"See, Dad?" asked Valerie, turning to her father. " That's why I studied English."
"It's all clear to me now."
"Dad lobbied heavily for engineering or maybe a pre-med program, but how could I let all those good books go unread?"
"And now that you've read your Shakespeare and Joyce," said Titisi, "you can think about doing something to help your country, your world."
"I've got vet school applications out."
"Overcrowded and competitive," said Randell. "Much less than a 3.85 and you're out of the running. I know because my son tried."
"I got a four-o, about two million assisting hours, and two field champion springers bred, trained and handled."
Vann Holt loved the way a young person could say the most self-aggrandizing things without sounding that way at all.
"I don't think I can help my country," Valerie continued, "but I could help some sick animals. Though here I am, going out to kill little innocent birdies and eat them for dinner. Maybe I should go into poultry ranching, more in keeping with my carnivorous lifestyle."
"Maybe you should help me run Liberty Operations," said Holt. This was an old refrain, but he had seen her interest rise in the last year. In fact, he was already luring her into the world of private security and privatized law enforcement with an odd job here and there.
Titisi and Randell laughed, and Valerie grinned at her father. Fargo looked back with his usual dour face, one thick black eyebrow raised like a gust of wind was about to blow it off.
"Have you shot quail in California?" she asked the Ugandan.
"Never."
"There's nothing like it," she said. "Although I'm sure the lions you took in the plains were pretty exciting."
Titisi looked at her a little uncertainly, not sure if this young
California brat was chiding him for shooting large cats for "sport"-though he had only done it once-or approving the primal ritual of a young Ugandan killing a lion.
"Oh, I did take one, once. Do you disapprove?"
"Yes," said Valerie. "I don't think I could kill unless I was going to eat. But I'm American and you're African, so a difference of opinion is pretty likely. I wouldn't tell a Honduran to leave his rainforest in place either, though personally I'd rather have the forest than a mahogany coffee table. Plus, we don't have lions here, so I can't be tempted. They are pure magnificence though-at least in parks."
"Miss Holt, they are more magnificent than you can imagine, running free on the Ugandan plains. And consider that then is a certain significance-for some peoples, at least-in killing an animal that could easily kill you."
Valerie went quiet. Her father watched her deep chocolate colored eyes, exactly the color of her mother's. Her hair too those pale golden curls so undisciplined and joyful-pure Carolyn, he thought. Carolyn.
"Well, the quail aren't bad either, and they barbecue up real nice!" said Valerie.
She and Titisi smiled at each other.
Holt, for the thousandth time, was proud of his daughter' uncommon common sense. "It would please her father immensely if she would take over the reigns of Liberty Operation when he goes to the happy hunting grounds."
"Oh, Dad," she said. "You're going to live to be ninety and we both know it."
She climbed over him and squeezed her way to the rear of the copter, where the dogs stood bracing their front paws on the kennel screen, tails blurred at Valerie's arrival.
Two hours later they were near the Anza Valley meadow that Holt had hunted for the last thirty years. The morning was cool, no breeze. The short golden grasses of the meadow stretched across five hundred rolling acres punctuated by clump of red manzanita, dark oak and sprawling green ghettos of prickly pear cactus. Around the perimeter of the meadow stood the old-growth manzanita and madrone, twenty feet high and to dense for anything but a determined dog to get through. Here, at nearly 4,000 feet and far from any city, the air was clean and the colors and shapes of the flora were unambiguous and rich as paint.
Holt's white Land Rover bounced along a winding dirt trail and came to a stop amidst the high cover of the meadow's edge. Holt told everyone not to slam the doors, then got out. Another rig, red and driven by Lane Fargo, followed just a few yards behind. Holt had already briefed his party on how they would hunt this morning: park the trucks on the west perimeter of the field, drop down into the low grass where the quail should be feeding this time of day, push them outward into the meadow, try to keep them from getting to the far side, where the deep cover would make them impossible to hunt.
The party spread out and formed a loose front-thirty yards between each of them-to work the field. Holt and Sally, his ten-year old bitch, took the far right end. Next came Randell, then Titisi, around whom Holt was feeling slightly unsafe because he had never hunted with the Ugandan before. To Titisi's left, thirty yards down, came Valerie, with Lewis and Clark, just ten months old. They were already working out in front of her, cutting left and right, scrambling back within shotgun range with every sharp chirp of Valerie's whistle. Lane Fargo had the far left end, putting at least forty confident yards between himself and Valerie.
Holt had organized his party like this not only to spread out the dogs and share them, but because he liked to watch his daughter without her knowing. He fell back just a little so he could see her. There she was, just eighty or ninety yards away, taking long deliberate steps through the grass, a tall, healthy woman, with her khakis tucked into her boots, a 20 gauge side-by-side cradled in her arms, a whistle between her lips and the red cycler's cap stuffed down over her pale bouncing curls. She stopped, canted an ear toward a big patch of cactus in front of her and called the dogs over and to the right. Holt never knew when it might hit him, but sometimes, all it took was a look at Valerie to send his heart into a sweet, swelling tumble of sadness and joy. The joy came from beholding her life, her spirit, her being. The sadness came from beholding the fact that she was practically all he had left, all that would outlive him, at any rate, so long as nothing happened to her. And always on the edge of Holt's consciousness was the blip, the reminder, that in the world today, anything can happen. Anything. At moments like that, when his heart was pounding hard with the alternating current of joy and dread, he wanted to hold her tight to his chest; he wanted to surround her with an invisible shield impermeable by any form of harm; he wanted to lock her away and preserve her forever.
None of those thoughts came to Vann Holt as he stepped quietly through the low grass and watched Sally work a ground patch. Instead, next to the pride he felt watching Valerie, what he felt most strongly now was his focused anticipation of the birds that would soon be rising. He could hear them, chirping alarmedly out there in front of Sally. He could feel the perfect balance of the Remington in his hands. He noticed the heightened perception of his eyes, though he knew that they were failing him. Even his sense of smell was acute now, the astringent perfume of sagebrush and desert scrub, the dankly human odor of the gourds, passing straight up through his nostrils and into his brain. Like nothing else in the world, hunting made Vann Holt feel alive.
Then, the ground before him seemed to bunch and gather and the air above it exploded with dark shapes as the covey rose with the wooden knock of wings. Holt's heart jumped into his throat, the same way it had for the three decades he'd hunted here, no diminishment of the rush at all, a charge of purest adrenaline streaking through his body. There were ninety of them, he guessed, bringing up the gun and flicking off the safety. He picked out a large male and shot it, then another, then another. Sally jumped to the first bird while Holt stood and watched the cove bend away in front of him and toward the others, fingering three more shells into his magazine without having to look at then getting them pointed in the right direction by feeling for the brass base. Shotguns popped to his left now, as the birds accelerate across the meadow. He saw Titisi blasting away into the cove hitting nothing. Then Randell picked up a single as the birds sped toward Valerie. Holt watched her drop two, then saw her loyal little springers-Lewis and Clark-nosing their way toward the first bird. God, she's great! On the far side, Lane Fargo shot double at about sixty yards. When Holt stepped toward his dog, two stragglers came up, wings whirring, necks straining, together. He shot the male first, then rode out the hen and knocked her down just as she started her turn. He stood, marking the falls and sliding two new shells into his gun. Sally dropped the first bird at his feet, pivoted and bolted back toward the second.