Wouldn’t be long now, not on a day like this, with the blue breaking out all over the sky and deer tracks peppering the woods. I leaned the rifle on the railing and opened the book of sonnets and poured a mouthful of Earl Grey onto my tongue—nothing like that first bite of sun on your face in the cold weather. But I had other matters on my mind, drawings and lines of statistics, ordinance and such.
A book I once read said that war snipers in northern climates wore white for camouflage. This was a detail I remembered before leaving the cabin this morning, when I wrapped the barrel of the Lee Enfield in a white blanket to keep it warm and the gun invisible against the snowy bark of the tree. That’s why when I was up in the tree I also covered myself partly with the same blanket, the eyes cut out so I could see. From a distance the stand would appear unoccupied.
I took the Aldis telescopic sight from the leather carrying case and attached it to the mount. The curious thing about many of the telescopic sights used with the Enflields in World War One was that they were attached left of the bore, forcing the shooter to aim with his left eye or move his cheek off the stock to sight with the right, losing the tight wedge against the rifle necessary for a steady aim.
I swept the field, moving the range drum on the sight, and saw how the sight seemed to gather the available light and create a luminous halo around objects. Now to make a range card, the way my father taught me, to help me judge distance before a shot and allow for elevation and bullet drop. I set an index card against my knee and drew expanding circles radiating from my position, four circles, each representing a distance of one hundred yards. Then I marked a tree that stood approximately half way between the first and second circle and added a simple drawing of the electricity pole that stood twenty yards on my side of the third circle.
With that done, I threw a piece of the card in the air and watched it fall to get a sense for wind speed, the windage, though you can never tell with gusts, and today was a day for sudden blows, but on this day they would all blow from left to right.
Some live their lives in preparation. A time comes when what’s left to do is wait.
I sat still and rested my eyes as much as I could. If a time came when I had to aim, the eyes can quickly tire and must be rested. After a short while, an hour at most, I observed a shape walk with a rifle slung over the shoulder, skirting the line of the woods across the field, a distance of four hundred and fifty yards. I brought the rifle up and sighted him.
In 1914 the Germans discovered that the best place to aim at a human body was the teeth, a miss six inches up or down still gives you a mortal shot; and if aiming for the area between the head and waist, you have two feet down by one foot across to hit and should try for the middle.
The man moved out of the tree line and into the field. I took my gloves off and bunched them against the stock and leaned my cheek against them to wedge the gun into my shoulder. I closed my left eye and opened my right in the sight, found him, zeroed up half an inch for distance and made a best guess for wind, aiming off a bit to the left, and took a deep breath, letting it out and pulling the trigger, and the man in the sights stopped and spun half way around and fell on his back.
I kept an eye on the shape that was now lying in the field.
The biggest mistake a sniper makes, and usually the last, is to check on his shot, to get up and stare, to come to the window, the ledge. The novice can’t resist looking out the window or peeking above the wall to confirm a kill. Which is what the other side wants, because they have a number of rifles pointed at that window or that wall and will wait for two or three hours for the split second when the face appears up for a view, and that half second is all they need to shoot a bullet into that face. So after the report died away into the white wasteland I froze and kept the rifle parallel for a full five minutes, using my knee as support and opening my right eye occasionally to check on the shape in the snow. Most of those five minutes I sat with my eyes closed, bunched up on the stand.
The shape did not pick itself up and walk away, and from every side came nothing but silence and wind brushing snow along the tops of the trees. The least I could do was approach and ask about Hobbes, so I packed up and walked across the field, past the tree and the pole. It was a long way to the man declined in the snow. After a hundred yards I noted that he was lying by a pool, after two hundred a red pool, and after three hundred a red pool from his head. At four hundred yards from the tree where I sat and aimed the shot, I stood beside him, the drawing of Hobbes in my hand, but there would be no questions today. If this were the shooter of a dog, he brought that to his grave. He had spun out of his left boot when shot, but how I could not figure, unless he had not laced it up properly.
I pulled his license out of his wallet: he was local, one of them alright, the Fort Kent crowd spreading out after me. That was good then, to bring them farther out here, the wrong way. And everywhere now I sensed them closing in. I dragged him inside the treeline and flopped him down scooped some dead leaves and branches over him. At the edge of the woods was best, with all the brush and tangled brush. He would be okay here. I noticed a car drive by, then another, and thought it best not to stay in the area. I could depend on most people not noticing what was immediately in front of them, but you never know. There’s always one.
At the last moment I said anyway: Did you shoot my dog? Do you know I shot you? The shot caught you unawares, you declined like the others, and that’s your blood disponging.
Then I said, Did you write on that poster? Was that your hand?
He said nothing, at least the bits of him I could see through the dressing of undergrowth I put across his body, so I wasn’t entirely addressing him then. If he were the writer, he was not going to write anything again: if I put up a new poster and it wasn’t written on, I might have got my man. If he were in Fort Kent to write on a poster, then he might as easily have gone anywhere hunting, including around the cabin. It was advisable for that reason to have spread the net like this to catch him. And he came with a fancy rifle, a Browning Gold model, very expensive, very clean, polished like a boudoir mirror, one of those guns from the magazine. He must have read the advertisements too.
Possibly it was the caliber that knocked his boot off, or him out of it.
My father once sat me in front of him, a .303 cartridge held in his hand to the light, long as a finger it was, and it looked as if he had six fingers, I said.
This is not a finger, Julius, he said. It spins through the rifle bore and travels at over 2,500 feet a second. It penetrates the bones and veins and muscle like wet cucumber. Some Germans we shot in Holland at a hundred yards, we found them later cracked and broken, as a good part of the body sometimes won’t stay intact against one of these.
You mean this bullet blows people up, I said.
That is essentially what it does, he said.
On the drive back from St. Agatha I saw more police cars at one end of Fort Kent’s main street stopping drivers, asking questions, searching trunks, but only those leaving town. I parked behind the supermarket, close to three o’clock, put the weapon and other items behind the seat, and tacked the new poster on the wall in the usual place using a blue nail someone left sticking in the noticeboard, this time a 4x5 inch index card, the same size as my range card: DOG SHOT, Information to J. Winsome, P.O. Box 271, Fort Kent.