Yes, I did count two rifles. The other must have been off hiding or tracking another animal. I waited for another couple of minutes and then eased up the safety and gently pulled the bolt, and then I looked up to aim as I raised the rifle, and I saw the man’s gun pointed at me, and he looked panicked. I stepped to the left as his finger pulled the trigger, that same instant, and the bullet smacked the bark of the tree at my right ear, scoured a foot of bark that shredded itself onto my shoulder and into my eye. He should not miss the second time, not at this range, even in a panic. I moved back to the right and brought the rifle up. I breathed in and he shot again, and some god-awful fire ran the skin of my left shoulder; I aimed with my good eye and breathed out and pulled the trigger, and his head cracked around the hole and he fell like carrots from a torn bag, dead a long time before he hit the ground.
I pulled back the bolt handle and checked the wound: superficial, nothing that would bleed much. My father had taught me well. Never hurry a shot. This man could have had me if he had waited a tenth of a second. He may have been expecting me: his shooting might have been bait to draw me out. But that was brave of him to stand out like that and shoot in an orange top. And why kill the deer? But why kill a dog? And foolish of him in the end, surely, though you don’t want to be mocking the dead.
It was a good thing I didn’t budge, because a truck ripped through the saplings and tore the foliage as it made for me, a big half-ton with blue paneling and tinted glass. A pump gun hung out the driver’s side window and sprayed shot pellets with the first report, and the second sound I focused on was the driver sliding the pump action. Must have been turning the steering wheel with his knees, most likely. I ducked as the shot sliced the undergrowth around my feet and a hot knife stabbed my knee.
I slowed the truck down in my mind: he was six, seven seconds from me, and if I ran he would drive over me within a few steps, there were so few large trees in this spot. I remembered the position of the grille and tracked the trajectory by its chrome, brought the rifle up and aimed three feet and seventy degrees from the front corner and fired. The cartridge splintered the windshield a hand wide and entered his right eyebrow. His head flicked to his left and he stared out the window as the truck locked in a circle and slammed against a tree, trying to mount it as the tires spun.
I did not move, a frozen man in his white blanket. I would not make that mistake twice. The engine of the truck ran high: the driver’s foot must have jammed against the pedal. The woods were so quiet, the truck so loud. As if another person beside me performed the action, the bolt slid and another round went into the firing chamber.
I had three bullets to my name.
I stayed low and watched, breathing the relief. I was lucky with the speed of reloading: the bolt handle on a Lee Enfield is set back behind the trigger, which makes chambering smooth and fast, twelve shots a minute. My grandfather said that when the Germans first faced the British infantry lines equipped with Enfields, they thought they were under machine gun fire. The bolt action, the engineering of the thing, had saved me.
I decided to check the truck, now that both men were down, and placed the rifle on the snow and moved to the passenger side window, the white blanket covering my head. He was still alive, and I recognized him. It was Pascal, the complaining man from outside the supermarket, the one with the gun, the law and order man. By way of comfort I said something to him from Hunt magazine, something a hunter would understand:
I honor your sacred spirit, and the firstling too, your friend. But I had to take you.
I’ll kill you, he whispered, and slumped like a man snoozing. I must have seemed like a ghost to him, a spirit come to take him away. Some men won’t go quietly.
They say you glimpse the bullet that will kill you. I am sure I saw this one. It came from his side of the truck, through his side window, passed in front of his face and along my right temple and whipped the saplings behind me like a spit.
A third man.
43
THE SNIPE IS A SHOREBIRD, A FAST WADER IN MARSH ground with a long, slender bill that sews for insects and such. When it sees you it crouches until the last moment and then bursts out of the grass, flying crookedly, an impossible dart through the air. A long time ago some men were fast enough with a rifle to put an aim on one and shoot it out of the sky. Those men went sniping.
Sniper. The word drifted across the trenches in 1914 and became a soldier’s word: a hidden man who made people disappear one at a time, a man who knew camouflage and wore the countryside on top of him, whether crouched or crawling, selecting a position, or observing the stir of a hand at a hundred yards and putting a shot through it. If captured he could expect little other than be executed like a spy, because his uniform was the invisible, because his eye looked along the sight and made entire platoons take cover, because he killed people’s friends. There must be something missing in him, an empathy gone or never there to begin with, so he receives none in return.
These days, from what I’d heard recently, anyone who lifted a rifle was called a sniper, when most likely it was just an angry man or a cruel boy with a powerful weapon on a clock tower or in a bush along the highway, shooting innocents because they happened to be there. Sniper: the very word is quickly said, but the best of them are slow, patient, deliberate men. I had heard that word on the open street in town the day before, heard discussion of a possible shooter who had lately killed some hunters, for what else could have happened to these men, gone off and left their families? No such thing. And when I went for groceries, the word was that they were definitely missing, these men, and it was clear to me that the people in the supermarket were giving themselves up completely to rumors and talk of rumors. The authorities were searching now, but that is the nature of hunting, that shots are fired in the wilderness. Anyway, I knew myself as no sharpshooter, lacking the training and true patience required. They must have been discussing another individual, though it is true that I was involved in a few incidents recently.
They say it takes an unbalanced mind to hold a rifle that steady. But my father said the English sniper who gave my grandfather the Pattern 14 Enfield was a happy man who said he was glad to see the end of the fighting and wanted to spend the rest of his life in a small country town with a church spire and the tinkle of bells in the evening, the rustle of sheep and the warm smell of the sea in summer. Of this reputed imbalance in the heads or minds of marksmen my father said little, other than that the best sniper is passionate and cold at the same time, awkward up close, best at a distance.
That sounded like balance. I hoped this third man was not of that kind. If so I was breathing the last of this life into me already.
44
I THOUGHT I SAW A FACE AT TWO HUNDRED YARDS, AND I ran from the truck to my rifle and dove to the ground, hooking the Enfield in my left hand and sliding to a halt while holding the blanket above me with my right, to cover my hair.
To my right I heard the truck still trying to straddle the tree—that noise could be my undoing—no way to track the sniper, to gauge his shooting. That blasted truck. The trigger of the rifle was five inches forward of my hand. No, this was the thing, not to move. I lay under the blanket and breathed face down, deep and slow. A shot punched the snow a yard to my left, another then two yards to the right, judging by the shiver and puff. He was trying pot luck. Good: he could not see me. That meant he didn’t have a telescopic sight or wasn’t willing to sacrifice his wide but poor view for a better one and possible exposure. He should have. Another shot, this one inches from my skull. Maybe he did see me but aimed poorly.