Excerpt from Bay of Souls by Robert Stone, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He remembered the deer at the edge of the stream. Its life ebbing, legs giving way.

"I suppose I called for moral support," she said. "I’m afraid."

"Hang in," he told her.

He walked unseeing back through the noisy room. Alvin and Norman were paying the check. Michael went into his wallet, took out two twenties and threw them on the table.

"That’s too much," Norman said.

"Kristin is worried about Paul. He’s out late."

It was snowing on Ehrlich’s parking lot when they got to the Jeep. Alvin checked the lines securing the carcass of the deer. Michael took a back seat.

"You know," Alvin said, "kids are always getting up to some caper and you get all hot and bothered and it’s nothing."

It was the last thing anyone said on the ride home.

The snow came harder as they drove, slowing them down. Michael watched it fall. He thought of the man with the deer in his wheelbarrow. By gad, sir, you present a distressing spectacle. If he could make it up somehow. His thoughts had all been mean and low. What he did not want in his mind’s eye now was his son’s face, the face on which he so doted. But it was there after all and the boy under snow. Hang in.

"Did I pass out?" he asked them.

"You were sleeping," Norman said.

How could he sleep? He had slept but forgotten nothing. His boy had been there the whole time. Prayer. No. You did not pray for things. Prayers, like Franklin’s key on a kite, attracted the lightning, burned out your mind and soul.

When, hours later, they drove into town there were dead deer hanging from the trees on everyone’s lawn. The lawns were wide in that prairie town. They supported many trees, and almost every bare tree on almost every lawn in front of almost every house had a dead deer or even two, slung over the low boughs. There were bucks and does and fawns. All fair game, legal. There were too many deer.

A police car was blocking Michael’s driveway. Norman parked the Jeep on the street, across the lawn from his front door. Everyone got out, and when they did the young town policeman, whom Michael knew, whose name was Vandervliet, climbed out of his cruiser.

"Sir," Vandervliet said, "they’re not here. They’re at MacIvor."

MacIvor was the tri-county hospital on the north edge of town.

Norman put a hand on his shoulder. Michael climbed into Vandervliet’s Plymouth cruiser.

"What?" Michael asked the young cop. "Is my son alive?"

"Yessir. But he’s suffering from exposure."

And it did not sound so good because as they both knew, the cold, at a certain point, was irreversible, and all the heat, the fire, the cocoa, hot-water bottles, sleeping bags, down jackets, quilts, whiskey, medicine, nothing could make a child stop trembling and his temperature rise.

"Your wife is injured, Professor. I mean she ain’t injured bad but she fell down trying to carry the boy I guess and so she’s admitted also over there at MacIvor."

"I see," Michael said.

"See, the boy was looking for the dog ’cause the dog was out in the snow."

On the way to the hospital, Michael said, "I think I’m going to shoot that dog."

"I would," said Vandervliet.

At MacIvor, they were waiting for him. There was a nurse whose husband ran the Seattle-inspired coffee shop in town and a young doctor from back east. They looked so agitated, he went numb with fear. The doctor introduced himself but Michael heard none of it.

"Paul’s vital signs are low," the doctor said. "We’re hoping he’ll respond. Unfortunately he’s not conscious, and we’re concerned. We don’t know how long he was outside in the storm."

Copyright © 2003 by Robert Stone. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.