The Keeper

By: Christian Sebastian

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Keeper
Book Two of The Backcountry Series

Silas is gone. Buried beside his wife and daughter on twelve acres of mountain land he never bothered to measure. He left Eli the house, the property, a hand-drawn map worn thin at the folds, a rifle carried forty-eight seasons and fired fewer times than one hand could count, and a letter with three lines that change meaning every time they're read.

He also left a secret.

Something lives on that mountain. Silas spent fifty years walking the same ridges every October, telling no one what he found, and in his final season he stood thirty yards from the impossible and chose to lower his rifle. Eli was beside him. He saw it. He has told no one.

Now others are coming. A patient man with the right questions. A hunter who doesn't go home empty. A woman who moves through the mountains the way the mountains ask to be moved through. They carry rifles and directions and the kind of certainty that doesn't ask permission. And somewhere above the tree line, in country that doesn't appear on any map the way it actually exists, something is moving through the timber that shouldn't be there – calm, deliberate, aware of everything below.

Eli is twenty-three years old. He has a dead man's map, a dead man's rifle, and fourteen seasons of walking behind someone who knew where he was going. It is not enough. It will have to be.

The Keeper is the second book in The Last Hunt Series – a story about what it costs to protect something the world wants to take, and whether some things matter precisely because they cannot be possessed.

For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Rick Bass, and anyone who believes the best stories are the ones that refuse to explain themselves.