story. The fish never got bigger nor the rack of the bull elk wider. Inches, feet, miles, weather, were all surprisingly accurate. Shane said that Lloyd had once told him that a great storyteller had to know when never to lie. “Hunting and fishing’s so much fun,” he said, “only a pissant needs to lie about it.” Jack could see that in all his father’s dealings with Lloyd—splitting up the ranch after their parents died, sharing the lease, covering for each other in calving time, and coping with irrigation—Shane trusted his brother more than any other person on earth. Jack knew that Lloyd made life more fun, it was that simple, and without ever compromising the dead seriousness of it. That was a person to ride the river with.
Jack’s father may have blamed himself and gone just about mute, but so did Jack—blame himself. That morning he had insisted on acting like a big man and taking up the rear. He’d never done it before. His gray, Duke, was much more athletic than sweet lumbering Mindy—if it had been him behind his father when BJ balked, Duke would have kept his footing. It was his fault for trying to be bigger than he was. His damn fault. In truth, at eleven he was already a constitutionally modest kid, and the accident just reinforced his aversion to drawing attention to himself or overreaching. He liked to be good at what he did—both his mother and father had instilled the value of that; there was nothing really more important other than treating animals and people with decency and respect—but not a lot of people had to know about it. What good did bragging do anyway? He had a few good friends who respected him and would do anything for him. Why did anyone else need to be impressed?
When he opened the envelope that said he’d gotten into Dartmouth, his father didn’t hoot or take him out to a celebratory dinner at the Tabernash Tavern; he looked at him with an odd expression, half pride, half sorrow, and said simply, “Your mother would be over the moon.” Over the moon. She was over the moon. It was almost exactly how he had been thinking of her these past years. When he walked halfway to the horse barn on a cold night and stood in the frozen yard and watched the moon climb over Sheep Mountain, he sometimes whispered, “Hi, Mom.” He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed that if she were to be anywhere it would be there. Maybe it was because his favorite book when he was very little was Goodnight Moon. She had read it to him over and over, and after she drowned he kept the battered copy on the little shelf above the bed and sometimes fingered the worn corners and flipped through it before he slept.
And it was books he took solace in. When he wasn’t out on the ranch, or riding the lease, or fishing. He eschewed team sports—he felt like they were a bunch of kids showing off—and he kept most of his reading to himself. Not even his English teachers knew the depths of his growing erudition, but the school librarian did, as did Annie Bosworth down at the Granby Public Library. They knew. They also knew his instinctive modesty and shyness, so they encouraged him with guidance but never made a big deal of his extraordinary voracity, nor of his range. They simply kept him in books.
He and Wynn had that in common, a literary way of looking at the world. Or at least a love of books, poetry or fiction or expedition accounts. Wynn was a straight-up arts major who took a lot of courses in comparative literature, particularly French. Jack was engineering and supremely comfortable in the language of mathematics, but for the rest of his courses he took anything to do with poetry or novels, and he had especially adored American literature from the beginning. They had met even before the first day at school, on a freshman orientation trip, a four-day backpacking romp through the White Mountains. He and Wynn had rambled way out ahead of the group and talked nonstop, about canoes and rivers and climbing, but also about how Thoreau did his laundry across the pond at Emerson’s house and how Faulkner was such a terrible drunk and womanizer and whether “Spring and All” was as good and important as “The Waste Land.” Jack was startled.