Excerpt from The Animals by Christian Kiefer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Above him, above them all, the sky had gone full dark and stars seemed all at once to rise from the tops of the trees, their pinpoints wheeling for a moment across that black expanse only to return once again to those needled shapes, as if each light had come up through the soil, through the epidermis of root hairs and into the cortex and the endodermis and up at last through open xylem, the sapwood, through the vessels and tracheids, rising in the end to the thin sharp needles and releasing, finally, a single dim point of light into the thin dark air only to pull one back from that same scattering of stars, the cambium pressing down the trunk, pressing back to black earth. Time circling in the soil and the silver-tipped needles. Time circling in the big sage and cheatgrass of everything to come before.

He pulled the lever back to the stock, the breech closing with a smooth almost silent whisper. I'm sorry, he said, not to the sheriff or to himself but to the moose before him in the underbrush. Then he lifted the rifle to his shoulder, leaned forward until the barrel was just a few inches from the hard curl of its skull, and squeezed the trigger.

Excerpted from The Animals: A Novel by Christian Kiefer. Copyright © 2015 by Christian Kiefer. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.