I came up here intending to sell off the land and the six cabins my father had built, but I didn’t do it. Somehow the Upper Peninsula was just what I needed. It was cold and unforgiving, even in the heart of summer. There was a terrible beauty to the place, and I could be alone up here in a part of the world where being alone was the rule and not the exception. I moved into the first cabin, the cabin I had helped him build myself, back when I was seventeen years old. I stayed up here and lived day to day and never thought I’d have to face my past again.

That didn’t work. It never does.

Hours after I called it a day, I could still feel the buzz of the chain saw in my hands. There was a deep ache in my shoulder, right where they had taken the other two bullets out.

“What was it this time?” Jackie said. He slid a cold Canadian my way.

He was talking about my face, of course. There was a nice little swollen knot under my eye. Whenever something goes wrong, I end up wearing it on my face.

“Hornets,” I said.

“How’s the cabin going?”

“It’s a little slow.”

He nodded his head. He didn’t say a word about how late it was in the season or how much of a fool I was. Jackie understood why I needed to do this.

“You know who could help you,” he said.

I knew. I took a long pull off the bottle and then set it back down on the bar. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said. Then I left.

I was just as sore the next morning, but somehow everything felt different. It was all coming back to me, the way you let the chain saw and the ax do the work, the way you work with the grain of the log instead of fighting against it. The logs started fitting together the way they were supposed to. I had the walls two logs high by lunchtime. Of course, that meant it was getting harder and harder to wrestle the logs into position. I’d have to start using the ramps soon, and eventually I’d have to set up some kind of skyline. That would slow me down.