Moises lives the life of an idiot—idiot in the old sense. Idiot, as in someone who is unable to participate in a world outside of himself. His parents are partially to blame, Juárez being the closest thing he has to a father. Speaking of a mother, well, there is no one to speak of.

When he was a pup he drank from a woman whose face and name he did not remember, and who died soon after he was weaned. These accumulations of bleak and petty tragedies form the strata to his life; the ground there will never be excavated and examined and interpreted through measured, kinder eyes. Like the moon, any footsteps upon it will remain there until the end of time.

Back in the present, he paces back and forth, working his jaws and worrying an old deer's femur to pieces. Dark flakes of marrow together with foamy saliva collect at the corners of his mouth.

This is how he spends most of his interminable days. No rich internal world keeps him occupied. Inside his head is polar night, a bloated darkness, demarcated only by manmade convention.