PART THREE

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

It had to be the Indian, the ponytail a dead giveaway even at half a mile. The Indian was pausing at the trail junction. He was in the shade of trees, only his red headband visible. Then the Indian turned up the trail toward the saddle, into the sunlight. The watcher waited until the man had hiked out of sight and then he set down the binoculars. His hand went automatically to the dog, his fingers worrying the fur.

Unlike the hiker he’d seen on Sunday and could not be sure he recognized, the Indian he’d seen before. It had been on Monday, the second morning of his arrangement with the simian man, the man having failed to show on the first day. The watcher had been overlooking the trail when a party of hikers appeared below him. The Indian was accompanied by another man and two women, one with a dog at her heel and the other appearing to wear some sort of uniform. There had been an air of authority about the group that gave the watcher concern. Now, only three days later, a member of that party was again coming up the trail.

The watcher ran his tongue over his cracked lips. He sucked at his mustache. Had he dropped or left something on the bench, a cartridge case, maybe the butt of one his handrolled cigarettes? He knew he’d dropped a cartridge case last summer when the Mexican had fired and missed and he had run to keep abreast of him and, running, had tried to finger a spent cartridge case out of the breech of the big double rifle and dropped it. He’d fumbled in a loaded cartridge and fired as the man crossed a break in the trees, the man stumbling at the shot. The watcher had followed the blood trail into the lodgepoles to the lee of a big rock where the Mexican was sitting down, blowing a bubble of blood out of his mouth. The man had looked at him with unfocused eyes, one long rattling exhalation collapsed his chest, and then the chest heaved to breathe and the breath caught and the Mexican’s eyes swam out of his head, and when the last, long, gurgling exhalation followed, he was already dead. The Mexican had been dying for ten minutes until the watcher walked up on him and was holding a Spanish-language Bible open in his right hand, a crimson ribbon folded into the crease between the pages.

For a long minute the watcher experienced a remorse so deeply felt that he could not draw breath. Finally he had gulped air like a man surfacing from a cliff dive. Shuddering gasps escaped him and he sobbed, not wiping at the tears. “What have I done?” he said aloud. He sat rocking back and forth with the Mexican’s head in his lap, cleaning off his mouth and stroking his hair with his callused palm. Then he took off his boot and sock to put his big right toe into the trigger guard of the rifle. For minutes he’d sat with the twin barrels pressed to his temple. But crying had emptied him of the resolve to press the five ounces of resistance that would trip the right-hand sear.

Back at home, he dug the Mexican’s Bible out of his saddlebag and opened it to the crimson ribbon. Job 1:21 was underlined in blue bottle ink. Being unable to read Spanish, he set the book down and found the King James version on his bedstand.

Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

“I’ll be,” he muttered aloud, for it was a passage he’d read many times, first thinking that the mother was the literal mother and then with the understanding that “mother” referred to the lifeblood of Earth. It was the end he intended for himself, to be buried back into the mountain breast. But the Mexican had missed his shot and he hadn’t, it was that simple. It was the next morning before he realized he had left an empty cartridge shell somewhere on the bench. He’d gone back but had been unable to find it.

It had seemed to matter, and then as the summer passed it hadn’t, and now, a year later . . . well, almost nothing mattered now. The disease was flexing its muscles, playing with the power of its grip. It had advanced to the point where seeing the Indian caused no more than a flicker of concern. It would not interfere with his arrangement if, in fact, there was still a chance of death with honor. But the simian man had not come on the appointed day, nor the second, nor the third, nor now the day after that. The watcher glanced around where his grandfather’s buffalo gun leaned against a tree trunk. Beyond it rose a wisp of smoke from the ashes of his cooking fire, and in the dappled shade of the pines, his horse with one leg up dozed. He shook his head.

“We’ve got enough beans for one more day, girl,” the watcher said, and his hand jumped on the dog’s neck.