This Rock by Robert Morgan

the other, and we lifted him up. He groaned and cried in spite of hisself, and he was too stiff and sore to walk except in little steps.
    â€œLean your weight on us,” I said. The steps he took was little jerks. It was hard going down the side of the mountain. I expected us all to lose our balance. U. G. and me had to walk sideways to hold Moody up on the steep ground.
    â€œYou’ll feel better when you get home,” I said.
    â€œDon’t want to go home,” Moody said.
    His shirt looked like it had been tore by a saw. He looked like he had been clawed all over.

Five
    Muir
    I NEVER COULD understand why sometimes me and Mama got on each other’s nerves so bad. Some said it was because we was so much alike. I was her boy and I was raised in her house and she was the only mama I’d ever had. But my brother, Moody, was raised in the same house, and he was as different from me as midday from midnight. Other people said the problem between Mama and me was that we was so different. Mama liked meetings and singings and getting together with other people, while I just liked to be off working by myself in the orchard or tramping the woods with a gun, walking my trapline.
    â€œTrappers are as no-count as fiddlers,” my aunt Florrie liked to say. But she said it in fun, while other people said it to be mean.
    I liked to get up early and leave the house before Moody and Fay and Mama was awake. It was a good feeling to be up while the house was quiet. I could make coffee and grits for myself while it was still dark outside. It was so good not to see my family, I sometimes skipped the grits and coffee just to get my mackinaw coat and gun and slip out into the dark. That way I could be halfway to the head of the river before dawn made the sky look like a stained-glass window.
    That’s what I wanted to do one day in January, the year after I preached. I knowed I’d have fur in my traps all through the Flat Woods and over on Grassy Creek and beyond the Sal Raeburn Gap. It’d rained for almost a week and I hadn’t gone to the traps. Moody and me had fixed the roof of the barn, and I’d split a pile of wood to stack on the porch. Now the rain had stopped and it’d blowed off cold. I knowed there would be mink and muskrats, even foxes and coons in the traps all along the line. Fur was the true gold and treasure of the mountains, and I believed I had a packsack full of it waiting.
    I had long practice at getting dressed in the dark. I tried not to wake Moody, who was snoring on the other side of the double bed. I liked Moody best when he was asleep. I slipped on my shirt and overalls by going slow. If you hurry in the dark you’ll lose your balance and knock into something. The secret is to go slow and remember where everything is. I found my boots and a pair of socks and tiptoed out of the bedroom on the cold floor.
    Soon as I stepped into the hall I seen a light in the kitchen. Somebody was up, because I could smell coffee. I tiptoed down the hall and seen Mama setting at the kitchen table reading her Bible. When she couldn’t sleep she liked to get up early and sip coffee while she read Revelation or Acts.
    â€œMorning,” I said, like I expected to see her there.
    â€œMorning,” she said, not looking up from the table. Mama loved to read more than anybody I ever seen, and she hated to be bothered. I set down at the table and started to lace my boots. They was almost new boots I’d ordered from the W. C. Russell Moccasin Company in Berlin, Wisconsin, with some of my molasses money. Mama had not approved of me buying such expensive boots.
    She looked up from the Bible. I noticed the wrinkles around her eyes and the lines around her mouth. “We old folks can just barely cover our feet,” she said. “But the young wear leather to the knees.” It was something she liked to say. It was something Daddy used to say. Mama had learned to be thrifty after