We camp in our usual place, down in the fragrant cedars below towering rims that cast spooky moon shadows nights. We've camped here for years, and since our last visit BLM has installed sturdy cement picnic tables and vast grated cooking grills that appear built to last. We string a tarpaulin between shading trees and will sleep on the ground gazing up to count meteorites skipping across a furry velvet sky. Stars begin to appear, a half-moon edging over a cliffy rim as we finish thick grilled steaks and chili beans, tossing paper plates into the fire that we stare into like an enlightening oracle.

"What was left of our platoon was pinned on this lone hill," my uncle says suddenly, breaking a silence punctuated only by chirping crickets and fire-popping cedar. "The Koreans just kept coming, we just kept shooting them. We were up there all day moving one way and the other so they couldn't fix us with their mortars, watching for them humping up that hill, coming in another wave. Didn't make any sense. There were just maybe 15 of us up there and a whole darn war out there, but they just kept coming up one after another and we'd shoot them like dump rats.

"Our luck ran out, though. We were shooting one way and they came from another and got us pinned, then a mortar came in and blew us to shreds. It was touch and go 'til dark, shooting all the time, scavenging ammo off the dead. It just didn't make any sense. The whole darned Korean army was out to kill just a handful of us.

"Come dark all of us were hit somehow but I could still walk. And that's what I did. I slipped right out of there. Left the rest to their gruesome fate. And I'm alive and they aren't."

I absorbed this in silence, understanding what he was giving me. "I may have shot some of our own people," I offered quietly. "I was running scared and shooting anything that got near me."

"May've?" Uncle Erwin says, quick as a bullet. "You know that, or is that guilt speaking?" I couldn't answer that question, but its nexus will invade my sleep in feverish repetition.

* * *

I rim out at daybreak, heat already arriving, my camouflage soaked through with sweat. I'm pulling from my canteen when a speck of movement catches my attention well off in the middle distance. Through the leather-covered field glasses it turns into a handsome muley buck, wearing a heavy, deep-forked rack with just a hint of junk on one side. I notice with some amusement that my hands have already begun to flutter slightly. I mark the moving speck carefully while moving to a ledge of sandstone to sit on and steady my glasses. The buck weaves across a relatively open bench, lost occasionally behind a squat pinon or cedar, ambling slowly.

After a time the buck pauses near a skeleton of ancient cedar, paws momentarily and drops from sight as if swallowed by the earth. I watch for long minutes but he's ceased to exist. I check the wind then circle, dropping into a line of low-laying pines to close the gap. The dead cedar's as distinct as a signature and I force myself to slow my pace and think this thing through.