rippling under the buck’s hide, the white crescent as his eye rolled, the old wound on the
nearest doe’s foreleg, where the fur had never grown back. She had a moment to wish
Eddie and Jake were lying on either side of her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what
she was seeing, and then that was gone, too.
I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
“I kill with my heart,” she murmured, and began shooting.
The first bullet took the lead buck in the head and he crashed over on his left side. The
others ran past him. A doe leaped over his body and Susannah’s second bullet took her at
the height of her leap, so that she crashed down dead on the other side, one leg splayed and
broken, all grace gone.
She heard Roland fire three times, but didn’t look to see how he’d done; she had her own
business to attend to, and she attended to it well. Each of the last four bullets in the cylinder took down a deer, and only one was still moving when he fell. It didn’t occur to her that this was an amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger, after all,
and shooting was her business.
Besides, the morning was windless.
Half the herd now lay dead in the grassy valley below. All the remainder save one wheeled
left and pelted away downslope toward the stream. A moment later they were lost in a
screen of willows. The last one, a yearling buck, ran directly toward her. Susannah didn’t
bother trying to reload from the little pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of
buckskin but took one of the ’Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding the dull
gripping-place.
“ ’Riza!”she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing buck at mid-neck. Droplets of
blood flew in a garland around its head, black against the white sky. A butcher’s cleaver
could not have done a neater job. For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless,
blood jetting from the stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats.
Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red.
The previous night’s long misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands
and her feet. There was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder
and blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world’s sweetest perfume.
Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms, Roland’s pistol clenched in
her right hand, and made aY against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it,
nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.
Four
Roland had insisted that they eat a huge breakfast, and her protests that cold corned beef
tasted like so much lumpy mush cut zero ice with him. By two that afternoon according to
his fancy-schmancy pocket-watch—right around the time the steady cold rain fattened into
an icy drizzle, in other words—she was glad. She had never done a harder day of physical
labor, and the day wasn’t finished. Roland was by her all the while, matching her in spite of his worsening cough. She had time (during their brief but crazily delicious noon meal of
seared deer-steaks) to consider how strange he was, how remarkable. After all this time and
all these adventures, she had still not seen the bottom of him. Not even close. She had seen
him laughing and crying, killing and dancing, she’d seen him sleeping and on the squat
behind a screen of bushes with his pants down and his ass hung over what he called the Log
of Ease. She’d never slept with him as a woman does with a man, but she thought she’d
seen him in every other circumstance, and…no. Still no bottom.
“That cough’s sounding more and more like pneumonia to me,” Susannah remarked, not
long after the rain had started. They were then in the part of the day’s activities Roland
called aven-car: carrying the kill and preparing to make it into something else.
“Never let it worry you,” Roland said. “I have what I need here to cure it.”
“Say true?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yar. And these, which I never lost.” He reached into his pocket and showed her a handful
of aspirin tablets. She thought the expression on his face was one of real reverence, and
why not? It might be that he owed his life to what he calledastin. Astin andcheflet .
They loaded their kill into the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and dragged it down to the
stream. It took three trips in all. After they’d stacked the carcasses, Roland carefully placed the head of the yearling buck atop the pile, where it looked at them from its glazed eyes.
“What you want that for?” Susannah asked, with a trace of Detta in her voice.
“We’re going to need all the brains we can get,” Roland said, and coughed dryly into his
curled fist again. “It’s a dirty way to do the job, but it’s quick, and it works.”
Five
When they had their kill piled beside the icy stream (“At least we don’t have the flies to worry about,” Roland said), the gunslinger began gathering deadwood. Susannah looked
forward to the fire, but her terrible need of the previous night had departed. She had been
working hard, and for the time being, at least, was warm enough to suit her. She tried to
remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept into her bones, turning them to
glass, and couldn’t do it. Because the body had a way of forgetting the worst things, she
supposed, and without the body’s cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded
snapshots.
Before beginning his wood-gathering chore, Roland inspected the bank of the icy stream
and dug out a piece of rock. He handed it to her, and Susannah rubbed a thumb over its
milky, water-smoothed surface. “Quartz?” she asked, but she didn’t think it was. Not quite.
“I don’t know that word, Susannah. We call it chert. It makes tools that are primitive but
plenty useful: axe-heads, knives, skewers, scrapers. It’s scrapers we’ll want. Also at least
one hand-hammer.”
“I know what we’re going to scrape, but what are we going to hammer?”
“I’ll show you, but first will you join me here for a moment?” Roland got down on his
knees and took her cold hand in one of his. Together they faced the deer’s head.
“We thank you for what we are about to receive,” Roland told the head, and Susannah
shivered. It was exactly how her father began when he was giving the grace before a big
meal, one where all the family was gathered.
Our own family is broken,she thought, but did not say; done was done. The response she
gave was the one she had been taught as a young girl: “Father, we thank thee.”
“Guide our hands and guide our hearts as we take life from death,” Roland said. Then he
looked at her, eyebrows raised, asking without speaking a word if she had more to say.
Susannah found that she did. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallow’d be Thy name. Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses, as
we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil;
Thou art the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, now and forever.”
“That’s a lovely prayer,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I didn’t say it just right—it’s been a long time—but it’s still the best
prayer. Now let’s do our business, while I can still feel my hands.”
Roland gave her an amen.
Six
Roland took the severed head of the yearling deer (the antler-nubs made lifting it easy), set it in front of him, then swung the fist-sized chunk of rock against the skull. There was a
muffled cracking sound that made Susannah’s stomach cringe. Roland gripped the antlers
and pulled, first left and then right. When Susannah saw the way the broken skull wiggled
under the hide, her stomach did more than cringe; it did a slow loop-the-loop.
Roland hit twice more, wielding the piece of chert with near-surgical precision. Then he
used his knife to cut a circle in the head-hide, which he pulled off like a cap. This revealed the cracked skull beneath. He worked the blade of his knife into the widest crack and used