Hig–Pops relationship

The Hig–Pops relationship develops from practical cooperation under fire into a durable alliance grounded in trust, shared knowledge, and a place in the makeshift family at the novel’s end. Its clearest early measure is not a declaration of loyalty but a dangerous airport maneuver: Hig follows Pops’s instructions, waits while Pops draws a sniper’s fire, and then joins him inside the building. Later, Hig takes Pops flying and shows him the territory they now have to defend and live within. These scenes make the relationship reciprocal: Pops leads when his judgment is needed, and Hig later becomes the guide.

An Alliance Under Fire

At the airport, Hig and Pops approach the offices of the FBO while remaining out of sight of the tower. Hig carries an AR-15, a handheld radio tuned to the tower frequency, and grenades retrieved from beneath one of the lambs. His approach reflects lessons he attributes to Bangley: silence has value, but so does overwhelming firepower. That strategic inheritance shapes the danger around the pair, yet it is Pops who directs their immediate movement and decides how to cross the exposed ground.

Pops tells Hig to remain in place and use his patched flannel shirt as a decoy. He fixes the shirt to a piece of rusty rebar, then orders Hig to push it past the corner only when signaled. The instruction is precise: Hig must not move until Pops says so. The arrangement puts Hig in the role of trusted partner rather than independent actor; he has to hold his position while Pops takes the greater visible risk. Their cooperation depends on restraint as much as action.

The FBO Crossing

When Hig extends the shirt, the sniper fires into it. Pops immediately sprints across the open ramp toward the rear door, feinting and zigzagging as more shots strike the pavement around him. Hig stays behind, sees the neat bullet hole repeated through the shirt’s folds, and waits. He counts the minutes, as he has when waiting for Bangley, until a single shot from Pops’s .308 rings across the airport. The delay makes the division of labor palpable: Pops must reach cover and establish a shot, while Hig has no choice but to trust that he is still alive and acting.

Pops then opens the FBO’s back door and waves Hig over, patting the air to signal that he can take his time. The gesture reverses the tension of the exposed crossing: Hig had been left waiting for news, but Pops’s calm welcome makes clear that the immediate danger has been handled. Inside, Pops explains why he could shoot from there. The tower’s windows are bulletproof, but its gunports create an opening; once inside the building, he had time to set up his shot. The episode reveals not only his marksmanship but his capacity to read the structure of a threat and find a way around it. Hig’s questions and Pops’s explanation turn a hazardous operation into an exchange of practical knowledge.

From Tactical Trust to Shared Territory

The alliance continues beyond the airport firefight. As Pops grows less tense, Hig takes him up in The Beast and flies a circuit, finding him a headset and explaining the view. He points out the tower, the river, distances, the high cutbank that serves as a moat, the only decent ford, and the berm. He also describes the thirty-mile radius they need to clear of roads and the families in the area. The tour is more than a change of scenery: Hig makes the defensive landscape legible to Pops, sharing the information by which he understands their position and responsibilities.

Their flight also brings Pops into view of the wider community. When they pass over the families, people run out from gardens, houses, and sheds to wave; children jump up and down. Hig counts seven children, notices that one is missing, and cannot tell which one. The uncertainty interrupts the welcome without erasing it. With Pops beside him, Hig witnesses both the community’s response and the losses it cannot fully account for. Their partnership thus extends beyond surviving a single armed encounter: they share the work of seeing, mapping, and responding to the fragile human world around them.

A Chosen Family

The novel’s ending describes Hig, Cima, Bangley, and Pops as having formed a kind of family. This is not evidence of a conventional family structure; it names a bond assembled among people whose survival has made cooperation essential. Hig and Pops’s specific contribution to that group is visible in the movement from the airport scene, where one man must trust the other to act, to the flight, where Hig deliberately shares his knowledge and company.

That family remains within an unsettled future. The ending holds renewed growth in the spruce and aspen and flourishing eagles and hawks beside the disappearance of trout and elk, dwindling water, and mysterious jets overhead. The account does not settle what comes next for the group. Against that uncertainty, Hig and Pops’s alliance matters as a practiced form of belonging: built through attention, competence, and shared risk rather than certainty that the world around them will become safe.