Free Fire - C. J. Box [141]
There he is. I see the broad back of his coat clearly, as well as his blaze orange hat. He is sighting the elk though his rifle scope. He is hidden behind a stand of thick red buckbrush so the elk can’t see him. He’s been tracking the big bull since an hour before dawn through the meadow, up the slope, over the ridge. Those were his tracks I’d been following. He is crouched behind the brush, a dark green nylon daypack near his feet. He is fifty yards away.
I settle to the ground, wriggling my legs and groin so I am in full contact. The coldness of the ground seeps through my clothes and I can feel it steady me, comfort me, cool me down. I thumb the safety off my rifle and pull the hard, varnished stock against my cheek and lean into the scope with both eyes open.
The side of his face fills the scope, the cross-hairs on his graying temple. He still has the remains of what were once mutton-chop sideburns. His face and hands are older than I recall,wrinkled some, mottled with age-spots. The wedding band he once wore is no longer there, but I see where it has created a permanent trough in the skin around his finger. He is still big, tall, and wide. If he laughed I would see, once again, the oversizedteeth with the glint of gold crowns in the back of his mouth and the way his eyes narrowed into slits, as if he couldn’t look and laugh at the same time.
I keep the crosshairs on his temple. He seems to sense that something is wrong. His face twitches, and for a moment he sits back and looks to his right and left to see if he can see what, or who, is watching him. This has happened before with the others. They seem to know but at the same time they won’t concede. When he sits back, I lower the crosshairs to his heart. He never looks directly at me, so I don’t have to fire.
I wait until he apparently concludes that it was just a strange feeling, and leans forward into his scope again, waiting for the seven-point bull to turn just right so he offers a clean, full-body shot. My aim moves with him.
I raise the crosshairs from his heart to his neck just below his jawbone and squeeze the trigger.
There is a moment when a shot is fired by a high-powered hunting rifle when the view through the scope is nothing more than a flash of deep orange and the barrel kicks up. For that moment,you don’t know if you have hit what you were aiming at or what you will see when you look back down the rifle at your target.The gunpowder smell is sharp and pungent and the boom of the shot itself rockets through the timber and finally rolls back in echo form like a clap of thunder. There is the woofing and startledgrunt of a herd of elk as they panic as one and run toward the trees. The seven-by-seven is simply gone. From the blanket of trees, birds fly out like shooting sparks.
Here’s what I know:
I am a hunter, a bestower of dignity.
2
JOE PICKETT WAS STRANDED ON THE ROOF OF HIS new home. it was the first Saturday in October, and he was up there to fix dozens of T-Lock shingles that had blown loose during a seventy-five-mile-per-hour windstorm that had also knocked down most of his back fence and sandblasted the paint off his shutters. The windstorm had come rocketing down the eastern slope of the mountains during the middle of the night and hit town like an airborne tsunami, snapping off the branches of hoary cottonwoods onto power lines and rolling cattle semitrucks from the highway across the sagebrush flats like empty beer cans. For the past month since the night of the windstorm, the edges of loosened shingles flapped on the top of his house with a sound like a deck of playing cards being shuffled. Or that’s how his wife Marybeth described it since Joe had rarely been home to hear it and hadn’t had a day off to repair the damage since it happened. Until today.
He had awakened his sixteen-year-old daughter Sheridan, a sophomore at Saddlestring High, and asked her to hold the ricketywooden ladder steady while he ascended to the roof. It had bent