In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass Page A

around trees and reversing my direction, but still Killer stayed with me, leaping the same logs, galloping through the same brush, though I was better at turning corners and could stay ahead of him that way.
    This would go on for an hour or so, until the sun was over the trees and the sky bright and warm. When Don figured the horse was getting too tired, too bloody from the spurs, he would shout “Swim!” and that meant it was over, and I could go into the lake.
    â€œThe Lake of Peace!” Don roared, snapping the whip and spurring Killer, and the dogs and I splashed out into the shallows. I ran awkwardly, high-stepping the way you do going into the waves at the beach. I leaned forward and dropped into the warm water, felt the weeds brushing my knees. Killer was right behind us, still coming, but we would be swimming hard, the dogs whining and rolling their eyes back like Chinese dragons, paddling furiously, trying to see behind them. By now Killer was swimming too, blowing hard through his nostrils and grunting, much too close to us, trying to swim right over the top of us, but the dogs stayed with me, as if they thought they could protect me, and with the leg weights trying to weigh me down and pull me under, I’d near the deepest part of the lake, where the water turned cold.
    I swam to the dark cold center, and that was where the horse, frightened, slowed down, panicking at the water’s coldness and swimming in circles rather than pushing on. The chase was forgotten then, but the dogs and I kept swimming, with the other side of the lake drawing closer at last, and Jason and Betty standing on the shore, jumping and cheering. The water began to get shallow again, and I came crawling out of the lake. Betty handed me a towel, Jason dried off the dogs, and then we walked up the hill to the cabin for lunch, which was spread out on a checkered tablecloth and waiting for me as if there had never been any doubt that I would make it.
    Don would still be laboring in the water, shouting and cursing at the horse now, cracking the whip and giving him muted, underwater jabs with his spurs, trying to rein Killer out of the angry, confused circles he was still swimming, until finally, with his last breath, Killer recognized that the far shore was as good as the near one, and they’d make it in, struggling, twenty or thirty minutes behind the dogs and me.
    Killer would lie on his side, gasping, coughing up weeds, ribs rising and falling, and Don would come up the hill to join us for lunch: fried chicken, cream gravy, hot biscuits with honey, string beans from the garden, great wet chunks of watermelon, and a pitcher of iced tea for each of us. We ate shirtless, barefoot, and threw the rinds to the dogs, who wrestled and fought over them like wolves.
    At straight-up noon, the sun would press down through the trees, glinting off the Lake of Peace. We’d change into bathing suits, all of us, and inflate air mattresses and carry them down to the lake. We’d wade in up to our chests and float in the sun, our arms trailing loosely in the water. We’d nap as if stunned after the heavy meal, while the dogs whined and paced the shore, afraid we might not come back.
    Killer, still lying on the shore, would stare glassy-eyed at nothing, ribs still heaving. He would stay like that until mid-afternoon, when he would finally roll over and get to his feet, and then he would trot up the hill as if nothing had happened.
    We drifted all over the lake in our half stupor, our sated summer-day sleep. My parents wanted me to come home and take over the hardware store. But there was nothing in the world that could make me stop fighting. I wished that there was, because I liked the store, but that was simply how it was. I felt that if I could not fight, I might stop breathing, or I might go down: I imagined that it was like drowning, like floating in the lake, and then exhaling all my air, and sinking, and never being heard from