Listening Post AFTER SIXTEEN WEEKS of Army training over a brutally hot summer in the red-clay hills of my native Georgia, you could say I had mixed feelings about the Army. I always hated physical exercise so it required the Army’s rules and single-mindedness to force me into fitness. I went in…

From 1969 Nassau Cash Book used as hunting log I was still using my little Southern Maid composition booklet when 1959 began. I wrote without even skipping a line: “Beginning of 1959–60 Season. (I am now 16 years old.)” I began one-line entries again, without noting the significance of being…

My second two days of elk season ended without me filling a tag or even seeing a bull. I had yet to catch a steelhead either, whether drift-fishing legally on the Puyallup River or spearing in the Gorge with Aaron’s kid, who got a kick out of my inability to develop the proper wrist flick. But the couple times I went out with him, I always came back with fresh fish; a gift from Aaron whose smoker was busy enough to follow its scent-trail to his hidden cabin.

Visiting Joe Consonants in his Home Cave… There was a clapped-out old Plymouth station wagon parked near the path leading to Joe’s mine shaft. I left Harry in the truck and took the blue grouse with me. Joe was hunkered comfortably outside the door to his cave puffing on his pipe, talking to one of the most Mongoloid of the kids from beneath the Burnett Bridge. “Brought you some dinner, Joe,” I said.

(The editor didn’t want to annoy the Nixon administration so he “spiked” my story) Brave New Security, 1971 THEY ARE CITIZENS of another time and place, very ordinary citizens for the most part, of what history is beginning to assert was an extraordinary time and place. When they confront the time and place in…

Joe wasn’t answering his cave door, so Harry and I walked back toward the county road. I heard a vehicle stop and a door open and close, a mumbled exchange, and the car went away. Harry wagged his tail and woofed that little woof with a question mark on the…

Chapter Twenty-Eight The day after my boy almost made it through the pasture fence, I had a lot of thinking to do. For all my sleepless nights, it had never occurred to me they might come in the daytime. Nor that he would go out to meet them. How the hell did he know they were out there? Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe my wife was right on that score; maybe he just decided to go for a ramble, and that laid his scent more strongly on the uphill breeze and drew them in. Maybe. Even though I slept damn little that night, there was no way I…

For in and out, above, about, below, ’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show, Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, Round which we Phantom Figures come and go. — Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat They sit with us…They tell us about the great big terrible things they’ve done and the…

Chapter Four Still later, on yet another world, the recruit found himself in a ramshackle beach town outside a low building with a salt-faded sign above dirty plate-glass windows that said “Mac’s Pool Hall.” He set the parking brake on his 1952 Chevy DeLuxe, got out and crossed the sidewalk. Inside, the man he had known first as a general in an improbable interstellar army was shooting a solo game of eight ball. At the lunch counter, a grimy individual in a black T-shirt was cooking on the grill. Hamburger and grilled onions; the odor was all-pervading.