A dark-colored fox skirts around abandoned farm buildings and laps up water in the nearby brook. When he first moves into Chopping County, he thinks Banger is an obnoxious old man, At the Bear Trap Grill, while looking for someone to go bird shooting with, he mentions to Tukey, who is said to be a good man for grouse, his disapproval of Banger and Tukey tells him the man’s wife and kids died in a house fire and left him with only his dog and hardware store. Tukey mocks him and tells him if he wants to go hunting he should grow familiar with Banger, who hunts with no one. 

After that interaction, he gives up on getting to know the locals and only sees Noreen Pineaud who cleans his house on Fridays. One day, she stays after for coffee and a smoke and tells him she’s separated from her husband. Noreen tells him gossip about her family line and he listens intently. On a cold morning hunting alone, he climbs the shattered rock looking for birds but finds none. In the distance, he hears two shots and imagines Banger taking two birds from his dog’s mouth affectionately. 

In the weeks following, he continues to hear Banger’s shotgun blast coming from the second ridge. Without a dog, he scrambles through the brush to find the birds he shoots and he envies Banger and his canine companion. He decides to move over to where Banger is hunting. On a good weather day, he reaches the back of Banger’s ridge that overlooks Stone City, an abandoned farm that lies between two ridges, and feelings of loathing and fear overcome him. The farm’s buildings have collapsed and he cautiously walks down the slope to the thin soil fields. From the apple tree, a swarm of birds filter out and many of them fall to the ground, but only one of them was shot by him. He comes face-to-face with Banger who tells him he used to hunt at the farm as a kid but was shot at by old man Stone. Banger says the place used to be called Stone City because all the Stones lived on the farm and that there’s always been birds here. When he asks what happened to the family, Banger lies to him that they died or moved away. 

On their way back, Banger gives him a ride in his Power Wagon and tells him more about the Stone family. Banger is so caught up in his story that he brings the man to the sugarhouse where he lives, and he invites him to dinner. The inside of Banger’s house looks like a Grouse museum and he lights a kerosene lamp that illuminates a picture of Banger’s dead wife, a long-haired girl standing in front of a farmhouse with a sagging roof. Banger and him eat in silence and they don’t see one another again until a month later. 

The fox trots behind the screen of chokecherries along the highway, rolling in the carrion before shaking himself and continuing on. Noreen plucks a second bird and says she’s done the action a hundred times before. When she was young and her family poor, she’d cleaned birds to bring in money. They lie in bed together and admit they’re both married and she tells him she’s slept with her half-brother Raymond before. She tells him her mother had Raymond with Floyd Stone, but there had been trouble and so she hadn’t married until Noreen’s father. Every Friday night, Noreen tells him more gossip about relationships in her family. 

With a few weeks left in the hunting season, he finds Banger’s and Lady’s tracks behind his house and takes the trail as an invitation. He finds Banger next to a fire and Banger shows him the knife he’d found, which had belonged to old man Stone. Banger tells him the story of the day Floyd drove drunk up the hill from town. Floyd reaches the train crossing when a train is going through and when the train passes, the man standing on the caboose porch waves to Floyd and Floyd shoots him in the head. The police come up to get him and when old man Stone tells them to get off his property, they arrest old man Stone for obstructing justice and the man swipes out one of the officers eyeballs in retaliation. The police find Floyd hiding underneath a bed and arrest him and pour hot tar on the naked bodies of the remaining men before covering them in chicken feathers. 

The fox continues to travel on, looking for a hare, but sensing a fox hunter he runs away from the trail. An intense cold sweeps the county and Noreen calls to say her car won’t start. Suddenly, Banger appears in his kitchen and yells at him to give him back Lady, but he says he doesn’t know where she is. Banger says he let Lady out the night before but when she wasn’t back the next morning he grew worried. They work together to search for the dog and finally find her body at Stone City. She had been caught in a fox trap and Banger says it was old man Stone’s. Banger says that old man Stone was the one who killed his wife and kid after he ran them out of Stone City and now he thinks the man took his dog because he picked up his knife. The trap belongs, in fact, to Raymond Pineaud Jr., meaning that even the Stone descendents are no good. Banger sells the hardware store and moves several times. The town clerk tells him that Banger owns Stone City, but he knows that the Stone family owns it and always will. The fox brings a bird back to its den for his cubs and they devour the animal.