The Photograph

I went with the intention of staying my distance, of being polite but standoffish. I didn’t want Kincaid for a friend, and I was afraid that if I could get within striking distance, I’d kill the man for what he’d done to our family. Not just what he did to my grandfather and father but how dependent we’d become on his patronage. I couldn’t see the point of his fame. I’d read the books and seen the movies done from them, and, yes, he was an engaging, persuasive writer. But that macho male friendship and combining strengths and resolves to take on all comers, whether the scenario was the American West or the battlefields of Iraq, got old pretty fast, I thought.

But the longer I was riding around with him up in those deserted hills of magnificent wild beauty, just the two us, with him weaving stories for me in a rich baritone voice that lulled and stroked me to the very quick, the more I could see how he worked on a person. He must have been over sixty by now, but he was still quite a man, the virile, solid, handsome man of power and decisiveness that he wrote about, and for which he had received international accolades for four decades.

The third day we had struck camp in a cottonwood grove next to a racing stream running down an isolated, sheltering ravine and then we’d ridden on up toward the snow line in search of elk.

We found a mud slide instead. Neither one of us got hurt—and the horses weren’t any worse the wear for the slide either. But we were filthy. With a hearty laugh, Kincaid challenged me to a horse race down to the crystal clear little lake the stream in our ravine fed into, and off he roared with another laugh.