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bowling, ballroom dancing—the woman with a rose clamped between her dentures . Don’t ever admit anything has changed, they’re screaming at him. Never for a minute slow down or feel sorry for yourself. Look at us! He crumples the pamphlet and throws it in the trash can.
    I do have a question, Doc, he thinks, sitting there, his shoulders hunched. Actually, I do. What the hell am I supposed to do now? There is something he hasn’t had the nerve to tell anyone yet: he doesn’t think he can go on with his work. He has never before realized how physical it is:the lifting, the sawing, six or seven solid hours on his feet—foot—a day. And it’s not just the stump, the gone leg. He’s exhausted to the core. Just yesterday he had to ask Ronnie to finish a coon for him—a simple little raccoon—he got so winded, trying to stretch the cape around the form. Somebody tell me what to do, he thinks, struggling to pull his pants on over the new limb, disgusted by it as if it’s a bad joke, a gag trick. Somebody tell me just exactly what it is I’m supposed to do now.
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    On the way back to Highland City, Jack takes the old road instead of the highway, the pike that stretches all the way up to Kentucky. It follows the natural valley of the hills and was the route the long hunters followed, two hundred years ago, when they came to these woods from the north to harvest the buffalo and deer. Jack’s father used to tell him stories of the long hunters. They’d arrive with nothing but a gun and an ax, build a log cabin and stay for a year, eating deer meat and salting the skins, which they rolled up on a travois and brought home when they simply couldn’t carry any more. Parklike forests, great open spaces under magnificently canopied trees. When the first of them came down from Kentucky, his father told him, they did not dismount, lest they be trampled, the woods were so crowded with game.
    Jack tries to picture it, squinting up into the sparse trees on the hillside along the pike, but he can’t. It must have been something like being in the shop, he decides. Big-antlereddeer standing shoulder to shoulder, fox and weasels cheek to jowl. Except also wolf and bear. Mountain lion.
    What if? Jack thinks, entering the Highland City limits. What if there really is a mountain lion up there? The houses huddle on either side of the pike, brick and squat, with carports and dog runs, the older ones at the edges of the last few tobacco fields, the farmers inside in front of their TVs, getting paid by Uncle Sam not to grow tobacco. He passes the gas stations, the cinderblock barbeque stand, the shopping center, the new shopping center. The smokestacks of the PLAXCO plant poke up out of the hills to the south, crowned by white smoke.
    If a panther really is up there, sniffing out an ancient path its great-great ancestors once followed, is at this very moment twitching its great muscular tail and arching its back to run its claws down the trunk of a tree, dropping to all fours to nose at a beef jerky wrapper filled with dirty rainwater and picking around rusted old tin cans and television sets to make its way into one of those hollers, meowing a lonely meow, well—Jack thinks, pulling in his driveway and stopping to check the empty mailbox in front of his trailer—then I pity the old bastard.
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    Tanya, alone in Ronnie’s house, takes off all her clothes and lies down on the couch, staring at the blank space on the wall, cleared of posters to make room for his new TV. She’s been driving back and forth to her place all day, bringing the lastof her stuff over. Now she wishes it would all disappear. All those things that seemed so special when she bought them: her leather jacket, her laptop, her world map shower curtain, her black boots, it all looks like a load of junk, now, stacked up in liquor boxes on Ronnie’s kitchen floor. Moving in with Ronnie is the start of