I've never been hunting. I've shot guns, and I've shot at and possibly killed some frogs, but I've never gone hunting the way my grandfather did. He lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, on some land up in the mountains, from where he used to set out for days hunting elk, antelope, bear. Bear hunting will make a man.

I didn't know my grandfather very well, but I knew him well enough to know he was a hard man. Once, while in the mountains cutting down trees for the winter, only two months away, grandpa got caught by a portion of tree that had split from the trunk while falling. He was pinned, unconscious, his back broken from the impact, the trunk lying across his broken legs. He was alone, and he hadn't told anybody where he would be.

By the time night fell he was hallucinating. He told us of looking up into the branches and seeing birds looking down at him, crows, talking to him, and among themselves. He could hear the coyotes. It was quite cold, so he did his best to bury himself, digging his own grave and covering himself with leaves.

I imagine his wife, Joy, began to worry by sunset. By the next morning they were looking for him, on land and by helicopter. Apparently, he had parked his truck in a way such to make it invisible from the air, and had gone where nobody thought to look. It was clear by nightfall that Grandpa Bill was in some serious fucking trouble.

He had slipped into a coma by the time rescuers found him, sometime on the third day. Everything that could be bruised was bruised; the rest was lacerated, contused, concussed, ruptured, or collapsed. He was kept in a coma for I don't know how long, but he survived, and he walked again. Not a miracle, but a helluva recovery by one tough sonofabitch.

He was 76 years old when he went up into those mountains to cut down trees. Clearly not the most brilliant man, but possessive of an impossibly hardened individuality, tempered through a youth in want, war, and work. He was a boss in the Heavy Machinery Operators union, and he wore a gold union ring and had a huge wardrobe for union duties. He was a hunter, but he also drove a Cadillac. If he was not strictly monagomous, he was, from all I've heard, a decent husband, maybe as good as a hard man can be. The cruelties I remember I dismiss as anachronisms. I knew him as kind, but I know very little, almost nothing more about him.

My mother really didn't have a relationship with the man, and she made sure her two youngest children never got too close their grandfather. She had her reasons, but I believe she regrets not having given me the chance to be closer to Grandpa Bill. She regrets even though she loathed the hardness, the meanness, the masculine irrationality. He was the only grandpa I had. My father's father had died when I was still and infant, and she regrets not giving me anybody but my father to really know as a man. While she loves my father, she knows he has never hunted bear.