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Even the most anti-American of the writer’s Canadian friends found his refrigerator politics a futile and juvenile exercise. (It was also a waste of Scotch tape.) And the same year In the After-Hours Restaurant was published, 2002, Da

Did Da

And now, with the war in Iraq almost two years old, wouldn’t Ketchum also have railed that the majority of Americans were so poorly informed that they failed to see that this war was a distraction from the so-called war against terror-not a furtherance of that avowed war?

Da

What would the raging woodsman from Coos County have said about the United States declaring an end to “major combat operations” in Iraq in May 2003-less than two months after the war had begun? It was tempting to wonder.

The questions for Ketchum on Da

To the separate but similar-sounding denials by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair-who swore in May 2003 that intelligence about Iraq ’s weapons of mass destruction was neither distorted nor exaggerated in order to justify the attack on Iraq -Da

At times, Da

Daniel Baciagalupo would be sixty-three this coming mud season. He was a man who’d lost his only child and his father, and he lived alone-not to mention that he was a writer. Naturally, Da

As for Hero, he seemed unsurprised by Da

THE DOG WAS OF INDETERMINATE AGE. Ketchum had been vague about how old this particular Hero was-meaning how many generations were descended from that first “fine animal,” which the current Hero represented. There were more gray hairs on Hero’s muzzle than Da

Most disconcerting to anyone encountering Hero for the first time was that the veteran bear hound was missing an eyelid-on the opposite side of the dog’s fierce face from his mangled ear. The eyelid was lost in Hero’s last confrontation with Six-Pack’s German shepherd, though-according to Pam-Hero had gained the upper hand in the dogs’ final, ke

To the writer, the battle-scarred bear hound was a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course. (As elsewhere, Da

In January 2004, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the start of the war had climbed to five hundred. “Hell, five hundred is nothing-it’s just getting started,” Da

“What do you think about that, Hero?” Da

Da

The onetime bear hound slept on a zippered dog bed stuffed with cedar chips in the Toronto kitchen. Contrary to Da

The foot-long Browning knife itself proved to be less useful. Da

Ketchum’s guns were another matter. Da

Andy Grant knew the Bayfield area like the back of his hand; he’d hunted there as a boy. But, for the most part, Andy took Da