In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass

life—in fact, as if I’d never even fought one, as if it was all new and I was just starting out and had everything still to prove. I floated there until I believed that that was how it really was.
    I was free then, and I would break for shore, swimming again in long, slow strokes. I’d get out and walk through the trees to my cottage with the dogs following, shaking water from their coats and rattling their collars, and I knew the air felt as cool on them as it did on me. We couldn’t see the stars, down in the trees like that, and it felt very safe.
    I’d walk through the woods, born again in my love for a thing, the hard passion of it, and I’d snap on my yellow porch light as I went into the cottage. The light seemed to pull in every moth in the county. Homer and Ann would stand on their hind legs and dance, snapping at the moths. Down at the lake the bullfrogs drummed all night, and from the woods came the sound of crickets and katydids. The noise was like that at a baseball game on a hot day, always some insistent noises above others, rising and falling. I could hear the dogs crunching June bugs as they caught them.
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    Right before daylight Betty would ring a bell to wake me for breakfast. Don and I ate at the picnic table, a light breakfast, because we were about to run, me on foot and Don on horseback.
    â€œYou’ll miss me when you get up to New York,” he said. “They’ll lock you in a gym and work on your technique. You’ll never see the light of day. But you’ll have to do it.”
    I did not want to leave Betty and Jason, did not even want to leave Don, despite the tough training sessions. It would be fun to fight in a real ring, with paying spectators, a canvas mat, a referee, and ropes, safety ropes to hold you in. I would not mind leaving the bar fights behind at all, but I could not tell Don about my fears. I was half horrified that a hundred wins in Mississippi would mean nothing, and that I would be unable to win even one fight in New York.
    Don said I was “a fighter, not a boxer.”
    He’d had other fighters who had gone on to New York, who had done well, who had won many fights. One of them, his best before me, Pig-Eye Reeves, had been ranked as high as fifth as a WBA heavyweight. Pig-Eye was a legend, and everywhere in Mississippi tales were told about him. Don knew all of them.
    Pig-Eye had swum in the lake I swam in, ate at the same picnic table, lived in my cottage. Pig-Eye had run the trails I ran daily, the ones Don chased me down, riding his big black stallion, Killer, and cracking his bullwhip.
    That was how we trained. After breakfast Don headed for the barn to saddle Killer, and I whistled the dogs up and started down toward the lake. The sun would be coming up on the other side of the woods, burning steam and mist off the lake, and the air slowly got clearer. I could pick out individual trees through the mist on the far side. I’d be walking, feeling good and healthy, at least briefly, as if I would never let anyone down. Then I would hear the horse running down the hill through the trees, coming after me, snorting, and I’d hear his hooves and the saddle creaking, with Don riding silently, posting. When he spotted me, he’d crack the whip once—that short mean
pop!
—and I would have to run.
    Don made me wear leg weights and wrist weights. The dogs, running beside me, thought it was a game. It was not. For punishment, when I didn’t run fast enough and Killer got too close to me, Don caught my shoulder with the tip of the whip. It cut a small strip into my sweaty back, which I could feel in the form of heat. I knew this meant nothing, because he was only doing it to protect me, to make me run faster, to keep me from being trampled by the horse.
    Don wore spurs, big Mexican rowels he’d bought in an antiques store, and he rode Killer hard. I left the trail sometimes, jumping over logs and dodging