The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [183]
I still had a ways to go to reach the glen of the waterfall, when I saw the horse. It was the man’s horse, but he was not in the saddle, and the horse was just standing there, not tied. Suddenly I stopped, thinking the man was bound to be near. My heart was already pounding in my ears from my run; now it was pounding harder from fright. I raised my rifle and held it ready to use. I crooked my finger around the trigger. But I did not squeeze it. That I am sure of.
And I am almost sure that the rifle wasn’t loaded. It was a cheap single-shot .22, and I don’t recall putting another bullet in it after I killed that squirrel. But I would ask myself, in the hours and days following: was it at all possible that in my excitement and distraction I did reload, and then when I tripped on that root and the rifle left my hand, it hit the ground and fired itself? Could that be? I had slammed into the ground so hard that I might not have heard the rifle go off. Could it, by sheer chance, have landed in that pile of leaves pointed so that its bullet, accidentally discharging, would find its way through hundreds of yards of thick woods and hit a man in the back of the head?
Because he had been hit in the back of the head. It was, Doc Swain declared later, a .22 bullet. It had been fired not from the Smith & Wesson revolver that Viridis possessed but from a .22 rifle such as the one I carried.
There have been a few times in my long life when I was not at all certain just what was happening to me, or what I was doing, but unless, as I conjectured, my rifle shot itself off after flying out of my hands, that bullet was not fired from my rifle. I know this!
And yet there he was. I found him near his horse, lying face up, already dead, I knew. I wouldn’t touch him, I just looked at him.
And then I spoke to his dead body the kind of thing a murderess might have said: “Well, Sull Jerram, you won’t never hurt another soul.”
On
You didn’t do that.”
She had not ridden Rosabone all the way into the glen of the waterfall, and thus she did not know if Nail had finally come nor if the contents of the cavern had been touched. When she heard the rifle fire, she pulled back on Rosabone’s reins and waited, listening, for a long scary moment, then turned back in the direction of the sound without even knowing who had fired the rifle. She had not ridden very far back when she came upon the strange scene: a dead man lying on the ground beside his horse, a girl standing over him with a rifle. “You didn’t do that,” she said to the girl.
“Uh-uh, I sure didn’t,” I said to her.
Viridis jumped down from Rosabone’s back and peered closely at the face of Sull Jerram, the eyes squeezed tightly shut as if in pain, the mouth clenched, an ugly face making its last grimace. She had to turn the face to one side, gingerly, to find the bullet hole: just behind the right ear at the base of the skull. I don’t see how a .22 bullet fired from such a distance could have penetrated the head of such a thick-skulled man. But it did. Except that at that moment I didn’t know it was a .22 bullet. And he was as dead as you are allowed to get in this world. Viridis put her ear against his chest and listened for a heartbeat but shook her head. She felt for his pulse but found none. “He’s dead,” she told me, as if I needed to be told.
“He was following you,” I told her, as if I knew something she didn’t.
“And you were following him?” she asked, and then pointed to my rifle. “Could I see that?”
I handed her my rifle. She examined it, sniffed it, looked into the chamber, where a spent cartridge lay. “I killed