could not get up. Its left wing hung low, obviously broken. He had struck the bird's shoulder. Its legs quivered slightly, seemingly paralyzed.
Raff was faced with an unpleasant dilemma. If he took the bird home and tried to nurse it back to health, his parents would see it and know he'd been lying about the rifle. If he just left it on the ground, it would suffer before it died, maybe taking a long time. There was only one solution: kill it, put it out of its misery.
Raff lay the bird down and fished out a National Park Service notebook from his hip pocket. He made a rough sketch of the bird and wrote down the color: deep yellow with blue-gray wings. Then he brought the muzzle of the air gun to within six inches of the eye of the bird and pulled the trigger. He glanced down and saw that its head was thrown back. Its body was still. Without touching it he turned abruptly and walked away, mounted his bicycle, and rode home.
Back in his room, Raff thumbed through his field guide and found a perfect match for the fallen bird: male prothonotary warbler. He had brought down a prothonotary warbler, and while it was looking at him, while it was singing. Raphael Semmes Cody, big-time hunter, had bagged a prothonotary warbler.
By supper that evening, the excitement of stalking and shooting a bird had died completely. It was replaced with shame. Struggling with that emotion, he had a revelation. With his little gun he had taken power over Nokobee. It had been so easy. Now, suppose, he thought, he had a better weapon, say a .22 rifle; he knew boys only a little older than himself who did. With it he could kill birds easily, shoot anything at all he wished out of the trees. He could roam the woodland back and forth until he hunted down almost all the birds and everything else that moved. Any person could do that, any boy could kill part or the whole of it.
Then it came to Raff with sickening clarity that Nokobee was not at all the edge of an infinite nature he envisioned as a younger child. It was just a tract of land that could be walked from one end to the other in an hour. The Nokobee he loved was a fragile entity, and today he had thoughtlessly disturbed its grace and beauty.
14
AS MUCH AS RAFF loved the creatures of Nokobee, none of his fellow citizens there loved him back. All of the birds, lizards, and mammals were frightened by even his most cautious approach. They either moved along to keep their distance or else they tensed, ready to run or fly to safety in a split second. Except for an occasional snake or turtle rendered torpid by a winter chill, or a frog hiding among waterweeds, he found it almost impossible to stalk and touch an animal of any kind. Surely they would be pleased to see this giant intruder fall down dead. And if he did perish at Nokobee, a dozen kinds of scavengers would come to fight over his body, rendering it down to the last fragments of flesh and skin, until only the skeleton was left, and that too would in time be strewn about by scavengers and covered in humus by rivulets of the unfeeling rain.
Nokobee was nevertheless perfectly safe for people. Well, almost perfectly safe. You could walk the length and breadth of the tract for days or weeks, step anywhere, come close to any object that caught your eye, and suffer no ill consequence. Statistically, however, if you came back enough times and stayed cumulatively long enough, and if you were consistently careless to boot, then in a flash, and likely for some mundane reason, Nokobee could cripple or kill you.
One day, when he was fifteen years old, a few weeks after his trip with Junior Cody down the Chicobee, Raphael Semmes Cody learned this harsh lesson of cumulative probability. While taking one of his frequent hikes around the lake, he saw an unusual animal submerged in shallow water a foot from the shore. It appeared to be a medium-sized frog with a dark cross-shaped pattern on its back. This was the kind of discovery Raff was primed to make. Totally focused, he stepped close and slowly extended a hand to seize what now was certainly an animal of an unfamiliar kind. At the last moment he was surprised to