. He stood back to admire his handiwork. The screen door cracked in its keeper. The pitcher in Marion’s hand was lacy with suds. “You scared me,” she said, with a pinched look. “I dropped a dish.”

“Sorry. I seen this on the light-pole. I shot him. Weren’t no fox. An eagle!” Breathing hard, he wiped his smiling face on a shoulder. Sweat had turned his gray hair the dark, wet sheen of merchant pig-iron.

“You allowed doing that?” she asked.

“Yeah I am,” he said curtly. He spoke through a fixed smile, as he tended to do when flustered. He’d expected her to beam. “Shot us a doe. She’ll eat good. Hose in the garage?”

“Is where it always is. You remember the liver?”

“Shit.”

She flinched at the word. He’d left the tender organ buried in the gut-pile like a precious coin. Marion’s favorite part, if a tad rich for his palate. She had reminded him of it three times. He picked shyly at his hammer-welted fingers. Blood had troughed blackly in the folds of knuckles.

“Want me to fetch it?” Though he knew crows would be playing rowdy by now.

She shaded her face, her pretty gray eyes. “No, no. It’s alright.”

“I want to,” he said, coloring. He was angry at himself, and angry at her. “I’ll run up.”

“Too late anyhow.”

“You want me to shoot another?”

“No. Well, maybe later this year. I’d hate to have one killed just for the liver.”

“We’ll get us one when the twins come. Here, come take a look at this old boy.”

The eagle was huge. Marion put a tentative finger to the claws. A train of blood eased down the whitewashed boards, the fierce yellow gleam draining from its iris. Sull and Marion heard a shrill cry breaking in two parts, then three. The eagle’s mate was banking to the clouds above Fenwick Mountain. As she climbed updrafts on stiff wingbeats, the circle she made grew and grew, expanding like a pupil to the shifting of light.

BEARS HAD BEEN SEEN ON THE road. Black bears, young males thrown out the den, nipped at by their mothers, romping over the green drop cloth of spring. They tore up the last worm fences in that county — those relics of another life, 1860, 1870—and raked the wood for termites. They scared cows and old men picking up trash along the road. Too early, the young males tried mounting sow bears, to make more of their perfect selves. When bitten hard and warned back, they looked joyous even then. So happy to be alive. After two hundred years of decline, they were managing an upswing. A new era had come.

LABOR DAY. WE COULD HEAR THE bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman’s trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail crunched underfoot with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses.

Finally, sun spilled through the trees, and we saw Pillow Rock rise as big as a church from the waters. A gaudy lichen of beach towels and bikini tops coated it over. Local women shouted our names. “Happy Labor Day!” When we set foot upon it, the granite seemed to curve to our bare soles, radiating an animal heat. Wolf spiders raced off. We made the top, where Pillow Rock flattened. The river nipped at its base. So much water. The Army Corps of Engineers had uncorked the dam below Summersville Lake. The water churned and gouged at the canyon walls. The Gauley had the reputation of a drowning river, even before the Army Corps wrestled it out of God’s control and gave it power.

Upriver, scraps of neon: rafters. Dyes like that don’t appear in nature. Their paddles flashed like pikes in the sun.

Rafting brings in millions of taxable dollars a year. The commissioner says it’s the best thing to happen to Nicholas County since the Coal Severance Tax. “Coal was king,” he says. “Coal was king.” Men in their twenties and thirties and forties shouldn’t stand idle. We who’d lost our mining jobs would work in whitewater, plow that wet furrow. Nice thoughts. Invigorating lies. For our bread, we worked filling stations, timber outfits, hospice care, county schools. The two big successes among us, Chet Mason and Reed Judy, started a welding outfit out of Reed’s old, echoing barn. The rafting operators — from Pennsylvania, Oregon, Croatia — brought their own people and did little hiring, until Kelly Bischoff started Class Five. He hired locals. The papers gushed over Kelly. He’d graduated from Panther Creek High School. One of us. Ex-miner. He looked rugged-good and dusky on a brochure, glossy and smiling, holding a paddle. His mother’s from Gad.

On Pillow Rock, men and women spoke to one another, casual and cunning. Someone fiddled with a portable radio: white jags of static, the silver keen of a steel guitar. We pried open prescription bottles that carried names other than our own.

Too late for trout fishing, too early for squirrel season — time to sun ourselves like happy rattlesnakes and watch the frolic. Five weeks running in the fall, we did, every Saturday, every Sunday. Opening day was always best. Every few minutes, another raft tumbled over Sweet’s Falls and crashed in the shredding whirlpool. After a tense moment, the raft popped up like a cork in a sudsy bucket of beer. We cheered. Agonized faces glanced back, blooming with smiles. They loved us, or the sight of us. They held paddles aloft in pale, white arms and their orange helmets shined. Some claim we don’t care about those people, we just take their commerce. Not true. We wonder about their jobs, their towns, their faces, their names.

Kelly Bischoff swore he heard a cash register chime every time they tipped over the falls. I love clientele, he liked to say. Kelly moved between the two worlds, sleek as an otter. He knew us. He knew the rafters. Their names, their faces. He had everything you could want.

“Look, that one’s so scared he keeps paddling, not even hitting the water.”

Laughter tumbled down the rock. “What a jackass.”

“A happy jackass.”

“Would you do that?” Chet Mason asked a woman. “Go over the falls?”

“I’d love to scream like that. I never scream like that.”

“You hear that, Jason? Sounds like you’re not taking care of your husbandly duties.”

Reed Judy said, “You pay big money to holler like that. Old Kelly gets two hundred dollars a head. You got to come with a full raft, too. He got plenty of rafts.”

“How many heads is that?”

“Six in that one, not counting the guide,” Chet Mason said. “Slick as a hound’s tooth, Kelly is. Course, fall’s got to pay for winter, spring, and summer — that’s awful heavy math. There he is. That’s Class Five, that’s Kelly’s.”

The forty-seventh raft that day. Class Five River-Runners had blue-and-yellow rafts, same colors as the Mountaineers’ football team. We were proud of Kelly. After they sealed the Haymaker Mine, he mortgaged his house to start the outfit. Kelly punched out Mayor Cline last year at the festival. Wasn’t even drunk.

“Hey, Kelly boy!” We cupped hands around our mouths. “Hey, Kelly!”

He didn’t wave back, riding closer on the careening swell. The raft hit at a bad angle. Rocks scraped the wet, blubbery rubber. As it made the lip of the falls — in our bellies, we felt a feathery sympathetic tickle — the raft toppled and shook out bodies.

Quiet. Then the screaming. We bounded down to the water’s jagged edge, we tried to tally them, keep the numbers right. Neon tumbling in that gullet of foam, and one frail arm. We reached and missed and cussed ourselves. Reed managed to hook a belt and flopped a man onto the rock.

One disappeared under a boulder for a few sickening moments and shot out the other side. His mouth a hard circle.

With a strong crawl, Kelly led some into a backwater that bristled with logjams and lost paddles. Their heads broke the surface. The current sucked them back.

Kelly and the girl reached up at the same time. Chet Mason was closest. He had one set of hands. He hesitated for a millisecond. He reached for Kelly. “Got you.”

A sharp little yelp cut the noise. The girl’s helmet disappeared downriver. She was gone.

ON A GOOD DAY, SURGERY LASTS three minutes or less. Today’s takes longer. Kathryn has an audience.

They don’t touch the fish at this point — they try to handle them as little as possible — but for the girl, Kathryn makes an exception. She wets her hand in a clear plastic bucket and lifts the stunned fish from the net. A wild brook trout, with a beating heart no bigger than a ruby. The girl leans in to wonder at the gently heaving side, the cool, vermiculated skin. It comes to life and squirms in Kathryn’s hand. She grips down — gentle, but firm. The girl squeals a little. She can’t be more than seven. She has the kind of light blond hair that darkens with age. In ten years she’ll pick up a picture of herself and see a stranger.

“Wet your hand,” Kathryn says.

Kathryn has to stop thinking of her as the girl. Her name is Shelly. Kathryn’s never been able to see children as real people. She wonders what this says about her. Shelly puts a tentative finger to an adipose fin, a sleek belly, a black mouth.

In Kathryn’s first summer on Back Allegheny Mountain, the trout and the bright scalpel made her squeamish. Fear of killing something so delicate, so rare. Two years later, the work is rote. She has to remind herself of the beauty of the place: its rich pelt of red spruce and wildflowers, its pools of glacial blue, each set like a sapphire in the spiky ring of a beaver dam. She doesn’t notice the sweet balsam on the wind, or the river smell, equal parts iron and moss. The odd bear will wander through camp and savage a cooler, reminding her of what the mountain still is. The Monongahela National Forest begins a mile downstream. A ski resort owns this land, ten thousand acres. So far, they have left this part undeveloped — or underdeveloped, as the Chamber of Commerce says.

“You better toss him in.”

A male voice behind them. Gary, bossy as always, is standing knee-deep in the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River. It laps at crudely mended neoprene waders. Lifting the electroshock wand high overhead, he reaches a free hand down to the river. He takes a palmful of water and rubs it over his face. Water droplets gather in a patchy beard, each a prism.

“By the book, by the book,” he crows. “What would the University Animal Care and Use Committee say? Ain’t you a member of said committee?”

Kathryn rolls her eyes. Shelly smiles at that. Kathryn dumps the trout into another plastic bucket, cold creek water dosed with a clove-oil solution. An anesthetic and antiseptic. Shock, drug, cut. A wonder it doesn’t kill them. The trout swims in a lovely sinuous line, resting on nervous fins. Sleek skin the color of mint and coal-fire. The trout lists to its side, loses equilibrium, and floats to the surface. Kathryn scoops it up.

Her scalpel licks its side, below the ventral line. A clean incision, millimeters.

“Give it here.”

She takes the telemetry device from Shelly’s palm. A mechanized pill, clear and crammed with minute machinery, with a fiber-optic tail. It recalls the sterility of good hospitals, all mankind can accomplish. Kathryn slides it into the incision. Shelly winces.

“Don’t worry,” Kathryn says. “He can’t feel a thing.”

“Fish don’t hurt?”

“No. Not that. He’s just sleepy.”

Initially the trout drove her crazy. The movements seemed erratic. Had the telemeters malfunctioned? Did the new cell-phone tower throw them off? Kathryn had ice-pick headaches and spent a lot of time in her sleeping bag. Patterns then emerged. To say the least, this population is mobile. Maybe the highest rates ever recorded in the mountain chain. Besides the odd flutter of anxiety, she is confident in her numbers.

Kathryn whip-stitches three sutures to close the incision and eases the trout into a bucket of plain river water. As they wait for the clove oil to wear off, she explains their research to Shelly, how they track the movement of brook trout between the main stem and the tiny tributaries. How far do they go? Do they migrate because of rising water temperatures? Is there an identifiable trigger?

“If you come back tomorrow, I’ll show you how. We use a radio transmitter. It’s fun. It’s like on TV.”

“Thanks for showing me, Kathy.”

“Kathryn. It’s Kathryn.”

She smiles at the girl quickly, ferociously — a bad habit of hers.

Shelly blushes, then runs off in a gawky clatter of limbs. Dumbfounded, Kathryn watches her go. Grasshoppers fling themselves out of her path. One hits the river. A trout snaps it up.

Gary says, “Strike another blow for women in the sciences.”

Kathryn laughs, a good sport, though she’s disappointed. She wanted to plug a laptop into the generator and show off her program: those dreamy wandering lavender dots, x-axis and y-.

The trout has righted itself. After taking measurements on a digital scale, Kathryn walks it to the water and works it back and forth in the current. Number 30. Gills flare. In a realization she can almost feel, the trout kicks off in a little starburst of relief. The trout’s lie is no bigger than a bathtub. She lifts her tickled palm.

Gary wades out and unhitches his pack, dainty for a big man. He respects the equipment. They drive back to camp in her big, bouncing Ford. It parts the field like a frigate. The other member of their team, Michael, the one Kathryn is sleeping with, is still asleep in her tent.

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1890, THE COUNTY sent the dying to the island. This scrap of ground, ten or twelve acres, would have been unremarkable if not for the fact that it was surrounded by water. The island was in the gorge of a brute river, the New, so unruly that the coal had to be hauled out by rail. The track had taken four years to lay, including tunnels.

There was talk — courthouse talk — of stringing a cable ferry to send the dying across, but in the end, rafts and pirogues were made to do. To build any bridge from the mainland would be foolish — what if a heedless patient ran it back some night and brought society his disease?

Late in the evening, to arouse as little notice as possible, the New River boatmen tied bandannas about their own mouths, all the way up to the eyes, and took pains not to inhale too much, despite their rowing, despite the shortness of their breath. They wouldn’t look at the dying people who reclined in their boats. Drawing close, they heard the puttering of a weird machine: the steam autoclave into which the doctor stuffed bandages. Afterward, their hard money won, the boatmen washed down their hands and implements with burning lye.

“SEE HOW IT ROCKS BACK AND forth, sister?”

Uncle Vaughn wasn’t a big man, but with little more than a brush of his fingers, the stone fell forward and caught in the crook of rubble beneath. You could push it back from the other side, too, rocking it like a cradle. This boulder — roughly egg-shaped, flecked with green — must have weighed three tons. Uncle Vaughn showed them the magic a few times over.

Neely, one of his two nieces, asked how long it had been that way.

“All my life,” said Vaughn. “And some before.”

“You’re not that old,” said G, his other niece.

“I’m a hundred!”

Uncle Vaughn — their great-uncle, really — lived above the garage. He had never married, never left the county but for a spell in the navy, and didn’t even own a car, so he was grand company, forever willing to take you berry-picking or deal a hand of rummy for matchsticks. Yet he would twist your ears and hide your toys. There was a touch of madness in that family. Uncle Vaughn once alarmed Neely and G’s father by telling him he saw a green sheep climb up over the cliff. A green sheep? their father asked. A green sheep, said Vaughn.

He rocked the stone again. No matter how hard you pushed, it would never crash over the hill in that horrible avalanche that little girls and boys so desire.

They were lucky, said Uncle Vaughn, to have such a wonder on their property. If he had run of things, he would charge people a dollar to see it.

Neely said, “What’s in that hole beneath?”

“Maybe it’s the Indian treasure.” He stooped down and reached into the blackness under the rocking stone, a wonderful place of rattlesnakes and mouse skulls.

G — for Glory, a name she hated — told him to quit that, he’d get pinched under the stone and they’d have to saw off his arm at the joint.

“I’m on a pension,” he said — his answer to most demands.

The stone fell forward with a skirling sound.

Vaughn’s face went white, drained. “Help!” His body curled with shocking speed, like a muskrat clapped in a snare. “I’m pinched! Oh God!”

Neely began to cry. Uncle Vaughn told them to keep calm, run back to the house, get their mother and a hacksaw. After a while, with the girls too frightened to move, he pulled his arm from the hole and began to giggle.

THEY CALLED THE VILLAGE GAULEY BRIDGE after its most discernible feature. In those times, the bridge itself was a swinging affair of rope and boards, enough for one body to cross at a time, and you wouldn’t want to in a rattling wind. The river ran thirty feet below. Once, a grand bridge vaulted the Gauley River, before the war, trig enough for horses, wagon trains, even the army that blew it up upon retreat. It was rebuilt, then blasted again to high heaven, this time by the town fathers. They wanted a river clear for logs. So commerce. So the swinging bridge.

For half a morning, Henry Gorby perched on the bridge like a falcon, and small like a falcon. If anyone noticed him up there, he would’ve been thought eccentric. Most hurried across. The bridge did not inspire confidence. Especially in the men who had roped it. Henry lingered out in the middle in comfort. There was no wind, no one wanting to cross. Despite his slight stature, the rope yawned a bit when he shifted weight. The current bent the weeds below. The Gauley wasn’t wide here, but deep, March-green with snowmelt and swollen. Weathered, quartzite ridges loomed on both sides. Henry couldn’t see the mountains. He was in the mountains.

Any time a bird or a body flashed through the bankside trees, he was certain it was his cousin Ezekiel coming. Despite the years, he reckoned he’d know Ezekiel: someone brisk and swarthy, from playing out in weather, from a gauge of Lebanese blood. From up here, Henry could see the post office, where they were to meet, and the muddy main drag and every direction going there. Gauley Bridge wasn’t much. All paths led to the post office. Ezekiel’s letter said two hundred souls lived here. Henry wondered where they all could fit.

Ezekiel wrote yes, he could find a man work.

Below, a wood duck and her raft of young eddied about in worried spirals. It is a duck that lives in the high hollows of trees — Henry didn’t know that, he only knew the paving stones of Kanawha City — and he would’ve been startled at how the ducklings fling themselves from that great height, trusting their downy bodies to God and the soft bounce of a forest floor. Henry, newly seventeen, could paddle and chug along a bit. The ducklings, swimming with prowess, a couple days old, bested him. He could laugh. He had that virtue.

In the Gauley the green fish rose. Henry thought it a piece of bark until it turned in diagonal sweep and showed the grim, pointed mask of its face. It merely drifted to the surface, the length of a child. Then it sank in grassy nothingness with no more motion than a slight, sinuous curve Henry could have imagined. Or was it a lizard? It left like the demon of dreams.

When it returned, Henry was looking in the wrong direction. An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish tossed water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true.

BLACK SMUDGE ON BOULDERS WIND-SCOURED THE color of bone.

Through riflescopes, the two of us watched the bear cross the saddle. She — a sow black bear for sure — poured her body through the laurel with a loping, liquid gait. Then hounds in chase, driven on lean, pumping haunches. She picked up speed and split through the timberline, where the krummholz lifts in mangled postures. A bear’s ungainly way of moving is an illusion. You’d never outrun one. Far behind, hunters dragged themselves up the mountain. They tripped and slid over scree and snow. I counted seven, almost our entire party, a pair of them with an obvious lead. I couldn’t tell who they were. Three hundred yards? I’m not good at judging distance. I eased crosshairs onto the dogs, adjusted the parallax. Shades of hide flickered in and out of focus: Plotts and blueticks, redbones and Treeing Walkers. The sow made the rocky heights, a plateau hovering at four thousand feet.

The rifle was ice against my cheek. In town, the Union Bank clock said twelve degrees. I had no idea how cold it was up here on Dolly Sods. The wind brought tears to my eyes.

A lone birch sapling quivered, a wild clean miss. Someone was shooting. The sow charged through a deadfall. I heard it: limbs snapping against her. And bawling of dogs.

“That’s Shovel,” my stepbrother said. “He ends on an up note. You hear that?”

He — Conner — wanted a pup out of Shovel’s line.

“When will you get one?”

Conner said, “Oh, I don’t know. Andy’s real jealous of Shovel’s pups. Real jealous. Now Shovel come out of Banjo. Now that was a singing dog. That’s a redbone.”

Even in a moment like this, my stepbrother and I weren’t quite sure what to say to one another. We lived in a state of familiar embarrassment.

Another shot. I saw a Plott’s stout neck, the head square as a file. Nipping at the bear’s ears and ankles, hounds scurried around dolmens of limestone and dipped out of view behind truck-sized boulders. Treble cries clattered on the landscape. Each yelp and bay was distinct. Old men claim the cold does something to it, that singing sounds best come December. The bawling rose in pitch.

We sat in the snowy truck-bed, using the side as a rest. Really, it was the best day Conner and I ever had together, or so it seemed at the time.

Conner tried to hand me a beer, and I said no, thank you. He kept it for himself. It was nine in the morning. The wind had chewed his face red. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget.” I was probably the only one he knew between eighteen and eighty who didn’t drink. People assume you’re in AA. I sometimes say I have a stomach condition.

Conner said, “I feel like Patton up here. Or Robert E. You can see it all.”

I tuned the scope to 10x. I’d never watched from this angle. We were late for the hunt — Conner put his truck in the ditch on that icy Laneville Road, we had to winch it out — so we drove up Cabin Rock to watch the spectacle unfold. We’d meet up later with the others. The CB crackled in the cab.

The sow forded a run with three great waltz-steps. Hounds swam the chilly water and hit the bank shaking their hides, bodies steaming. I shivered reflexively. Conner laughed at this.

“Rose, you need you a little firewater,” he said, draining his beer. (My name is Roosevelt Daugherty.) “Can’t hack the cold without it. Makes you feel like a true-blue mountaineer.” He struck a heroic pose, the Great Hunter. “We make them northeast libs shiver the night before a presidential election,” he said, in a creaky old-timer voice. “Make them shake like a dog shitting razorblades.”

I laughed, despite my feelings. He learned that silly voice off my dad. The CB gave out snarls of English, quizzical Chinese, a squall of pink noise. That morning in a strip-mall parking lot, I saw the Chinese merchants from Pittsburgh who huddled around a Chevy Blazer. They sipped tea from Styrofoam cups, listening to a scanner. The bear’s gallbladder is said to be an aphrodisiac. They pound the organ into a greasy, yellow concoction and sell it for thousands. Wise fellows, banking on the black market and backward countrymen. Their children graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and Carnegie Mellon. More power to them.

I said, “I can’t see it anymore.”

“Me neither. They’ll pop back up.”

The smell of beer in the cold made me nauseous. I ate a burning handful of snow. This was in my vague year between college and law school. (I had not yet been accepted and was nervous, though everyone else was sure I would turn out okay. Why so sure? I wondered.) Conner was five years younger, but our roles seemed reversed. When I was home on break, he made an effort to take me fishing and hunting. Family was sacred to him. Like all sentimental people, he would mine that vein till there was nothing left: nothing but bare, scraped rock.

“If you get a shot,” he said, “lay down a field of fire. They can take a lot of lead.”

I said I would.

“Something You Can’t Live Without” first appeared in Oxford American (Spring 2010) and was anthologized in PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year. “Mates” appeared in the minnesota review (Fall 2014). “Natural Resources” appeared in Baltimore Review (Spring 2013). “Gauley Season” appeared in West Branch (Summer/Fall 2013) and was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2014. “Telemetry” appeared in Ploughshares (Winter 2012–2013). “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River” appeared in Ecotone (Spring 2014). “Rocking Stone” appeared on the Tin House website (May 31, 2013). “The Slow Lean of Time” appeared in American Short Fiction (Spring 2014). “In the Second District” appeared as “Destinations” in Mississippi Review (Winter 2013–2014).

MATTHEW NEILL NULL is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award, his short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Best American Mystery Stories, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.