North of Hope by Shannon Polson

and hit pretty close to center mass.
    “Not bad!” he said with a smile. “Shotgun?” He picked up the heavy metal gun. “You ready to hit a bear with one of these things?” he asked.
    “Hopefully we won’t have to,” I said, parroting what I knew I should say. “It would be rare. They generally stay away from people and usually don’t cause any trouble. I really don’t want to have to shoot at anything.” As I said it, I believed it, or most of me did, and yet I realized how ludicrous it would sound to anyone who knew what had happened last year.
    The manager nodded. “Well, don’t tell anyone,” he said. “We’re not really supposed to do this, but here’s slugs, here’s the shot. You gonna carry this, you need to be ready to shoot it.”
    The pistol-grip shotgun had an eighteen-inch barrel, the shortest legal length. It had been a gift to Dad from his friend George in the army. George and his sons were hunters, and this was widely considered a standard bear gun in Alaska.
    I tried it first. The gun weighed heavy in my arms, requiring commitment and intention. Holding the pump and the pistol grip, I aimed at the target. The percussion echoed down the lane. My shot demolished the top quarter of the paper target.
    “You’ve got to aim it lower than you think,” the manager said. “You’ll naturally pull up, so get it lower.” I tried again. Center mass, a huge hole ripped from the target. Trea followed suit, hitting center mass on her first try. The explosions reverberated in the emptiness inside me.
    A bolt. A bullet. A chamber. The 45-70 had been found lying next to Dad on the sands of that Arctic beach. He had actioned the lever, but never had the chance to fire. The gun was the last thing he had touched.
    Years before, I’d visited my grandma in Phoenix. Before I left, she asked how my brothers were doing.
    “Fine, I think, Grandma,” I said. “They’re boys. They don’t say much.”
    “Last time Ned was here,” she said, “I took him to the airport when he left. He gave the agent his ticket, and as he started to walk down the jetway, I said, ‘Keep the faith, Ned!’ He turned around and yelled back at me, ‘No!’ And then he kept going.” She shook her head slowly. “I just hope he’s okay.”
    “I don’t know, Grandma. We don’t really talk about those things.”
    I remembered that conversation as Ned, Sally, and I each took care of our gear, getting ready for the night. Ned was so sensitive that he couldn’t take the tiniest disruption, arming himself withanger for protection. I didn’t remember him that way in childhood, only since our parents’ divorce, though I supposed he had experienced additional stresses as an adopted sibling that I would never understand. I watched the care he took with everything, appreciating his attention to detail, worrying about the precision he seemed to demand and what might fail to live up to his expectations on this trip. I shook off the thought and headed to my tent. Not something I could solve. I had my own problems.
    Sally took the first shift to watch for bear. I had the second. I wiggled into my sleeping bag, wadding up my raincoat for a pillow and pulling a T-shirt over my eyes to keep out the light.
    At 11:00 p.m. I awoke to Sally’s tapping on the nylon vestibule of my tent, waking me for bear watch. The tapping came thin and soft, a reminder of how little stood between me and this wilderness.
    I crawled out of my tent into the middle of a watercolor painting, the water, tinted and glistening, still moist on the paper. The brightness of the Arctic summer sun had lessened as the sun swung closer to the horizon, letting soft shadows from the west stretch gently across the tundra, and the watery light of rain showers in the mountains smoothed the edges of the limestone and shale while illuminating the mountainsides with a yellow glow. As the wind died, I shed my clothing down to my long underwear, though the quick clustering of