Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  “It’s a terrible disease called post-traumatic stress disorder. It has to do with the war he was in. He was in heavy fighting and many of his very close friends were killed. He was strong enough to put that behind him and build us a very fine and happy life. But sometimes there are things that just can’t be kept away. It’s like a little black dog has escaped from the secret part of his brain and come out. It barks, it bites, it attacks. His old wounds are hurting, but also his memory keeps recalling things he thought it had forgotten. He has trouble sleeping. He is angry all the time and doesn’t know why. He loves you very, very much, though. No matter what happens and how he acts, he loves you very much.”

  “I hope he’s all right.”

  “He will be. He needs our help, though, and he needs the help of a doctor or something. He’ll understand that eventually and get some help, and then he’ll be better again. But you know what a stubborn man he is.”

  The two rode on in silence.

  “I don’t like it when he yells at you. It scares me.”

  “He’s not really yelling at me, honey. He’s yelling at the men who killed his friends and the men who sent him over there to fight that war and then walked away from it. He’s yelling for all the poor boys who got killed and never came back to the lives they deserved and were forgotten.”

  “He loves you, Mommy.”

  “I know he does, honey. But sometimes that’s not enough.”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “I believe he will be, too. He needs our help, but he needs mostly to help himself, get some medication, find a way to take advantage of his very special skills and knowledge.”

  “I can ride Western. I don’t mind.”

  “I know. It’s not about that, really. It’s about how mad he is at things he can’t stop. We just have to love him and hope that he sees how important it is to get some help.”

  They were out of the trees. The high chaparral was desolate, rock strewn, clustered with primitive forms of vegetation. Ahead, in the shadow of the snowcaps, the cut in the earth between mountains that was called Widow’s Pass beckoned, and beyond it, after a course on a shelf of dirty rock and broken slope, a precipice from which could be seen as much beauty as has been put on earth. Julie loved it and so did Nikki. Bob loved it too. They rode here nearly every morning; it got the day off to a fine start.

  “Oh, here we go, baby. Be careful.”

  The track was tricky, and Julie was speaking more to herself than to her nimble daughter or to her daughter’s horse, the better athlete of the two animals.

  She felt the tension come into her; this was delicate work and she wished her husband were here. How had they ended up like this?

  Nikki laughed.

  When the noise came, it didn’t shock or surprise the sniper. He had waited in the dawn for targets before. He knew it had to come, sooner or later, and it did. It didn’t fill him with doubt or regret or anything. It simply meant: time to work.

  The noise was a peal of laughter, girlish and bright. It bounced off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high plain from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin air.

  The sniper wiggled his fingers, finding the warmth in them. His concentration cranked up a notch or so. He pulled the rifle to him in a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in practice or on missions.

  Its stock rose naturally to his cheek as he pulled it in, and as one hand flew to the comb, the other set up beneath the forearm, taking the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone below. He found the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief would be perfect and the circle of the scope would throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. He cocked one knee halfway up toward his torso to build a muscular tension into his position, as he had been trained to do.

  The child. The woman. The man.

  “Hey, there!”

  She turned at the voice to see her husband riding toward her and her heart soared.

  But then it subsided: it was not Bob Lee Swagger but the neighboring rancher, an older widower named Dade Fellows, another tan, tall, leathery coot, on a chestnut roan he controlled exquisitely.

  “Mr. Fellows!”

  “Hello, Mrs. Swagger. How’re you this morning?”

  “Well, we’re just fine.”

  “Hello there, honey.”

  “Hi, Dade,” said Nikki. Dade was an occasional hanger-on at the ranch, welcome for his knowledge of the area, his sure way with animals and guns.

  “Y’all haven’t seen a dogie or two up this way? My fence is down and I’m a little short. They’re so stupid, they might have come this way.”

  “No, it’s been completely quiet. We’re riding through the pass to see the sun come across the valley.”

  “That is a sight, isn’t it?”

  “Would you care to join us?”

  “Well, ma’am, I’ve got a full day and I’d like to find my baby cows. But, hell, why not? I ain’t seen the sun rise in quite a while. I’m up too early.”

  “You work too hard, Mr. Fellows. You should slow down.”

  “If I slow down, I might notice how old I got,” he laughed, “and what a shock that would be! Okay, there, Nikki, you lead the way. I’ll follow your mother.

  Nimble Nikki took her big chestnut along the climbing path, and it rose between the narrow canyon walls until they seemed to swallow her. Then she sunk into shadow where the pass was really deep. Julie was close behind, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her daughter break clear, into the light. At the end of the enfilade was a shelf of land that ran along the mountainside for half a mile, gently trending upward, and then it reached a vantage point on the far valley.

  Nikki laughed at the freedom she felt when she emerged, and in a second had freed her horse to find its own pace; it preferred speed and began to gallop. A fear rose in Julie’s heart; she could never catch the girl, nor stay up with her if she had to, and she felt the urge to call out, but suppressed it as pointless, for there was no stopping Nikki, a natural-born hero like her father. The eight-year-old galloped ahead, the horse’s bounding grace eating up the distance to the vantage point.

  Julie then came into the light and saw that, safely, Nikki had slowed to a walk as she neared the precipice. She turned back and called, “Come on, Mr. Fellows! You’ll miss it.”

  “I’m coming, ma’am,” he yelled back at her.

  She cantered ahead, feeling the rise of the mountains on either side but also the freedom of the open space ahead of her. Its beauty lightened her burden and the mountains looked down solemn and dignified and implacable. She approached Nikki, even as she heard Fellows coming up behind her, driving his horse a bit harder.

  “Look, Mommy!” Nikki cried, holding her horse tight between her strong thighs, leaning forward and pointing out.

  Here, there was no downslope beyond the edge, just sheer drop, which afforded a vista of the valley beyond, the ridge of mountains beyond that as the sun crested them. The valley was green and undulating, thatched with pines, yet also open enough to show off, sparkling in the new sun, its creeks and streams. Across the way there was a falls, a spume of white feathery water that cascaded down a far cliff. Under the cloudless sky and in the pale power of the not yet fully risen sun, it had a kind of storybook quality to it that was, even if you’d seen it a hundred-odd times, breathtaking.

  “Ain’t that something?” said Fellows. “That is the true West, the one they write about, yes, sir.”

  Swagger had aged, as all men do, even as the sniper himself had aged. But he was still lean and watchful and there was a rifle in the scabbard under his saddle. He looked dangerous, like a special man who would never panic, who would react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he was. His eyes darted about under the hood of his cowboy hat. He rode like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it unconsciously with his thighs while his ey
es scanned for signs of aggression.

  He would not see the sniper. The sniper was too far out, the hide too carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim’s eyes at this hour so that he’d see only dazzle and blur if he looked.

  The crosshairs rode up to Swagger, and stayed with the man as he galloped along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter’s finger caressed the trigger, felt absorbed by its beckoning softness, but he did not fire. He knew the range perfectly: 742 meters.

  Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up and down through a vertical plane. By no means an impossible shot, and many a man in his circumstances would have taken it. But experience told the sniper to wait: a better shot would lie ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that’s the one you took.

  Swagger joined his wife, and the two chatted, and what Swagger said made her smile. White teeth flashed. A little tiny human part in the sniper ached for the woman’s beauty and ease; he’d had prostitutes the world over, some quite expensive and beautiful, but this little moment of intimacy was something that had evaded him completely. That was all right. He had chosen to work in exile from humanity. Seven hundred thirty-one meters.

  He cursed himself. That’s how shots were blown, that little fragment of lost concentration which took you out of the operation. He briefly snapped his eyes shut, absorbed the darkness and cleared his mind, then opened them again to what lay before him.

  Swagger and his wife had reached the edge: 722 meters. Before them would run a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbed even higher. But what this meant to the sniper is that at last his quarry had ceased to move. In the scope he saw a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child’s horse was so big it put her up with her parents. They chatted, the girl laughed, pointed at a bird or something, seethed with motion. The mother stared into the distance. The father, his eyes still seeming watchful, relaxed just the tiniest bit.

  The crosshairs bisected the square chest.

  He stroked the trigger and the gun jarred and as it came back in a fraction of a second, he saw the tall man’s chest explode as the Remington 7mm Magnum tore through it.

  It was a moment of serene perfection, until she heard a sound that reminded her somehow of meat dropping on a linoleum floor—it had a flat, moist, dense reverberation to it, somehow—and at that same instant felt herself sprayed with warm jelly. She turned to see Dade’s gray face, his eyes lost and locked on nothingness as he fell backward off his horse. His chest had been somehow eviscerated, as with an ax, its organs exposed and spewing blood in torrents, his heart decompressing with a pulsing jet of deoxygenated, almost black liquid spurting in an arc over the precipice. He hit the ground, in a cloud of dust, landing with the solidity of a sack of potatoes falling off a truck as his horse panicked and bucked, hooves flailing in the air. As a nurse, from too many nights in a reservation ER, Julie was no stranger to blood or to what mysteries lay inside of bodies, but the transformation was so instantaneous that it shocked her, even as, from far off, the report of a rifle shot finally arrived.

  The sound seemed to unlock her brain from the paralysis into which it had blundered. She knew in the next nanosecond that they were under fire, and in the nanosecond after that her daughter was in danger, and she found the will to turn and yell “Run!” as loud as possible, and yanked hard to the left on her reins, driving her horse into Nikki’s to butt it about.

  My daughter, she thought. Don’t kill my daughter.

  But like hers, Nikki’s reflexes were fast and sure, and the girl had already reached the same conclusion, reeled her horse to the left, and in another second, both horses were free of the ruckus caused by Dade’s plunging animal.

  “Go!” shrieked Julie, kicking and lashing her horse with the reins. The animal churned ahead, its long legs bounding over the dirt toward the narrow enfilade of the pass. She was to the left of and a little behind Nikki, that is, between Nikki and the shooter, which is where she wanted to be.

  The horses thundered along, careering madly for safety, and Julie was bent over the neck of hers like a jockey, but she could not keep up with Nikki’s, which, a stronger animal with a much lighter load, began to gun away and ahead, exposing the child.

  “Nikki!” she screamed.

  Then the world went. It twisted into fragments, the sky was somehow beneath her, dust rose like a gas, thick and blinding, and she felt herself floating, her heart gathering fear for the knowledge of what would come next. The horse screamed piteously and she slammed into the ground, her head filling with stars, her will scattering in confusion. But as she slid through the dust and the pain, feeling her skin rip and something in her body shatter, and the horse scampered away, she looked to see that Nikki had halted and was circling around toward her.

  She rose, astounded that she could move through all the fire that was eating her skin, and had a moment when she noticed the blood pouring across her shirt. She staggered, went to one knee, but then rose again, and screamed at Nikki, “No! No! Run! Run!” waving her away desperately.

  The girl pulled up, confused, the fear bright on her face.

  “Run for Daddy!” Julie screamed, then turned herself and began to scramble for a ravine to the right, a copse of rough vegetation and tough little trees, hoping that the shooter would follow her and not the girl.

  Nikki watched her mother run toward the edge of the shelf, then turned herself, lashed the horse, felt it churn into a gallop. The dust of the slashing hooves floated everywhere, clotting her breathing, and the tears on her face matted up with it, but she stayed low and whipped the horse and whipped it again, and though it neighed in pain, whipped it still a third time, gouging it with her English boots, and in seconds, the dark shadows of the enfilade covered her and she knew she was safe.

  Then she heard a shot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  He fired and the sight picture at the moment of ignition—the stout, heroic chest quadrisected perfectly by the crosshairs zeroed exactly for a range of seven hundred meters—told him instantly that he had hit. As the scope came back, he saw red from the falling body, just a fraction of a second’s worth, but square in the full chest, until it was lost in the dust.

  Then he shifted to the woman but—

  He was astonished by the swiftness with which the woman responded. His whole shooting scenario was based on her utter paralysis when her husband’s chest exploded. She would be stupefied and the next shot would be easy.

  The woman reeled her horse about almost instantaneously and he was astounded at how much dust floated into the air. You cannot anticipate everything, and he had not anticipated the dust. He had no shot for almost a second, and then, faster than he could have begun to imagine, she and the child were racing hellbent and crazed toward the pass and safety.

  He had a momentary flash of panic—never before had such a thing happened!—and took his eye from the scope to get an unimpeded visual on the fleeing woman. She was much farther away than he had figured; the angle was oblique, dust floated in the air. Impossible shot! Only seconds remained as she and the girl raced toward the pass.

  He fought his terror, and instead let the rifle sit, and picked up his secret advantage in all this, a set of Leica binoculars with a laser range finder, since unknown distance shooting is almost pointless, and he put the glasses on her to see the readout as it shot back to him, straight and true. She was now 765 meters, now 770, racing away.

  His mind did the computations as he figured the lead, all while setting the binocs down and reacquiring the rifle, flipping through a bolt throw with the shell ejecting cleanly to the right. A lifetime’s experience and a gift for numbers told him he had to shoot a good nine meters ahead of her—no, no, it would be nine if she were preceding at an exact ninety degrees, but she was on the oblique, more like forty-five or fifty degrees, so he compensated to seven meters. A mil-
dot—that is, one of a series of dots etched into the crosshairs—in the scope, at this range, was about thirty inches, so when he went back to the rifle, he led her six mils and a mil high, that is, putting her just inside the edge of the solid part of the horizontal crosshair. Impossible shot! Incredible shot! Close to eight hundred meters on a fast-mover at the oblique away from him in heavy dust.

  The rifle jolted in recoil and came back to reveal a ruckus of disturbance. He could see nothing. The horse was down, then up, bucking and kicking in fury, dust floating in the air.

  He cycled the bolt again.

  Where was she? The child was forgotten but that was not important.

  He searched the dust, then put the rifle down and seized the binoculars, which would give him a much bigger field of vision.

  Where was she? Had he hit her? Was she about? Was she dead? Was it over? He waited for centuries, and without oxygen. But now, there she was, hit—he could see the blood on her blue shirt—and stiff with the pain of the fall. But she had not gone into shock, was not surrendering and, like many who discover themselves in mortal circumstances for the first time, giving up to lie and wait for the final blow. Heroically she moved away from the horse and the dust to the edge.

  Soft target. Giving herself up for the girl, who didn’t matter.

  She was at the edge.

  He put the binoculars squarely on her and had just a glimpse of her face, only the fleetest impression of her beauty. A melancholy closed upon him, but his heart was strong and hard and he put it away. He pressed a button to fire a spurt of smart laser at her and it bounced back and he looked to the readout and got a range of 795 meters, and knew he’d have to hold dead center of the first low vertical mil-dot.

  He set the binocs down, went back to the rifle and saw her at the edge, just standing there, daring him to concentrate on her while the daughter vanished into the shadows of the pass. The woman’s foolish courage sickened him. Her dead husband’s insane courage sickened him.

  Who were these people? What right did they have to such nobility of spirit? Why did they consider themselves so special? What gave them the right? He put the center of the first mil-dot below the horizontal crosshair on her.