“This is going to be your hunt, but with you will be a team to ensure that your hunt is successful and safe.” He paused, and she decided that during the second’s delay he was studying her to be sure that she had heard and understood the words precisely as he had meant them. That was another hint, just a small indication that he was not a native English speaker, did not have the native speaker’s certainty that his words had been the right ones, spoken perfectly. They had been.
Parish turned to look away for the first time, and glanced at Emily Lyons. “Your tracker will be Emily. She will be doing precisely what it sounds like. She goes out ahead, and finds the target. When she has, she signals the party to come ahead. She stays on the scene, keeping him in sight.”
Marcia looked at Emily Lyons, who nodded and gave a quick, businesslike smile. She was about thirty and small, with dark, curly hair and very white skin, and a compact body that looked as though she had done some gymnastics when she was young. Her face was pretty, and it made Marcia feel jealous and defensive, and that made her feel stupid. She had tried to break herself of the habit of looking at other women that way. Was she engaged in a competition with Emily Lyons over Michael Parish, for Christ’s sake? Hardly. She nodded at Emily Lyons and turned back toward Parish in time to see him point at the other woman in the room.
“Mary will be your scout.”
This one was, if anything, a bit scarier to Marcia, because Mary O’Connor was attractive in the same way that Marcia was. She was tall, thin, and athletic looking, with long red hair that had gone to strawberry in highlights from the sun. Marcia forced herself to stop thinking about her and listen to Parish.
“But it all starts with the tracker. The tracker finds your target and immediately signals the main party. While the main group comes up, the tracker stays with the target. She’s prepared to move with him, to note exactly where he’s going. He remains her responsibility all the way through. If he smells trouble and bolts, she stays on his trail. If the client takes a shot but only wounds him and he keeps running, she stays after him and follows him to ground. She never loses sight of him, if she can avoid it. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Marcia.
“Good. Now, the main party comes up. Its purpose is to bring the hunter-that’s you-into close proximity to the target so you can get a clear, unimpeded shot that will result in a clean kill.”
“The main party? How many?”
“Usually it’s just a scout and a professional hunter. The scout on this hunt is Mary. She stays a bit apart to watch and handle any external factor on the scene that might interfere with the hunt. If the target seems to be in a good place for a shot-say, alone in the middle of a field-but then a group of picnickers comes along and gets in the way, she would have to handle that. The easiest way to think about it is that the tracker’s responsibility is the target, and the scout’s responsibility is the place: seeing and averting external problems. She’s a lookout.”
“What about the professional hunter?”
“This time that’s me,” said Parish. “My sole responsibility is the client, the amateur hunter. I stay with you at all times. I help you move into the best possible position. I provide you with the proper weapon, check all conditions with the tracker and the scout, get the all clear, and give you the go-ahead to fire.”
“I get it,” Marcia assured him. “The tracker shows up first, spots the target, then calls in the rest of us. The scout comes up separately, checks out the area, and the two of us come ahead together.”
“That’s right,” said Parish. “It takes a little patience. We give the tracker and the scout as long as it takes to find the target, assess the conditions, and signal us. Only when everything is right do we commit ourselves.”
She looked at him closely. “You’re not really just there to say go, are you?”
Parish returned her gaze for a moment. “No. The professional’s responsibility is the client, the person whose hunt this is. Sometimes the client will commit himself, then freeze. Sometimes the game doesn’t simply take the shot and die. Sometimes he runs, or even charges. The person any mammal will attack is the one he recognizes as a threat. It will not be the tracker or the scout, whom he’s already seen and discounted as innocuous. The client will not be used to that sort of thing, and may hesitate. At that point, the professional hunter must try to bring him down before he harms the client.” Parish smiled. “None of those things are what usually happens. But the system allows the hunting party the flexibility to handle all the likely problems-not the least, worrying about them-and it leaves the client free to concentrate all of her senses on the pure enjoyment of the experience.”
“It sounds very… effective,” said Marcia. She didn’t know whether that was the right thing to say, but it was all she could think of. She wanted him to know that she was smart enough to have understood, and that she would not be one of the ones who collapsed, who stepped out of cover and did not have the guts to fire, or did not have a steady enough hand to hit anything.
Parish went on. “That’s the basic hunting party. Under difficult conditions we might add people. Usually it would be extra scouts, but if there is a need for special equipment, we might lay on a bearer or two. The essentials are the same. The method has been widely used over a two-hundred-and-fifty-year period of big-game hunting in India and Africa, and has worked on a hundred species, with surprisingly minor variations. What that indicates, at least to me, is that it takes advantage of fundamental aspects of the nature of all consciousness that has been developed on this planet. It works both on the vulnerability of the prey to an attack that comes from multiple hunters, and a peculiar ability in predators-lionesses, wolves, humans-to hunt cooperatively. The prey is confused and disoriented, but the hunters are each made bolder, quicker, and steadier.”
Parish leaned back in his chair and the intensity left him. His body acquired the studied quiescence and ease that Marcia had noticed in the rest periods during the first month she had spent at the camp. At some periods of her life, she would have found his looks and his ways of moving and carrying himself intriguing. She knew that the relationship he had with the two women, Emily Lyons and Mary O’Connor, was, among other things, sexual. She did not have the patience to begin examining exactly why she knew that, and since she never intended to tell anyone, she did not bother to assemble proofs. She just knew it. At one time she would have vied to be the third. But not now. She had watched him all this time, thinking not that she wanted to be with him but that she wanted to be like him.
A second later she realized that this was exactly how the other two women had gotten here. They carried themselves in imitation of him, but a special kind, as a dancer is a mirror imitation of her partner: he steps back, she steps forward; he turns, she turns. The two women looked not at all like each other, but in motion they looked like his sisters. She did not feel jealous, and she did not want him. She wanted only to be the hunter he was for a time.
She gave in to an impulse. “When can we go? I’d like to do it as soon as possible.”