Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Brian Garfield Hunting Accident

When I arrived in the office Tuesday morning Cord’s wife was waiting for me. She didn’t rise from the chair. I’d heard the news on the car radio and her grief didn’t surprise me but it was mitigated by anger: she was in a rage.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cord. I just heard.”

Her lips kept working and she blinked at me but she held her tongue; perhaps she was afraid of what might come out. Her natural appearance was drab but normally she managed attractive contrivances. This morning there was no makeup. She sat with her shoulders rolled forward and her arms folded as if she had a severe abdominal pain. Now she snarled — a visible exposing of teeth — and afterward she remembered herself, tried an apologetic smile, gathered herself with an obvious effort of will. Her wrath had rendered her quite inarticulate.

I tried to help. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. I didn’t expect—”

“I want you to help me, Bill. I want you to go up there.”

Her voice had lost its customary music; it was like a smoker’s morning voice — a deep hangover baritone. I stood at my desk unwilling to sit down. “Up where?”

“That place in Colorado. Whatever it’s called.”

“You’d like me to bring the body back? Of course.”

“Bill, I want you to find out who was responsible.” She spoke slowly with effort; the words fell from her with equal weight, like bricks. She said again, clenching a fist, “Responsible.”

“The radio said it was an accident.”

She watched me with her injured eyes. It rattled me. I said lamely, “My work’s industrial security, Mrs. Cord. You seem to be asking me to investigate a homicide. It’s a little out of my—”

“You don’t like — you didn’t like Charlie.”

“Mrs. Cord, I—”

“Never mind. I didn’t like him very much myself. But he was all I had.”

“You need rest,” I told her. I sat down behind the desk. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“He gave me a pill. I’ll take it when I go home. Bill, you’re the only one I trust to do this.”

What a sad thing for her to say, I thought. I hardly knew her. She was the wife — the widow — of an acquaintance who’d been an executive in a neighboring department; I hadn’t known Charlie Cord very well. She was right — I hadn’t liked him, and therefore I’d avoided him when I could. Yet she’d come to me. Hadn’t they any friends?

She looked down and saw her fist and unclenched it slowly, studying the fingers as if they were unfamiliar objects. She was waiting for me to speak; she almost cringed. I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me to do.”

“Bill, nobody here cares about Charlie. Good riddance — that’s what they’ll be thinking. You know the gossip of course.”

“Gossip?”

“Why Charlie married me. I’ve never been what you could call a glamour girl. But my father happens to be a director of the company with sixteen percent of the stock. When Charlie married me, he married sixteen percent of Schiefflin Aerospace and married himself into a forty-thousand-a-year job in the sales and marketing division. Charlie made his way well up in the world from the football team of a second-rate state university. That’s what most everybody thinks of Charlie. That’s all they ever think of him.”

“Mrs. Cord, you’re upset and that’s understandable, but—”

She went on, not allowing me to interrupt further. “He wasn’t likeable. He was a boor. He was a hearty backslapper, he was never sincere enough, he told outhouse jokes badly and too loudly. He affected garish jackets and ridiculous cars. He had a fetish for big-game hunting. But he did a good job for this company, Bill. People tend to ignore that — deliberately I’m sure, because no one likes to give credit to a person as obnoxious as Charlie. As Charlie was.” Then her voice cracked. “He made my life miserable. Intolerable. But he was all I had. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.” I tried to look reassuring.

“Bill, I want you to be the instrument of my revenge.”

“Revenge? Wait a minute now, Mrs. Cord.”

“He was mine and I was his.”

“But apparently it was simply an accident.”

“Accident? Maybe. He was shot twice.” She paused as if to challenge me to contradict her. Then she said, “I’ve talked to my father. The company will voucher your expenses. There’s a plane to Denver at half-past eleven.” She stood up. “Find out how he was killed. And why. And who did it.”

On the plane I reviewed what she’d told me about the death of Charlie Cord, what I’d already known, and what I’d learned from two brief phone calls to Colorado.

Six days ago Charlie had flown to Denver with his hunting gear, picked up a rental car at Stapleton Airport, and driven into the Rockies to a half-abandoned mining town called Quartz City. In Wild West days it had been a boom town; now it was a center for tourists and hunters.

Charlie had spent the night in a motel and in the morning by prearrangement he’d been picked up by a professional guide employed by Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd., a commercial hunting outfit. Charlie and the guide, a man named Sam Mallory, had set out into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive truck with provisions and gear enough for ten days. Four days later Mallory returned to Quartz City in the truck with Charlie Cord’s corpse in the back. Charlie had been dead, by then, about twenty-four hours.

According to the sheriff’s office, Charlie had been shot twice through the chest by a .30-’06 rifle. Sam Mallory, the guide, professed to know nothing about the event. His deposition, prepared for the pending coroner’s inquest, alleged that Mallory had been in the process of setting up camp on a new site to which they’d moved that morning; while Mallory was pitching the tents, he said, Charlie had taken his .303 rifle and climbed a nearby peak to reconnoiter and perhaps bag something for the supper pot.

About an hour after Charlie’s departure from camp, Mallory heard two rifle shots on the mountain. He thought little of it at the time, assuming Charlie had shot some game animal. When Charlie didn’t return within two hours, Mallory assumed Charlie had wounded the animal and gone after it, as any hunter must.

It wasn’t until late afternoon — six or seven hours after he’d heard the shots — that Mallory became alarmed. After all, he deposed, Mr. Cord was an experienced hunter and had a compass and canteen with him; there was no reason for concern earlier.

Mallory went up the mountain but darkness fell before he found anything. Through the night he kept the campfire banked high to give Charlie a homing beacon, but Charlie didn’t return and at dawn Mallory was back on the mountain tracking Charlie’s boot prints; and at about 8:30 in the morning Mallory found him lying where he’d been shot. Mallory had backpacked the body down to the truck and driven straight to the sheriff.

The sheriff was a towering thin man with weathered blue outdoor eyes and a thatch of black hair. He went by the name of Bob Wilkerson. He poured me a cup of strong coffee to take the chill out of the autumn afternoon.

“Afraid I never met your friend while he was alive. They tell me he was — well, kind of loud.”

He smiled to take the edge off it.

The coffee was old but hot. “Have you found the rifle that shot him?”

“No. It was an ’ought-six, of course. We recovered both slugs from the body.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“Unusual? No. Why?”

I said, “A powerful rifle like that, wouldn’t it tend to punch straight through a man and keep right on going? Or were they hollowpoints that explode on contact?”

He watched me gravely, then something like suspicion entered his face. “No, they weren’t hollowpoints. Jacketed slugs — military style. They didn’t expand hardly at all. But they were half spent by the time they hit him. That’s why they didn’t go on through.”

“In other words he was shot from a considerable distance.”

“Mr. Stoddard, you don’t rightly believe a hunter could mistake a man for a buck deer at close range, do you?”

“Is that how it happened, then, Sheriff?”

“That’s what it looked like to me. He was shot from a range of four hundred yards or better and it was an uphill trajectory. Fighting gravity and all, those slugs weren’t going too fast when they hit him.”

“Both bullets hit him in the chest?”

“Not more than three inches apart. One of them penetrated his heart.”

“That’s extraordinary shooting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Or lucky shooting.”

“Two shots within three inches of each other at four hundred yards, uphill?”

Wilkerson’s shoulders stirred as if to dismiss it. “Let me lay it out for you, Mr. Stoddard. I just got back here an hour ago myself — spent the day up on that mountain with Sam Mallory. I expect you’ll want to talk to him.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Surely. Anyhow, we went over the ground up there again. It’s pret’ near up to timberline, that area. Scrub trees, a lot of rocks, talus slopes, bare ground in patches here and there. You can pick up a track if you know what to look for but it ain’t easy.”

“And you found the killer’s tracks?”

“Yes, sir.” He refilled my cup and set the electric coffee pot back on the window sill. With his gangly frame and sharp Adam’s apple he looked boyish, but he had to be at least forty. He went on, “The way Sam and I pieced it together, there was some fellow lower down over on the opposite slope, facing the mountain that your friend climbed over. This fellow, whoever he was — well, you’ve got to figure if he’s up there with an ’ought-six rifle, then he’s doing the same thing there that Mr. Cord’s doing. Hunting. So this hunter looks across and sees Mr. Cord moving through the scrub oaks up there and he thinks it’s got to be a deer or maybe an elk or an antelope or a bighorn sheep. Whatever he figures, he takes aim and he lets go two shots.”

“What was Charlie wearing?”

“Buff-colored hunting coat. Bright red cap. We’ve got to assume the hunter didn’t see the cap.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“After he fires the two shots, the fellow goes down one mountain and up the other to find out what he shot and whether it’s dead.”

“You managed to follow his tracks, then?”

“Yes, sir, we saw where he’d come across the canyon there. We saw where he came up to look at Mr. Cord’s body. He sat himself down a while there. Probably shocked to realize he’d killed a man.”

“And then the hunter just walked away?”

“Right back the way he came. We tracked him back to the point where he’d done the shooting from. Used a forked tree for a rifle rest. We found that.”

“Where did the tracks go from there?”

“Into a shale slope. Nothing but loose rocks. Acres of them. No way to track the man through there.” Wilkerson poured his own coffee, lifted it to blow on it, and watched me over the rim of the cup. “The way I size it up, Mr. Stoddard, this hunter discovered he’d killed a human being by mistake and he sat there all gloomy-like, trying to think. And after a while I expect he must have said to himself. ‘Now this here poor man is dead and that’s my own stupid fault for sure, but there ain’t a thing I can do for him now. If I was to take this body-down and admit I was the one that shot him, why the sheriff just naturally he’d put me in jail and I’d go on trial for manslaughter or some damn thing and I could spend the next five years of my life in prison on account of this stupid accident.’ ”

Wilkerson put his cup down. “You see how it could have been.”

“Yes.”

“But this Mr. Cord was a valuable man to the big company you work for. I guess they want more evidence than my guesswork. So they’ve sent you up here to look around.”

“I don’t want to step on your toes,” I said. “I’ve got no official authority. But Charlie’s widow and his father-in-law and the company I work for — yes, they’d like as many answers as we can find.”

“I’m happy to help out however I can. But I doubt we’ll find much. It ain’t the first time we’ve had this kind of accident with hunters in these mountains and I expect it won’t be the last.”

“Does it happen often?”

“Sometimes five, six men get injured or killed up there in a single hunting season. We get crowded with hunters up there, you know. Some of them are city people that don’t know half as much as they think they know. Just last year we had three Milwaukee men in a party up in those canyons back of Goat Peak, all three of them were found dead at the end of the season. Two of them had been shot with each other’s rifles and the third one got shot by some ’ought-six. Wasn’t much my office here could do about it except file the reports and notify the next of kin. As long as the law allows men to go banging around mountains without so much as a hunting-license test to find out if they can recognize the difference between a human being and a cow, you’re going to have accidents...”

When I left Wilkerson’s office I drove the rent-a-car around to the buildings that housed Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd. They were weathered barns and sheds; there was a corral with a few horses and a mule. A terse old man in the tackroom told me Sam Mallory had left for the day. The place smelled of leather and manure. The old man gestured with a spade-bit bridle when he directed me to Mallory’s house.

I felt as though I were going uselessly through the motions. But I owed it, I supposed, to that sad angry lost woman who’d come to my office and I owed it to Schiefflin Aerospace. The company had lived up to the moral stereotypes that are honored more often by empty lip service: Schiefflin had recovered me from a psychic gutter, reformed a tattered soul, brought me back to a life that seemed worth something after all.

It was a pleasant old frame house on a shady street behind a row of saloons and shops that had been restored for the tourist trade. Sam Mallory surprised me: I must have expected to find a rustic old-timer. He had a broad freckled young face and soft kindly gray eyes and blond hair tied back with an Apache-style headband. He was probably in his late twenties, no more. He had a leggy young wife with a quick intelligent smile; she excused herself to go back through the house toward the wail of a baby.

Mallory knew who I was; obviously Sheriff Wilkerson had briefed him. He offered me a drink and we sat in the front room surrounded by magazines and bookshelves and a few paintings. The only outdoorsman touch was a tall rifle rack in one corner. It held five rifles: they were locked in place with a chain.

He told me a number of things I already knew but I wanted his version. He’d been with Wilkerson when they’d tracked the killer across the canyon. “We didn’t find his empties. But then a lot of hunters pick up their brass. Anyhow the sheriff tells me the slugs were fired by an old Springfield. First World War type.”

“When I was in the army,” I said, “they still issued those to rifle competition teams. It was a hell of an accurate weapon.”

“I never saw one in the service myself. We all had M-14’s.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

He nodded.

“What outfit?”

“Why? Were you over there?”

“In the C.I.D., yes.” I smiled as if to apologize.

“Not a very popular outfit,” Sam Mallory observed. “I was just a grunt myself.” Then he grinned and put on a hillbilly twang: “Never had much truck with you hifalutin criminal-investigation types.” He sounded uncannily like Wilkerson when he did that.

“I didn’t like the work much,” I confessed.

“Then why are you still doing it?”

I said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”

He gave me an up-from-under look as if to catch me off guard. “You seem awfully low-key. Do you do it well?”

“Usually.”

“What have you found out so far?”

“Need to know, Sam?”

“No, I’m just curious. What can you possibly have learned from me, for instance?”

I glanced toward his rifle rack. “For one thing you haven’t got a Springfield .30-’06 over there.”

“You’re acting as though it’s a murder case. As if I’m a suspect.”

“Everybody is,” I said. “What did you think of Charlie Cord?”

“Obnoxious.” He didn’t hesitate.

“That’s the word most people use.”

“Well, he liked to kill. You know?”

“You’re a hunters’ guide. You must see that all the time.”

“Not really. I’m a hunter myself but I’m no killer. Not the way Cord was.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Sometimes I’ll track a brown bear through those peaks two-three days and finally we’ll stand face to face and I’ll aim my rifle at him, and that’s that. I hunt bears — to prove a point to myself, I guess — but I’ve never killed one.”

“You mean you don’t pull the trigger?”

“What would I do with a dead bear? I’m not a trophy collector and I don’t like the taste of bear meat.”

“But Charlie—?”

“He’d kill anything that moved. For fun.”

“You must get a lot of clients like him.”

“Not many. You’d be surprised. Most hunters have some dignity. And we’re still carnivores, aren’t we? Biologically there’s nothing dishonorable about that. You can’t condemn hunters if you eat meat yourself. But I’m talking about hunters. They eat what they kill. They make use of it. They don’t just kill it for the fun of killing and leave it there to rot. You want another drink?”

“Not especially, thanks. Tell me, Sam, why’d you take up this line of work?”

“I like to think of myself as a pioneer mountain-man type. It’s clean, you know. It keeps me outdoors.”

“Clean,” I said, “except when you have to go out with somebody like Charlie Cord.”

“Yeah.” He met my eyes and smiled. “Except then. Look, is this getting us anywhere?”

“Maybe. What was Charlie after? Specifically, what kind of game?”

“He said he wanted a bobcat and a mule deer buck.”

“But?”

“He kept asking me about Rocky Mountain Goats.”

“They’re a protected species, aren’t they?”

“What’s left of them, yes.”

“But he wanted one.”

“One or a dozen. I think if he’d seen any goats he’d have killed them, yes.”

“How was he with a rifle?”

“Good. Not spectacular, but good enough.”

“Is it customary for the guide to stay in camp while the client goes out hunting?”

“Some hunters want you right with them all the time. But it wasn’t unusual. He was just scouting around. He said he didn’t want to waste his time sitting around watching me set up tents.”

I unfolded my county map. “Show me where it happened.”

He put his finger on it. “About there.”

“Near Goat Peak.” I folded it and put it in my pocket. “Anybody live up in that area?”

“It’s National Forest. You can’t own property up there.”

“Sometimes you can lease it. Do you mind answering my questions?”

For the first time Mallory looked uncomfortable. It was subtle — I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been waiting for it. A knotted muscle rippled briefly along his jaw: that was all. He said, “There’s a sourdough who lives in a lean-to up there. Been searching for years — for the mother hide, I guess.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, Sam.”

He pretended to be thinking, exercising his memory. Then he snapped his fingers. “Collins, that’s it. Hugh Collins.”

“I don’t suppose he’s got a phone.”

Mallory laughed. “Up there?”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“What for?”

“He lives on Goat Peak. He may have seen someone.”

“I doubt it. He lives on the far side of the peak.”

“Can you take me up there? I’ll pay for it.”

“Waste of money.”

“I want to talk to him,” I said gently. “It’ll go a little faster if you’d be willing to guide me.”

“Suit yourself. We can leave in the morning.”

“Make it ten o’clock. I’ve got something to do first.”

You didn’t put two jacketed .30-caliber bullets into a space smaller than a handspan at 400 yards without knowing what you were doing. That was what had stirred up my suspicions at first; it had been followed by improbabilities and too many coincidences.

The town didn’t have a library or a newspaper. I had to get the information by phone from Denver. It took more than an hour and I was a few minutes late meeting Mallory. He had an old Dodge Power Wagon — four-wheel drive, winch, jerrycans, and canteens. A real wilderness rig. When I was a kid in the Southwest I’d known uranium prospectors who’d go out in Power Wagons and live out of them for months at a stretch and that was long before the fad for truck-mounted camper outfits.

We rolled out of town and Mallory put the truck up a steep dirt road through the pines. “Find out anything?” he asked.

I watched him while I spoke. “Seventeen hunters have died in this county in the past six years. Eleven of them in the vicinity of Goat Peak. Nine killed by .30-’06 bullets. Jacketed.”

“Not surprising. That’s what a lot of hunters carry. And Goat Peak’s where most of the hunters go to set up their base camps.” But he said it in a tight-lipped way.

I glanced at the carbine he had clipped to the inside of the door panel by his left knee. “What’s that, a .30-.30?”

“Right. Saddle gun. For varmints.”

“Tell me about Hugh Collins.”

“Nice old guy. A gentleman. You’ll see for yourself.”

I said, “You didn’t like it much in ’Nam, did you?”

“Did anybody?”

“Some did. We had to arrest some of them. The ones who learned to enjoy killing. Got so they’d kill anybody — our side or theirs or just neutral.”

“Fragging?”

“Those. And others. Some of them just got bloodthirsty. Psychotic. They couldn’t stop killing — didn’t want to.”

He said, “We had one of those in my outfit. One of the other guys fragged him — threw a grenade down his blankets while he was asleep. We never found out which guy did it but we figured he probably saved all our lives.” He glanced at me. “It wasn’t me.”

“No. You never got into that bag, did you?”

Mallory said, “Too scared. And in the end I suppose I developed a respect for life. No, I never got to liking war.”

“That wasn’t war,” I said.

“Shook you up, did it?”

“It was a long time before I got pulled back together. I had to have a lot of help.”

He gave me a quick look and his eyes went back to the steep rutted road. “Shrinks? Psychiatrists?”

“Yes. And friends,” I said. I opened up to him because it might inspire him to share confidences. “Mostly it was the interrogations that did it to me. The ones we arrested. The way they could talk about committing grisly murders — and laugh about it. I couldn’t take it after a while. It was too grotesque. Terrifying. The bizarre became the commonplace. One day I just started screaming, so they sent me home.”

“Rough,” Mallory remarked.

I watched his profile. “Charlie Cord like to frag animals, didn’t he, Sam?”

“You could put it that way,” he replied, giving nothing away.

“He didn’t have much respect for life.”

“Not for animal life, at any rate.” He turned the wheel with a powerful twist of his shoulders and we went bucking off the road up into a meadow that carried us across a rolling slope into a canyon. He put the Power Wagon into four-wheel drive and we whined up the dry gravel bed of the canyon floor. I was pitched heavily around and tried to brace myself in the seat.

It was past two o’clock when we reached Hugh Collins’ lean-to. It was a spartan camp. A coffee pot and a few utensils were near the dead ashes of the campfire — he’d built his fireplace out of rocks. A cased rifle stood propped inside the lean-to. A bedroll, two canteens, a waterproof pouch with several books in it. No one was in sight, but we left the truck there and Mallory led the way through the forest. He was following tracks, although I couldn’t discern them.

After a half-hour hike we heard the ring of a hammer against rock and presently we came upon the sourdough. He had a black beard peppered with gray; he wore coveralls and a plaid work shirt; he was short and built heavy through chest and shoulders. His eyes gleamed with an intelligence that seemed almost childishly innocent.

Mallory made introductions. “Mr. Stoddard’s investigating the death of Mr. Cord.”

“Who?”

“The hunter who got killed the other day over on the far side of the peak.”

We hunkered in the shade. Hugh Collins had been whacking away at a rock face with his pointed hammer. I said, “Finding any color?”

“You always find color. Enough for day wages. I pan out a few hundred dollars a month. You wanted to ask about this hunter?”

“Someone shot him. Looking at the map, I thought the man might have come from this direction. I wondered if you might have seen anyone that day.”

“What day was that exactly?”

“Sunday.”

“Nobody came through this way Sunday.”

“You didn’t hear a couple of shots that day, then?”

Collins laughed. He showed good teeth. “I hear shots all the time. This time of year these hills are alive with idiot hunters.”

An animal limped into sight and approached us hesitantly. It was a hardy-looking little creature; it had only three legs but it managed to hobble along with dignity and even grace.

Collins said, “All right now, Felicity,” and snapped his fingers and the delicate little creature came to him and nuzzled his hand. Its left foreleg appeared to have been amputated at the shoulder. Collins said, “Felicity’s a Rocky Mountain Goat. You don’t see many.”

“What happened to her leg?”

“That’s how we got together, Felicity and I. Seven years ago — she was a yearling — some idiot hunter blew her leg off and I came across her half dead up there on the peak. Bandaged her up, looked after her. She’s been with me ever since. Like the lion and Androcles.” He scratched the goat’s ears. After a moment she hopped away toward the woods. Collins looked up through the pines, evidently judging the angle of the sun. “You gentlemen hungry? Why don’t we walk back to my camp?”

He served up a meal of beans and fritters and greens that he must have harvested from the mountain slopes. “Sorry there’s no meat. I don’t keep any on hand. Don’t get many visitors.”

“Are you a vegetarian?”

“Going on seven years now.”

I said, “You don’t talk like a back-country hermit, Mr. Collins.”

“Well, I used to be on the faculty at the School of Mines down in Golden.” He had an engaging smile. “I’m mainly anti-social. I prefer it up here. Of all the animals I’ve met, I find man the least appealing.” The three-legged goat appeared and Collins fed it the last of his salad.

I’d seen the cased rifle when we’d arrived in camp; it was propped inside the lean-to. Now I walked to it and unzipped the leather case. I was sure before I opened it, but it needed confirmation. The old rifle shone with fresh oil — it was well cared for.

Collins and Mallory hadn’t stirred from their places by the fireplace. Collins said in a mild voice, “That’s a real old-timer, you know. Dates back to Black Jack Pershing’s war.”

“I know.” I watched Sam Mallory get up and walk toward the Power Wagon. When he opened the door I said, “Leave the carbine there, Sam,” and he looked at me — looked at the rifle I held and closed the truck door with stoic resignation. I said to Collins, “Funny that a vegetarian keeps a rifle around.”

“Varmints.” He met my gaze guilelessly.

Mallory returned to the fire and sat. I said, “If I had this rifle tested by the crime lab in Denver, do you suppose they’d identify it as the weapon that killed Charlie Cord?”

I looked at Hugh Collins and then at the three-legged goat. She was curled up by the old man’s side. I said, “What was he doing, Mr. Collins? Drawing a bead on Felicity here?”

“No. He was taking aim on a Bighorn Sheep. We’ve got a little flock of them up here. Seven or eight Bighorn Sheep. They’re the last survivors of a multitude.”

“How long do you expect to keep getting away with it?”

Sam Mallory said, “Sometimes you can’t go by that.”

I thought about the misery Charlie Cord had trailed around him. I remembered the face of the woman in my office and I looked at the half-asleep face of Felicity by Hugh Collins’ side. I had an image of Charlie and I remembered the passionate happy killers who’d appalled me, sent me screaming toward lunacy; and I saw the calm faces of Collins and Mallory.

I said to Mallory, “You’re a hunter who doesn’t like to kill. You had to have a reason to work for killers. It was to lead them into this old man’s trap, wasn’t it? How long have you two known each other?”

“Sam’s my nephew,” Hugh Collins said. “We didn’t see much of each other until he came back from Vietnam. That was his lesson — the way Felicity was mine.”

I said to Mallory, “But you still eat meat.”

“I’m his nephew and I’m his friend. I’m not his disciple.”

Collins said, “Sam never shot any of them. That was me. I’d stalk them and watch them and decide whether they were hunters or criminals.”

“Nine hunters in the past six years,” I said.

“Eleven. Killers, Mr. Stoddard.”

Mallory said, “I’ve guided hundreds of hunters through here.”

Collins said, “You want to mind that trigger. She goes off easy.”

I set the safety and put the rifle down against the lean-to and walked to the truck. I looked back at Mallory. “We’d better start back or it’ll get dark before we’re down off the mountain.”

Mallory got to his feet, bewildered. I said, “I’ll report that it was a hunting accident.”

Collins scratched Felicity’s chest and she pawed amiably at him with her one front hoof. Mallory came past me and opened the truck door. “You trust me next to this carbine?”

“Yes.”

“Because you want us to trust you?”

“That’s right,” I said. I went around and got in. When I shut the door Mallory started the engine. Collins appeared at the window.

He didn’t offer to reach in and shake my hand. But he smiled slightly. “If you change your mind, don’t go to Sheriff Wilkerson with what you know. It would put him in a dilemma.”

“I assumed he was in on it,” I said. “He had to be. Otherwise he’d have compared the ballistics on those various .30-’06 bullets over the years and it would be public knowledge that they were all killed by the same rifle.”

“All but two. Last year that was. I started shooting at one of them and the other two panicked and killed each other. Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

Mallory had the truck idling. He said, “I still can’t say I understand this.”

I said, “Let’s just say we’re fellow veterans of the same war.”