The man sat with his back to the bole of a cottonwood and lifted the dog’s ear to find the tick seated there, gray and swollen and pulsing with the slow tide of its feeding, and he took the point of his knife and worked it in beneath the body until it parted from the flesh with a small wet sound like a secret finally being told. The dog did not lift its head. It lay in the dust with its eyes half shut and let itself be handled the way an old country lets itself be handled, without complaint, as if long usage had taught it that complaint changed nothing that mattered. The man held the tick pinched between two fingers and watched it grope in the air after what had been taken from it, its legs searching out a purchase in a world that had gone all at once to nothing.

If the tick could speak – and men have imagined stranger tongues in stranger mouths – it would say the blood was owed to it, that hunger is its own deed of title and asks no further proof than itself. It would say the dog was large and warm and rich with a superfluity of blood, and that its own need was a kind of right by simple weight of comparison, the many drops the dog could spare set against the few the tick required merely to go on being a tick. It would not trouble itself to speak of the fever that comes after, or the slow wasting of an animal bled too often by too many small mouths, and not because such things are hidden from it. The tick is not ignorant of the dog. It found the dog, chose the ear, judged the vein; whatever apparatus a tick is given for knowing has done its work well enough to bring it to this exact latitude of skin. What it lacks is not information but interest. Its whole economy runs on a single account, and that account has one column only, headed with its own want, and the dog’s diminishment is never a figure entered on the other side, because for the tick there is no other side. It is not that the tick cannot see the ledger runs two ways. It is that the tick has never once been furnished with a ledger that had two columns in it. It wants, and the wanting settles every question before the question can be asked, and it has settled every such question since before there were dogs to feed on or men to sit beneath cottonwoods and call the settling by its right name.

He crushed the tick between two flat stones and watched the thread of dark blood run down and vanish into the dust, the way all blood finally vanishes into the ground that receives it without asking whose it had been. He wiped the knife against his trouser leg and folded it away. Below him on the road the dust still hung and turned in the failing light where a wagon had passed not an hour before, and he sat and watched it settle the way a man watches a thing whose meaning he has already worked out and would rather not have worked out.

Two days past, three riders had come down that same road. They had taken the old man’s mule at the creek crossing and beaten him into the mud when he was slow to let go the lead rope, and left him there with his teeth loosened and his hip cracked so that he would not walk right again for whatever remained to him of his life. One of them had gone off into the willow brake with the girl from the Hollis place, and when she came back up through the brush she would not speak and would not lift her eyes to her own mother, and something had gone out of her there that no doctor in that county would know how to put back. The sheriff had ridden out and studied the tracks with his hat pushed back on his head and allowed that he knew the men, had known them and their fathers before them, and that the jail could not hold such men more than a season and the circuit court could not hold them longer than that, and that nothing further would be done until they did it again, because that was how the law had been built to run, a physician who could only be summoned after the patient was already in the ground. It would not have mattered greatly, the sheriff seemed to know without saying it, if the law had come sooner and named the cost to their faces in plain words. A man cannot be talked into owning a column in his ledger that was never built to hold one.

The tick’s want is not ignorant of the dog’s day ahead of it so much as unconcerned with it, the way a man drawing water from a well is not ignorant that the well has a bottom but simply has no occasion, in the drawing, to think about it. And it may be that the three men on the road knew well enough what a mule meant to an old man who had no other, what an afternoon in the willow brake would mean to a girl for the rest of her life, what a beating in the road would cost a body already worn thin by age. Men are not ticks. Most of them carry some rough apparatus for imagining another’s hurt. But knowledge carried and knowledge consulted are not the same furniture, and the three of them did not consult it, not because it was hidden from them but because it was not, in their reckoning, a cost that entered anywhere into the account. Their days were shaped around the next taking the way a compass needle is shaped around the pole, without will in the matter, only orientation, and what a compass never does, whatever the terrain beneath it, is ask what the traveler behind it might be crossing over. They rose of a morning wanting and lay down at night still wanting, and they called the wanting their right, because a man who takes enough must eventually furnish himself a right to stand upon or else see himself plain, and there are not many men built to bear that kind of seeing – though seeing was never in fact the trouble. The trouble was that what they saw, they had long since trained themselves not to weigh.

They said the ones they took from had more than they needed and could stand the loss, the way the tick would say the dog was strong enough to spare its portion of blood, and in neither case was the saying a lie born of not knowing better. It was a saying that simply did not require the other side of the ledger to be true, since the other side was never consulted in the first place. The fence that would stand unmended for want of the mule, the woman lying awake past midnight with her ears tuned toward the yard, the girl who would flinch now at ordinary sounds for the length of a life that had been altered in a single afternoon without her consent ever having been asked for – none of this was hidden from the men who caused it. It simply did not enter into what they were doing while they did it, any more than the far side of a coin enters into the hand that spends it. Their attention, like the tick’s, ran in one direction only, outward toward the want and the getting of it, and never once circled back to ask what the getting had cost the thing it was got from. That is a kind of exile a man arranges for himself in small stages – not an exile from knowledge but an exile from the habit of reckoning – and once arranged it becomes very difficult to walk back out of, since the taking has by then become the only architecture he still knows how to live inside.

In the towns men spoke of hiring more deputies and building more cells, as though what was wanting was only more of the same machinery and not some different machinery altogether. Yet it was often the same men calling loudest for the cells who had, a decade before, voted down the tax that might have paid for them, or let the old circuit judge go unreplaced because a courtroom costs money and an empty courtroom appears, to men who do not look closely, to cost nothing at all. They had loosened what restraints there were because the loosening served some other purpose of theirs, and had then found it useful to stand up before frightened people and promise a safety they had themselves already sold off in pieces, on other days, for other reasons. The people listened because the alternative was worse than the lie. To disbelieve the promise was to admit that the country they thought they were building was being eaten hollow from within by men who had made a vocation of the eating, and that such men were not going to be stopped by a speech, however well delivered, however sincerely meant.

A country with few such men in it needs little watching. Doors can be left on the latch. A rifle can hang above a doorframe and gather dust for a generation and never be taken down for anything but hunting. A man can pass another on the road and see in him only a man, tired perhaps, or in a hurry, or lost, and not have to first ask himself what the stranger might have come to take. But once the takers are loose in a country the whole shape of the day bends around them whether a man wills it or not. He must reckon their presence into every plan the way a farmer reckons frost into his planting. He must weigh what can be left in the yard overnight and what must be carried in and locked away, what road is safe after dark and what road is not, what his children must be taught to keep close about them, in their hands or in their bearing, so that they will not present themselves to the world as a thing worth the taking. All of this is a tax, though no legislature ever sat to pass it and no collector ever comes riding to the door to claim it outright. It is paid in the coin of a narrowed life, in the acreage of trust that goes fallow because it is no longer safe to plant it, and it is paid whether or not a single crime is ever committed against the man who pays it, since the mere existence of the takers is itself the toll, exacted before any hand is laid on any thing.

The man rose from beneath the cottonwood and walked down through the bunchgrass to where the road lay pale and empty in the last of the light. The wagon he had watched was long gone from sight and the dust it had raised had settled back into the weeds as if it had never once been disturbed, the road giving up no evidence of what had lately passed over it, as roads never do, being older than any single passage and indifferent to the whole procession of them. He stood a while with his hat pushed back, looking at the place where the wagon had gone, and then he turned and walked back up to the tree. The dog had not moved. Already the ants had found the crushed husk of the tick on the flat stone and were dismantling it grain by grain and freighting the pieces away into the grass, so that within the hour there would be nothing left on the stone to say that a thing had lived there, and fed there, and been ended there.

He went into the house and took the rifle down from the pegs above the door and broke it open and checked the loads and closed it again with a sound like a small door shutting somewhere far off. The woman was at the stove and did not turn around, and she asked him where he meant to go, and he told her he was going to see about the men who had come through. She did not ask him anything further. She had been married to him long enough to know that some questions are themselves a kind of interference in a thing already decided, and she understood, the way he understood, that the tick would come back to feed at the dog’s ear if no one troubled to take it off, and that others would follow after it, world without end, until somebody was willing to be the hand that did the taking off.

Whether a rifle can be brought to bear upon a thing so much like a tick, and not itself become in the bearing a kind of taking, is a question that has occupied better men than the one now walking down toward the darkening road, and it is not a question the road will answer for him, or the dusk coming on, or the dog watching him go with its old patient eyes. Some part of him understood that he was walking out to become, for an hour or a day, an argument he would not afterward be able to take back whole, that the hand which sets out to correct a wrong is not permitted to hold in the same hand the fact of its own innocence. But the fence at the creek crossing would not mend itself, and the girl at the Hollis place would not stop flinching at the ordinary sounds of an ordinary evening merely because some better man than he had once wished it otherwise. There are debts, he had come to understand, that do not care to be paid in wishes. He was not a tick, and could not make himself one merely by taking a rifle down from its pegs. Whatever else the walk to the road cost him, it would not cost him the habit of weighing what stood on the far side of his own hand – that habit was the one column the men he was going to find had never carried, and it was, more than any statute or any jail too small to hold them, the whole of the difference between them and him. It was also, he understood without much comforting himself over it, no exemption. A man could carry the second column faithfully all his days and it would not lighten what he was about to place in it. He went on toward the road in the failing light with the rifle a cold weight along his forearm, walking the way men walk toward things they have already decided and would rather not examine a second time, and behind him in the dark the dog rose at last and followed, as it always had, not knowing where, only that it went where the man went, which was the only order it had ever needed to understand, and perhaps, in the end, the only order there truly is.