Hawkheel, a local hunter in Chopping County, grew up hating everything except the woods, but now he likes books and lives in a trailer on the river next to Antler Mountain. When his wife, Josepha, leaves him, he sells most of his property and now he only has his trailer, ten acres of river bottom, and his social security checks. But, he is happy with this and has secret places all through Chopping County that he visits regularly in a specific order. 

Since Bill Stong, who is now the town constable, hit him in school, the man has antagonized Hawkheel. On the Sunday before Stong’s fifteenth birthday, his mother accidentally used a pan that contained traces of a deadly poison meant to kill cows preying on crops to cook pork roast. Everyone in the family died except for Bill Stong who was losing his virginity during the dinner. The combination of sex and death tainted Stong's adolescence and he lost control of the farm and became a creepy loner. As adults, Stong does trivial things to annoy Hawkheel, but one day when Hawkheel is buying grain at Stong’s feed store, Stong tells him that Josepha is cheating on him. Stong’s neighbor, Urna, makes excuses for him until Stong turns her in for hunting doe in the summer. 

After Josepha leaves, Hawkheel starts to enjoy reading. Over time, Stong's business begins to fail, but is saved by new seasonal residents who find him amusing and wise. Stong carries his family's possessions down to the shop’s shelves to sells antiques along with ammunition. Urna tells Hawkheel that Stong’s selling his grandfather’s valuable, old books and Hawkheel drives over to check it out. As he drives up to the house, he remembers when his father drove him there as a child and he’d kept his hand on the door handle in case his dad steered towards the cliff edge. The Stong’s barn is dim-lit and smells of apples and Hawkheel finds lots of valuable books inside that Stong is selling for about a dollar each. Stong tells the tourists that Antler Mountain is named after a couple named Jane and Anton Antler who’d lived there and lived off raccoons and weeds and had a child that died at only a few months old. Hawkheel wonders if he’s talking about his father, who’d been carted away to the state asylum. Stong draws the tourists a map to the house on the mountain. For every lie in the story Hawkheel hears, he takes three extra books.  Hawkheel buys only a few books a week, so as not to alert Stong of how valuable they are. When he feels Stong growing suspicious, he diverts his attention by talking about a large buck he saw the other day. Hawkheel finds an rare, undisturbed trout pool, but in late August other hunters find it and he falls down and cracks his knee on a rock. Urna brings him over hot dinners until he gets back up on his feet. He finds a Stong family album he bought from the garage sale and finds a picture of Bill Stong trespassing on the undisturbed trout pool on Hawkheel's property years ago.  Hawkheel runs into Stong who gives him a strong cup of alcohol for his knee and tells him that there are no deer on Antler Mountain right now because of all the summer traffic. Hawkheel knows Stong is lying, but as he gets more drunk Stong discovers an original price tag on one of the books he sold Hawkheel for cheap. That night, Hawkheel feels queasy as he goes to bed and in the morning he feels even worse. It's only when he hears a shot go off on Antler Mountain and watches Stong kill a large deer that he realizes the brandy was poisoned. Urna says Stong killed the biggest buck ever recorded on Antler Mountain.  Looking back through the family album, Hawkheel finds a photo of Stong that has been mutilated and torn, accompanied by a self-composed obituary that lists his family as survivors and him as the one who’d been poisoned in the accident. The next morning, Urna calls to tell him that Stong and Rose are on TV with their record-holding kill and Hawkheel plans his revenge. He packs his boxes up and drives up the rain-soaked path to Stong’s house. He arrives just as another storm begins and finds the buck hanging from a gambrel. He rips pages out of his books and hurls them at the carcass.