DANNY LEANED HIS head back and opened his eyes wide to the sun. They were bloodshot, and he resisted the urge to squint from the glare and the never-ending wind. In his short twenty-three years, he never ceased to marvel at the incessant wind.

Danny dipped his head downward to give his eyes a chance to refocus. He turned his back to the wind and scanned the mountains. It was autumn, and the north wind had the nibble of winter. It was a welcome relief from the summer heat. Danny loved this time of year. It reminded him of the many hunts he'd shared with his father in the Bighorns. They were usually hunts that produced more father-son bonds than game. Danny missed those days.

This was deer season. The week before was the time of year when he and his father would sight in their rifles, inspect the camping gear and scout their hunting territory.

As Danny grew older, his relationship with his father had deteriorated. That was the deepest regret of his life. His father was less tolerant of Danny's shortcomings, and Danny felt a deep void in his heart from the loss of his father's affection. An acute case of teenage rebellion and alcohol addiction had not helped matters.

Deer season had just opened. It was not likely that relations with his father would improve enough to salvage this hunting season, but Danny was still optimistic. He was young. His father was in good health. There was plenty of time to break down the walls. Maybe next deer season would be like the good old days.

Danny's long black hair wrapped around his face as he tipped the bottle up for the last swig. As his head fell back, he world spun, and he lost his balance. He caught himself before he fell, but Jim Beam had taken his toll. Danny was still several miles from home, and the likelihood of someone giving a drunken Indian a ride was next to none. If he were going to make it home before dark, he'd have to knuckle down and start walking.

It was not yet winter, but it got cold enough that Danny was not prepared to spend the night in the mountains. He pitched the empty bottle over the side of the mountain road, turned into the wind and staggered toward home. As he walked, he was reminded of his ancestral heritage. He thought of the thousands of miles his people had walked throughout history under far worse conditions than this. After all, he was only drunk.

A minor disturbance caught Danny's attention. About two hundred yards up the slope, a crow was chastising someone beside a mature Lodgepole pine. Danny tried to focus his watery eyes on the silhouette, but the wind, sun and whiskey had blurred his normally 20/15 vision.

Suddenly, Danny took a piercing blow that felt like a sledgehammer penetrating the thickness of his chest cavity. Dust rose from his vest at the point of impact, and a twoinch hole opened up in his back. Blood and tissue sprayed out behind him. The ringing in his ears from the wind and whiskey covered the distant report. The only thing he heard was a loud thud on his ribcage.

The next thing Danny heard was the sound of his body crashing to the ground. The impact produced a grunt and a spray of blood as the air was knocked from his lungs. Suddenly, Danny didn't feel drunk. His mind raced to analyze every bit of information that his dulled senses could feed it, but there was nothing to analyze. He couldn't feel his legs or arms.

Danny felt a sticky wetness under his shirt. His lungs were not working. Panic and a sense of helplessness quickly set in. He could only lie on his back and watch the clouds drift between the strands of long black hair that were wrapped around his face.

Danny's fear peaked. His world was growing smaller. He was losing his peripheral vision. He could only see a small tunnel of light surrounded by a red halo. His hearing also faded. The wind grew quiet and was replaced by a ringing in his ears. He could no longer feel the wind on his face, and the tunnel of light gradually faded into total darkness. He opened his eyes wider to cling to the last pinhole of light, but the red halo quickly faded to black.

Now, totally confined in his darkness, Danny's fear vanished. He no longer fought to breathe. For the first time in his life, he felt total peace. It was peace beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. He was fully cognizant of his new environment, and knew this must be death. If death was this peaceful, why had he feared it all his life?

Danny felt himself rising. Suddenly, his senses heightened. They were many times keener than before. He no longer felt the restraints of his mortal body. He felt like a man who'd been released from a straight jacket after a lifetime of bondage.

Danny looked down at his body, which grew smaller and smaller. He knew he had slipped into eternity. Reality soon set in. He had never been sure if he believed in life after death, but now he was there. It had happened so quickly. He was not prepared for this at such a young age. This happened to other people, not him. If there were an afterlife, there must be a God. What was he going to say to him, and where was he going to spend eternity?

Danny took one final glance backward. His body was very small, almost too small to see. The only living things in sight were an unfamiliar person carrying a rifle down the slope toward the lifeless shell that Danny used to occupy, and a noisy crow.