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Nearly a decade later, on the night before my thirtieth birthday, my older brother, Luke, called me on the phone.

“Come on, let’s go hooter hunting tomorrow,” he said. My .22 had disappeared, and it had been years since I thrashed through the woods after sooty grouse. There were errands and other things I needed to do, but I agreed to meet Luke at a trailhead at six in the morning. The hooting of the first grouse of the day brought back a flood of memories of Buff, Thad, and Tim, and sitting in class daydreaming about hooter hunting while popping out hundreds of devil’s club thorns from my hands and forearms. Luke and I hiked through wet brush as the dark forest dripped and softly swooshed and creaked in the breeze.

“Got him,” I said when I spotted a grouse high up, perched on a branch of a spruce tree. Luke, acting as a retriever, got under the tree the bird was in. I used his .22 and the grouse fell, its wings beating wildly, to the earth. We took turns shooting and retrieving until the early afternoon. Even though there were other grouse hooting nearby, we had four in the bag, more than enough for a birthday feast.