The End

The End is the post-pandemic period in which Hig lives among the ruins of ordinary society, nine years after a devastating pandemic ravaged the globe. Its decisive condition is ongoing loss: the outbreak took people Hig loved, while ecological changes have emptied streams and diminished animal and plant life. The period is not a settled aftermath so much as a continuing crisis, measured in absences that reach from the human community to the changing seasons.

The Collapse and Its Human Cost

The pandemic transformed the world Hig inhabits, killing people he loved and leaving him at an abandoned airport in Erie, Colorado, with Jasper and his neighbor Bangley. Their uneasy alliance makes survival possible but does not restore the social world that has disappeared. Bangley provides armed defense; Hig watches the perimeter, hunts, and keeps the household supplied. Their arrangement is practical and strained, shaped by the different capacities each brings to a dangerous life.

The consequences extend beyond their immediate refuge. A Mennonite community lives nearby with a blood disease that appeared after the flu; children are born with it, and some die each year. Hig visits the community and brings supplies, extending the period’s fragile social ties beyond the airport. Such acts stand in contrast to Bangley’s emphasis on defense and underscore that life after the pandemic still includes obligations to people outside one’s own survival partnership.

A Changed Natural Calendar

In this era, familiar seasonal expectations have lost their authority. Hig notes that mid-April is too early for a true thaw, yet old seasonal benchmarks have become little more than nostalgia. Although the mountains received snow in one recent winter, the peaks had been dry for two consecutive years before that. The prospect of continued climatic change frightens him more than attacks or disease, because it threatens the environmental conditions on which life depends.

The trout’s disappearance gives that larger change a precise, personal measure. Hig remembers brook trout, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, and cutbows as gone, and connects their loss to mountain streams becoming too warm. Other absences accumulate around them: elk, suckers, and even carp are included in his fear of what may vanish next. The repeated thought that he might wake crying over the last trout makes ecological extinction an object of grief in its own right, not merely a backdrop to human suffering.

Fishing, Memory, and Refuge

Fishing remains one of Hig’s ways of inhabiting a world altered by The End. When trout are gone, he continues to fish for suckers and carp, sometimes using dry flies as the carp adapt to feed nearer the surface. He has learned to eat these less-preferred fish, but he does not treat fishing solely as food gathering: the hours beside a stream offer distance from the airport’s routines and the risks of survival. Because Bangley regards recreation as a distraction from survival, Hig keeps much of this practice to himself.

His trips into the mountains also preserve a connection to places that have not entirely died or are beginning to recover. He passes stands of dead trees and seeks green woods, where running water and familiar forest scents recall an earlier world and the time when he and Melissa were young. In the woods, fishing resembles a private ritual of attention and gratitude. That refuge is real but provisional: Hig still encounters ecological decline, and the streams that draw him into the mountains are themselves changing.

The Meaning of the End

The period’s defining tension is between maintaining life and mourning what survival cannot bring back. At the airport, Hig and Bangley secure a perimeter and prepare for human threats; beyond it, warmer water, drying peaks, and dwindling animal life register slower changes that cannot be held off by weapons. Hig’s attachment to fishing, the mountains, and the lost trout gives those changes personal form, while his assistance to the Mennonite community shows that care persists amid scarcity.

The End therefore names more than the aftermath of the pandemic. It is a lived interval in which the old world remains present in Hig’s memories even as its human and ecological foundations erode. His routine of returning to the surviving or recovering woods holds together both sides of that interval: grief for what is gone and attention to what is still here.