advanced another step, the cat spun away from me and dashed along the
moon-silvered path, vanishing into the darkness.
Elsewhere in the night, the Hummer was on the move again.
Its shriek and snarl rapidly grew louder.
I picked up my pace.
By the time I had gone a hundred yards, the Hummer was no longer
roaring but idling somewhere nearby, its engine noise like a slow deep
panting.
Overhead, the predatory gaze of the lights swept the night for prey.
Upon reaching the next branching of the hollow, I discovered the cat
waiting for me. It sat at the point of division, committed to neither
trail.
When I moved toward the left-hand path, the cat scurried to the
right.
It halted after several steps-and turned its lantern eyes on me.
The cat must have been acutely aware of the searchers all around us,
not just of the noisy Hummer but of the men on foot.
With its sharp senses, it might even perceive pheromones of aggression
streaming from them, violence pending. It would want to avoid these
people as much as I did. Given the chance, I would be better off
choosing an escape route according to the animal’s instincts rather
than according to my own.
The idling engine of the Hummer suddenly thundered. The hard peals
echoed back and forth through the hollows, so that the vehicle seemed
to be simultaneously approaching and racing away.
With this storm of sound, indecision flooded me, and for a moment I
floundered in it.
Then I decided to go the way of the cat.
As I turned from the left-hand trail, the Hummer roared over the
hilltop on the eastern flank of the hollow into which I had almost
proceeded.
For an instant it hung, suspended, as though weightless in a
clock-stopped gap in time, headlights like twin wires leading a circus
tightrope walker into midair, one searchlight stabbing straight up at
the black tent of the sky. Time snapped across that empty synapse and
flowed again: The Hummer tipped forward, and the front wheels crashed
onto the hillside, and the rear wheels crossed the crest, and gouts of
earth and grass spewed out from under its tires as it charged
downhill.
A man whooped with delight, and another laughed. They were reveling in
the hunt.
As the big wagon descended only fifty yards ahead of me, the hand-held
searchlight swept the hollow.
I threw myself to the ground and rolled for cover. The rocky swale was
hell on bones, and I felt my sunglasses crack apart in my shirt
pocket.
As I scrambled to my feet, a beam as bright as an oak-cleaving
thunderbolt sizzled across the ground on which I had been standing.
Wincing at the glare, squinting, I saw the searchlight quiver and then
sweep away to the south. The Hummer was not coming up the hollow
toward me.
I might have stayed where I was, at the intersection of the trails,
with the narrower point of the hill at my back, until the Hummer moved
out of the vicinity, rather than risk encountering it in the next
hollow. When four flashlights winked far back on the trail that I had
followed to this point, however, I ceased to have the luxury of
hesitation. I was beyond the reach of these men’s lights, but they
were approaching at a trot, and I was in imminent danger of
discovery.
When I rounded the point of the hill and ente red the hollow to the
west of it, the cat was still there, as though waiting for me.
Presenting its tail to me, it scampered away, though not so fast that I
lost sight of it.
I was grateful for the stone under me, in which I could not leave
betraying footprints-and then I realized that only fragments of my
broken sunglasses remained in my shirt pocket. As I ran, I fingered my
pocket and felt one bent stem and a jagged piece of one lens. The rest
must have scattered on the ground where I had fallen, at the fork in
the trail.
The four searchers were sure to spot the broken frames. They would
divide their forces, two men to each hollow, and they would come after