During her three seasons as campground host at Lost Moon Lake, Kay Solomon had never heard gunshots, not even during deer season. Only once had she needed to confront anyone with a weapon: an eleven-year-old boy shooting at chipmunks with his BB gun.

But the shots Kay heard now didn’t come from a child with an air rifle, and the noise tore apart what had been a productive and quiet dawn. Already, she’d collected fees from campers, cleaned the primitive toilets, and plucked a Mylar birthday balloon from the branch of an aspen. By mid-morning, she was rigging up her fly rod and looking forward to spending the rest of the day fishing.

When she heard the firing, she froze with the fly rod still in her hand, like the times she’d played freeze tag with the students at her school. She knew enough about guns to deduce the volley came from a high caliber rifle, maybe an AR, and it was close.

She climbed into her truck, and out of habit paused to look out at the lake. It was going be a clear and warm day. She could see much of the granite peaks and undulations of the Northern Sierra, all the way to the faint blue fringes of Lake Tahoe. 

She drove toward the sound. It seemed the shooter, or shooters, were just up the road from the kiosk where, one month before, Kay had switched out the CLOSED sign with the one that said OPEN. Just past this point, she saw an older-model sedan parked in a turnout. The car’s paint was blotched and faded and the wheels were without hubcaps.

Kay pulled behind the car. The more she looked at it, the more worried she became. The vehicle’s crooked bumper was sneering at her, a twisted and defiant lip made of chrome.

She saw a path leading from the turnout into a small, kidney-shaped meadow. Then she saw a tall man in jeans and a white tank top, like the one Brando wore in A Streetcar Named Desire. He held the gun at his side. She was right. It was an AR. He was looking at the target he’d been shooting: a bright blue figure of a human torso. He tilted his head and studied the target as if he were trying to decipher constellations in the bullet holes he’d made.

Kay had nothing against guns, really. When she was in high school, her father used to take her to the range to shoot the single-shot .22 Remington rifle her father had since he was a boy. One of her heroes was Annie Oakley. Kay had a picture of the famous sharpshooter tucked away in one of her college textbooks as a way of conveying the necessity of focus and precision and doggedness, no matter what the endeavor.

But the man she saw in the meadow was the perfect image of someone she didn’t want to believe existed. Was he really there—the caricature badass in cheesy cop shows, the desperate thug, the belligerent castaway from society?

Kay stayed in her truck and waited. Once there was a pause in the man’s firing, she called out from her open window.

“Hello there.”

He turned toward her and squinted, his face contracting like a touched sea anemone.

As Kay got out of her truck and began walking toward him, his eyes shifted to her truck, and then to her. “Is there a problem?” he said.

She didn’t know; was there a problem? He was outside the boundary of the campground and on U.S. Forest Service property. Shooting on public lands is legal.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “I just heard some shots and thought I’d check it out.”

“And who are you?” he said. He tilted his head to get a closer look at the magnetized sign on the door of her truck. “Does that say ‘campground host’?” he asked, mockingly.

“That’s right,” Kay said.

She looked more deeply into this face. He had about a week’s growth of whiskers on an angular jaw and high cheekbones. His rust-colored hair was swept back in long serpentine waves.

“Well,” he said. “This is public land. I’ve got a right to shoot here.”

“I guess so,” said Kay.

“No,” he said. “You don’t guess so. I have the right.”

“I’m not saying you don’t,” she said.  “But you are pretty close to this road. And, like you said, this is public land. That means other people are here. I’m just concerned about their safety.”

He looked at her as if she’d said something breathtakingly stupid.

“It’s safe,” he said. “I always shoot safe.”

The man turned back to his target. Then there was what seemed like a long silence, a truce. Out of the quiet came her unspoken permission that he could keep shooting.

Kay walked back to her truck. She sat behind the wheel for a moment and heard the shooting start again, more rapidly now, as if the torrent of rounds announced his triumph.

For an instant, she thought about returning to the meadow and being more assertive. She felt as if she’d backed down. He was too close to the road, wasn’t he? What was the required distance in California: 150 yards? She couldn’t remember, but she would find out.

Finally she drove off and tried not to think about the shooter. Back at her camp she finished getting her fishing gear together. Earlier, trout had been rising to feed on a recent midge hatch, but now the surface of the lake was quiet and mirror-like.

Still, she went to her favorite spot on the lake and waded out. The shooting stopped. She heard the man’s car start, and then the crackle of his tires as he climbed toward the paved highway.

From where she stood, she could see all of the campsites available to campers at Lost Moon Lake, and so she could do her job and keep an eye out for any rule breaking while she fished. It was times like this when she felt lucky she’d gotten the job here, since Sierra Mountain Leisure Services preferred couples to serve as hosts, or that hosts have a dog, preferably a big one. But it was just her: no husband, no dog. Just Kay Marie Solomon, the retired elementary school teacher and principal who wanted to live in the high Sierra for three months, while doing something that made her feel useful.

After three casts she had her first strike, but the fish didn’t stay on. Then, for a good hour, there was nothing. She sloshed back to shore and peeled off her waders. She sat close to the water on the round stone that’d been like a steady compass bearing during her seasons at the lake. It was just a smooth rock protruding from the wet ground, but it fit her butt perfectly, and she liked the hardness against her bones. She’d always been lean, maybe too lean. She’d run track and cross-country in high school and college, and had four marathons under her belt. Her hiking friends still called her “the mountain goat,” and she prided herself in being the first to reach the top of a peak.

She thought of these things now as a way of restoring her pride. The shooter in the meadow had gotten the best of her, and she couldn’t rid herself of the humiliation she felt. In a way, she wanted to confront him again, in a way she didn’t. Soon she realized the best she could do to redeem herself was return to the meadow and see what sort of damage the man had done.

She parked where he had parked, then walked into the clearing. She stopped when she saw a glitter of brass on the ground where the man had stood.

There were at least a hundred spent casings in front of her. He’d even left his blue torso target, now so torn and shredded from his bullets she wouldn’t have known what it was unless she’d seen it before.

“Jerk,” said Kay, as she surveyed the mess.

She looked past the target and noticed a few bullets had struck a fir snag behind it, leaving tears and holes in its smooth gray wood. This angered her more than the litter in the meadow. She’d always loved the dead standing trees, and they were so misunderstood. To many they were simply lifeless: cut them down, burn them. But to Kay, they just went from one plane of existence to another. In their new form they continued to contribute to the living, offering soft, naked wood for cavity nesters and insects, and a high, unobstructed view for raptors. Any vestige of her faith in God revealed itself when she looked up and marveled at one of the taller, sprawling snags, spreading its bleached and wind-polished branches as if in some sort of prayer to a greater skyward being. That reaching out made her think more hopefully about the people she’d loved who’d died, her father and mother, her childhood friend Denise, and the many teachers and students she’d known.

But of all of them, it was Andy whose memory ascended and lived inside the dead wood. Seeing the tall trunk, the sprawling weathered limbs still stabbing at the air, helped her believe Andy wasn’t really gone, but only in another place and substance.

It had been ten years since he’d fallen on Mt. Hood. The news came to her as she sat in her school principal’s office at Easton Elementary. She’d been with some parents, a meeting about an unruly, savage boy named Bobby Petty, when her phone rang. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the caller ID: Clackamas County Sheriff. Clackamas, that’s somewhere in Oregon, she thought, so she’d better take the call. She doesn’t remember exactly what she said to the parents, something like “I’m sorry, but I need to take this.” But she remembered how cold and crass they were to her, even as she listened to the sheriff’s deputy tell her there’d been an accident on the mountain and Andy had died.

In the minds of her friends and family, her mourning was over in a few months. But she’d always been good at pretending, at seeming whole and strong and impervious when she was still hurting. She went back to work, and never revealed to anyone that she and Andy were to be married a few weeks after his Mount Hood climb. This is what he wanted: “Let’s keep it simple and just tell people after it’s done,” he’d said, but she’d wanted an engagement ring. She’d wanted a wedding, for her father to give her away, for her best friend Denise to be her maid of honor. But she knew how much Andy worshiped simplicity, and what an off-the-charts introvert he was. So she’d agreed. And, for a reason she didn’t completely understand, she wanted for it to remain a secret still. Did it have something to do with the guilt she felt over not being with him on the Hood climb? He’d wanted her to go, but she was too busy at school: parent-teacher conferences, assemblies, testing, open house. Would he have lived if she’d gone with him? Would she look at snags differently?

She approached the tree and ran her hand over the scars made by the bullets. “Total jerk,” she said. Then she walked back to her truck to get a trash bag and went back to the meadow and cleaned up the man’s garbage.

When she returned to camp, a few of the campers had departed and the lake was quieter than before. The day’s remaining light shined on Kay’s little Airstream trailer, and it gleamed under the pines. The trailer was her home during her three months here. Sometimes she thought of it as a modern version of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, even though the venerated writer never cleaned toilets or picked up trash or retrieved birthday balloons from trees. 

Kay searched her trailer for the booklet of regulations she’d kept, and there it was: shooting was not allowed within 150 yards of a public road, and the shooter was no more 100 feet from the road’s turnout. The knowledge gave her a sense of security and relief she didn’t have before, should the man happen to return.

She ate her dinner at the water’s edge, watching as the line of evening shadows advanced over the lake. She poured a glass of red wine and climbed the most prominent rise of smooth granite overlooking the water—something she’d done almost every evening since she’d been here, simply to take in the beauty and silence. She’d sit on the rock with her knees drawn to her chest and watch the osprey that seemed to always come out then, as if she and the bird had arranged a rendezvous. Watching the osprey, especially when it plunged into the lake, reminded her why she loved wild things so much. They are simply what they are: no pretense, no politics, no ego, no reflection, no philosophy, no mourning.

Throughout the next week, Kay continued to carry out her duties as campground host. She cleaned toilets and collected fees and welcomed campers. Each day, she found time to fly-fish, and every evening, she returned to her place on the high granite rock with her red wine and watched the osprey. Then, on another quiet morning, she heard gunshots again.

As before, she got into her pickup and drove toward the firing. After she’d traveled the road a couple miles, she could tell the shots arose from the same place as before.

Her heart pounded and sweat erupted on her face, feeling like the time she was summoned from her principal’s office to the playground when there was a terrible fight out there between the two biggest boys in sixth grade. Kay had marched through the corridors to the circle of kids that’d formed around the brawl. She plowed through the wall of students and knocked one to the ground, something she’d have to answer for later. The two combatants were in the dirt, and one boy had pinned the other down with his knees. Kay grabbed the collar of the boy and jerked him off the other, nearly propelling him into the air. He fell back and looked up at her as if he’d just been thrown from a horse, and then Kay stepped between the two fighters and put her arms straight out. “Enough!” she’d said.

And so she said that now:

“Enough!”

She parked behind the shooter’s car, got out of her truck, and slammed her door so he could hear her. Then she walked toward him.

He’d placed another target in the meadow and already had riddled it with bullets. A few shell casings were strewn near his feet.

He turned to her and let the rifle hang at his side. Kay stopped and stared at him. He stared back.

“Oh, it’s the campground host,” he said. “Can I help you?”

She continued toward him. He looked at her feet, as if they were things that weren’t supposed to move, but did.

Then she stopped again.

“Yes, you can,” she said. “You didn’t clean up after yourself last time. You can shoot on public land, but you can’t trash it. And you’re too close to this road. You need to be at least 150 yards away. You’re not anywhere near that.”

He smiled dismissively. She’d seen it before, that you can just kiss my ass smirk. Oh my God, how many times had she’d seen it? It was the desperate weapon of so many of the bad boys she’d had to deal with, and whenever she was the target of the sardonic grin, she became both stern and sad, knowing there was always a tragic story behind all those defiant smiles.

“Is that right?” said the shooter.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “And some of your misses have scarred that tree.”

She pointed.

He jerked his head to the snag.

“That old dead thing?” he said. “Give me a break.”

He lifted his gun and pressed it against his shoulder and aimed at his target. Kay walked swiftly toward him. When he heard her approach, he lowered his rifle and watched as she moved deliberately between him and his target.  

“Are you crazy?” he shouted.

She planted her feet and folded her arms over her chest.

“Move! Damn it!” he said.

He kept shouting until his voice rang out like the shots he’d fired. But Kay didn’t move. Finally he laid down his gun in the grass and marched out to her. He came within a few inches of her face, so close she could smell the alcohol on his breath. They stared at each other like two boxers in the center of the ring before the start of their fight. Kay felt as if her feet were sinking deeper into the ground, seeming to grow like roots. She looked deeper and unflinchingly into his eyes. This, she thought, was the tragic archetype of all those angry boys she’d dealt with who’d somehow made it to manhood, and now it was as if she were confronting all of them at once. She saw their hard faces gathered at the far edge of the playground of her school, and there among them was the man who looked at her now, aiming his eyes at her like he’d aimed his gun.

Timeless silence passed between them. Then the man turned away from Kay and walked back to his rifle. He leaned over and jerked the weapon up from the ground as if he were pulling out a weed. Kay stayed still and watched him stomp out of the meadow.  She heard his car door slam, and then the fading rumble of his engine as he drove away.

Like before, she cleaned up his trash. The mystery and power of what’d just happened kept Kay in a daze as she moved through the meadow and gathered up the riddled target and spent shell casings and stuffed everything into a trash bag. She remained in this stupor as she travelled back to camp. Once she forgot she was driving, where she was. She pulled over and turned off the engine and rested an elbow on the steering wheel and pushed her face into her palm. She smelled her skin, remnant odors of the fish she’d caught since she’d been here, the fires she’d built, the rocks she’d climbed. She felt her breath’s moisture begin to cling to her nose and lips. When she lifted her face it was as if she’d surfaced from a cold lake into the pleasant sting of sunlight.

Finally she turned her truck around and drove back to the turnout and walked the same path the shooter had taken into the meadow. She stood where he had fired his rifle, and for a long time she looked up at the snag and the human-like shadow it cast over the trampled ground.