Around here, even dying can be hard. Horribly hard. Only death itself comes easy. By easy, I mean frequent. Death happens so often that people regard it pretty much the same as the never-ending rain. When life itself is hard, you have to be hard to live. Even a bitch will cull one of her own pups if she doesn't think he's going to be tough enough—she knows she's only got but so much milk, and there's none to waste. Survival isn't some skill we learned—it's in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough. There's rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man's found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn't mean his death was due to natural causes. Folks drink a lot. Wives get beaten something fierce. Some of those wives can shoot pretty good. And some of their husbands never think it can happen to them, even when they're sleeping off a drunk. There's supposed to be good and bad in everyone. Probably is. But here, it's the bad in you that's more often the most useful. Like the difference between climate and weather. Most folks around here don't view a killing as good or bad—just something that happens, like a flood or a fire. That's why a whole lot of bodies never get viewed at all. For a man like me, this is a good part of the country to do my work. I take pride in the quality of my work, but I never deceive myself that every death at my hands is justified, never mind righteous or noble. I never saw myself as ... much of anything, really. Just a crippled, cornered rat, trying to protect my little brother with whatever I can.