I didn’t like the looks of it at all, but there wasn’t a helluva lot I could do at that point.
Then Stan raised his face, and it was all shiny and very flushed now. He slowly pulled his rifle forward and poked it out over the edge of the bank.
I suddenly was very cold.
Stan got himself squared away. There wasn’t any question about what he was aiming at.
“No, Stan!” It came out a croak. I don’t think anybody could have heard it more than five feet away from me. Helplessly I put my scope on McKlearey.
Stan’s shot kicked up dirt about two feet above Lou’s head. McKlearey dove for cover. Instinct, I guess.
I didn’t really consciously think about it. I just snapped off the safety, pointed my rifle in the general direction of the other side of the ravine and squeezed the trigger. The sound of my shot mingled and blurred in with the echo of Stan’s.
I saw the white blur of his face suddenly turned up toward me for a moment, and then he scrambled back into the brush.
McKlearey was burrowing down under his pile of limbs like a man trying to dig a foxhole with his teeth.
There was something moving on the other side of the ravine. It flickered palely through the bushes, headed down the ridge.
It was the white deer. Apparently the double echo was confusing hell out of it. It ran down past McKlearey and on down the ravine. A couple minutes later I heard several shots from the stands below. Jack and Cal were shooting.
I hoped that they’d missed. The poor white bastard was just an innocent bystander really. He had no business being on that other side just then.
I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold my rifle. I took several deep breaths and then slowly pulled back the bolt, flipping out the empty in a long, twinkling brass arc. It clinked on a rock and fell in the dirt. I closed the bolt, put the safety back on, and picked up the empty. Then I went back up to my rock and sat down.
23
“MAN!” Jack said when I got back down to camp, “the son of a bitch ran right through the whole damn bunch of us!”
“I shot at him five times!” Sloan gasped, his face red. “Five goddamn times and never touched a hair. I think the son of a bitch is a ghost, and we all shot right through ‘im.” He tried to giggle but wound up coughing and choking.
“You OK?” I asked him.
He tried to nod, still choking and gasping. It took him a minute or so to get settled down.
“Did you shoot, Dan?” Jack asked me.
“Once,” I said, taking out the empty cartridge case, “and I think Stan did too, didn’t you, Stan?”
He nodded, his face very pale.
“I got off three,” Jack said. He turned to Miller. “I thought you said they always ran uphill, Cap.”
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,” Miller said.
“Maybe one of us bit him,” Sloan gasped.
Miller shook his head. “He cut back on up over that far ridge when he got past you men. I expect all the shootin’ just kept pushin’ him on down. I don’t imagine he can see too good in broad daylight with them pink eyes of his.”
Lou didn’t say anything, but his eyes looked a little wild.
We ate lunch and then all of us kind of poked around looking for something to do until time to go back up again.
I wound up wandering down to the pond again. I stood watching the fish swim by and trying not to think about what had happened that morning.
“Why don’t you watch where the hell you’re shootin’?” It was McKlearey.
I looked at him for a moment. “I know where I was shooting, Lou,” I told him.
“Well, one of them damn shots just barely missed me,” he said. His hands were shaking.
“Must have been a ricochet,” I said.
“I ain’t all that sure,” he said. He squatted down by the water and began stripping off his bandage.
“I’ve got no reason to shoot you, Lou. I don’t have a wife.” I just let it hang there.
He looked at me for a long time, but he didn’t answer. Then he finished unwinding his hand. The gash in his palm was red and inflamed-looking, and the whole hand looked a little puffy.
“That’s getting infected,” I told him. “Clint’s got a first-aid kit. You’d better put something on it.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I been pourin’ whiskey in it.”
“Iodine’s cheaper,” I said, “and a helluva lot more dependable.”
He stuck the hand into the water, wincing at the chill.
“That’s not a good idea either,” I said.
“I know what I’m doin’,” he said shortly.
I shrugged. It was his hand, after all.
“Danny,” he said finally.
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t see who shot at me, did you?”
I didn’t really want to lie to him, but I was pretty sure Stan wouldn’t try it again. He’d looked too sick when we’d gotten back down. “Look, Lou,” I said, “with the scopes on all the rifles in camp, if somebody was trying to shoot you, he’d have nailed you to the cross with the first shot. If one came anywhere near you, it was more than likely just what I said — a ricochet.”
“Maybe —” he said doubtfully.
“You’re just jumpy,” I said. “All keyed up. Shit, look at the nightmares you’ve been having. Maybe you ought to go a little easy on the booze.
“That’s why I drink it,” he said, staring out across the beaver pond. “If I drink enough, I don’t dream at all. I’m OK then.”
I was about to ask him what was bothering him, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell me. Besides, it was none of my business.
We went back up to camp, and he went into his tent.
We went out at three thirty again, the same as we had the day before.
“I thought you wasn’t gonna shoot at that deer,” Miller said when we got up to the top.
I couldn’t very well tell him why I’d shot, and I didn’t want to lie to him. “I was just firing a warning shot,” I said. In a way it had been just that.
He looked at me for a minute but didn’t say anything. I’m not sure if he believed me.
None of us saw anything worth shooting that evening either, and we were all pretty quiet when we got back down.
“Come on, men,” Miller said, trying to cheer us up. “No point in gettin’ down in the mouth. It’s only a matter of time till you start gettin’ the big ones.”
“I know which one I’m gonna get,” Jack said. “I’m gonna bust that white bastard.”
“Not if I see ‘im first,” McKlearey said belligerently, nursing his hand.
They glared at each other.
“All right,” Jack said finally, “you remember that bet we got?”
“I remember,” Lou said.
“That deer is the one then.”
“That’s fine with me.”
“That wasn’t the bet,” I said flatly.
They both scowled at me.
“Dan’s right,” Sloan said, gasping heavily. “The original bet was best deer — Boone and Crockett points.” His voice sounded pretty wheezy again, but his tone was pretty firm.
“There’s still the side bet,” Stan said very quietly. I’d forgotten about that one.
McKlearey stared back and forth between the two of them. He looked like he was narrowing down his list of enemies. “All right,” he said very softly. It didn’t sound at all like him.
“I don’t want you men shootin’ at that deer when he’s up on top of no cliff or somethin’,” Miller said. “I seen a couple men after the same deer once — both of ’em so afraid the other was gonna get it that they weren’t even thinkin’ no more. One of ’em finally shot the deer right off the top of a four-hundred-foot bluff. Wasn’t enough left to make a ten-cent hamburger out of it by the time that deer quit bouncin’.”
“We’ll watch it,” Jack said, still staring at McKlearey.
Lou edged around until he had his back to a stump and could keep an eye on both Jack and Stan. His eyes had gone kind of flat and dead. He was sort of holding his bandaged hand up in the air so he wouldn’t bump it, and his right hand was in his lap, about six inches from the butt of that .38. He looked like he was wound pretty tight.
We tried talking, but things were pretty nervous.
After a while Stan got up and went back to the latrine. I waited a couple minutes then followed him. He was leaning against a tree when I found him.