Carried off by boredom from the deer blind
Followed older brothers footsteps
Through the thick brush in behind him slow
Approaching where the forest broke
Saw him standing at the tree line
Hunter orange distorted in the boughs of pines between us in the woods

Where I stood now in my hand-me-downs in the cold
The same ones my uncle wore in that framed page from the press
Both of them up north above dad's desk
A couple years after their father's death and his brother left

Stood and watched him scan the open field with his rifle scope
About a mile deep twice as wide at least
To where we could see military netting draped across the canopy of trees

Tried to keep up where he walked on
There appeared to be some compound on the far side of the clear-cut
We knew the rumors of militia grounds in the north heard on our radios
Locals poaching does talk in voices down by the bait piles on the ridge

And father waited patient eyeing deer sign from his blind by the lake and I
On the other side of it, kept on walking through the field
To find my brother standing posed
With his gaze locked in the ground down in a pit

Scattered with carcasses skin on their bones
Dried skulls sawed for the antlers of the dead
Like some portal to nowhere now for forever
And no time I watched trancelike with the vultures overhead
Heard his boots in the grass again, the fading of footsteps away
Knew he was walking off to the compound up ahead
And I knew I had to break from the trance
Follow fast in that direction or I'd never find a way to close the gap

That if I stared down in the corpses there transfixed
He would go that way forever
And I would stay here staring downward and I did