The Orchard Keeper

Snow falls in December. Arthur wakes up early and watches the flakes. While sipping homemade alcohol, he rereads an old issue of Field and Stream. He falls asleep in his chair, waking in the morning, “stiff and shivering with the cold“ (69).

Warn Pulliam, Boog, and Johnny Romines are young kids who live in Red Branch. They are roughly the same age as John. After the trio returns from a hunting expedition with a rabbit, they encounter John. He recognizes Warn, whom he met when Warn was flying his pet buzzard on a long piece of string. Warn invites John to join them on a hunt. They are pursuing a skunk with Johnny Romines’s two beagles. John talks about the puppy Marion gave him, proudly declaring it to be “as good a tree dog as they is goin” (71). His mother refuses to have the dog in her house, so Marion is keeping the puppy at his home for the time being. At the frozen sinkhole, the boys build a fire and swap stories about trapping animals.

As guns fire through the valley in “diminishing reiteration,” Arthur crosses the snow-strewn landscape to