Uncle Erwin's a towering, powerful man who runs his own construction company like a dictatorship, a converted Mormon with strong convictions but the rough edges of his former life as an Army Master Sergeant who survived two tours in Korea; something he refuses to talk about. He arrives from Utah, no doubt at the behest of my mother, his older sister. He simply appears, steps into my room and closes the door behind him.

He leans a couple long boxes against the wall, moving a chair precisely to the edge of my bed, leaning forward, elbows on knees. I feel like a trapped animal under his gaze. He sits there waiting for me to speak, only the ticking of an electric clock filling the emptiness.

"Boy, this is no good," he says finally. "You're not doing yourself any good. You ever stop and think of anyone else's feelings?" He sits there regarding me with hard eyes, unblinking, solid as oak. "You're being a selfish little baby," he adds tersely.

I look him in the eyes with a flash of anger, my head swimming while he sits unflinching, staring me down with those steady gray eyes, the blood vessels at his temples suddenly visible through tanned skin.

"You don't know…" I blurt, quickly cutting myself short, my emotions suddenly taking a different turn until I'm struggling to hold onto myself. I can no longer look at him.

"You're wrong there," he says with an edge, then suddenly softens to talk quietly once more. "Just remember one thing; you're alive and there's no shame in living. And, by God, I'm not allowing this to go on any longer."

We talk a long time. We talk for hours, my uncle sitting on the edge of that chair unmoving, patient and soberly articulate. When I cuss he doesn't flinch. When I cry he doesn't reach to comfort me. But he listens and he talks softly and when it's nearly midnight he leaves the room but is there again in the morning, rational and serene as stone. He stays a week.

* * *

The boxes my uncle has arrived with turn out to be an elegant Browning Explorer recurve, a dozen "Quality Ferbenglas Shaft" wood-grain arrows. He bought me my first bow when I was in diapers. We have bowhunted together annually since I was 13, stalking mule deer in the rims above Irish Canyon north of Dinosaur National Park. To avoid my over-bearingly worried family I take to roving for hours on end with my new bow, sometimes trekking all day across the sand dunes and prairies west of Craig, directing arrows at cow patties and grass clumps, prairie dogs and jackrabbits, recalling the joy that comes from the simple flight of an arrow. These hikes create an appetite that allows me to join family meals and encourages some semblance of sleep though the nightmares remain, granted less intense and abstractly real.

Uncle Erwin shows up late September, one of his construction trucks loaded with camping gear. He's arrived unannounced, to collect me for our annual archery deer hunt that only Vietnam has interrupted during the past seven years.