Kurt looked down at the frost for a long moment. Then he took one slow step toward Dale.
I’d known Kurt Ostrowski for eleven years. He’d stood at my wedding with a carnation pinned crooked on his lapel. He’d eaten my chili at a dozen Packers games. He’d hunted my grandfather’s ridge every November since Brad first brought him out there in a borrowed truck.
I’d never once seen him look the way he looked that morning, standing at the edge of Grandpa’s cornfield in the gray light with frost on his boots.
Behind him, Mike Pruett and Russ Lindahl stood with their rifles slung, breath smoking in the cold, their eyes moving from me to the three blaze-orange hats in the trees and back again.
Dale didn’t move. He stood next to me at the foot of the old wooden ladder stand with his empty hands at his sides and his gray beard frosted white at the chin. He was fifty-eight years old and stood about six-two, and he had the stillness of a man who’d been in rooms far worse than a cornfield.
Kurt stopped about three feet from him. He studied Dale’s face, then the faded patch sewn on the left shoulder of Dale’s canvas hunting coat: a black horse head on a yellow shield, a diagonal stripe across it.
“First Cav,” Kurt said quietly.
Dale’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “That’s right.”
“Desert Storm?”
“Desert Storm. Then Iraq twice.”
Kurt stood there for a long time, breathing white clouds into the cold. Then he pulled off his right glove, finger by finger, and held out his bare hand.
“Twenty-fourth Infantry,” he said. “Ninety-one. I was nineteen.”
Dale looked at the hand. Then he took off his own glove and shook it.
Nobody said anything. A mile off, a second shot cracked across the hills, and then a third.
Kurt let go of Dale’s hand and turned to me. His face had gone red, and not from the cold.
“Amy,” he said. “What do you mean you didn’t cool off? Brad told us you were fine with it. He said you agreed to it.”
“Agreed to what?”
Kurt reached inside his blaze-orange vest, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. It was soft at the creases, like it had been in and out of that pocket a lot.
I unfolded it in the gray light. At the top, in bold letters somebody had typed on a computer, it said HUNTING LEASE AGREEMENT.
Below that was a legal description of my eighty acres, copied word for word off the deed: the Southwest Quarter of the Northeast Quarter and the Northwest Quarter of the Southeast Quarter of Section 14, Township 27 North, Range 4 West. Then: Lessor, Amy L. Halvorsen. Lessee, Kurt Ostrowski, on behalf of hunting party. Term, November 2026 gun season. Consideration, $4,000, paid in cash.
At the bottom were two signatures.
One was Kurt’s.
The other said “Amy L. Halvorsen,” in a loopy, slanted hand that looked nothing like mine.
I’ve signed my name the same way since I was twelve, when Grandpa Arvid taught me to write it on the back of a savings bond. I didn’t sign that paper. I’d never seen it in my life.
“Brad gave us that in August,” Kurt said. “He said you signed it at his place when you came to pick up the rest of your boxes. He said you were glad for the money, with property taxes and all.”
My hands were shaking so hard the paper rattled.
“I didn’t sign this, Kurt,” I said. “I haven’t been to Brad’s place since the divorce. I haven’t spoken to him except on the phone in August, when he told me I don’t even hunt and hung up on me.”
Kurt stared at me. Behind him, Mike swore under his breath.
“Then where’d our four grand go?” Russ asked.
Nobody had to answer that.
