petering out in shallow, rain-scoured gullies. The wild turkeys and white-tailed deer native to the land had been overhunted to relative scarcity, but enough were still about and free enough for the taking to make the odds for a one-day hunt favorable.
A mile down the bumpy road, Ainesley slowed the truck and turned it onto a nearly invisible logging track. He inched it along for fifty yards before stopping. Then he opened the door on his side and climbed out. Hawked, spit, and hitched up his pants.
"Looks good," he said to the boys. "We'll get something today. But we got a lot of work to do. Now get your asses moving."
He let the boys out the other side, and, directing his gaze up the logging path, he intoned the venerable adage of the outdoorsman.
"Don't see anything yet, but they're there. The woods are empty only if you're a lousy hunter."
"I got to pee," said Junior.
"Me too," said Raphael.
Ainesley nodded assent. He lit a cigarette and leaned against a fender of his truck, waiting as the boys walked a few yards into the bush to relieve themselves. When they returned, Ainesley tossed the still-burning cigarette to the side of the trail and walked to the rear of the truck. He untied a tarpaulin there and pulled out a break-action, breech-loading shotgun. It looked old enough to be a family heirloom.
"Now, you guys, the first thing you've got to learn is how to handle your weapon safely."
Raphael only half heard. He was watching Ainesley's cigarette. When the dead oak leaves around it mercifully failed to catch fire, he turned his attention back to his father.
"First, we break the barrel like this and check it out. Come over here and see how clean and oiled I got everything after the last time I used it."
To Raff, who held back, he said, "Son, what the hell's the matter with you? Git over here with Junior and take a look."
The boys bent forward and peeked down through the breech. Raff glanced back and forth over the trigger casing, trying to figure out where the bullets were.
"Okay, next we load."
Ainesley reached into a pocket of his yellow waterproofed hunter's jacket and pulled out two cylindrical shells of number 5 lead shot. He pointed them up in the air for the boys to see and fed them into the barrel heads. He intoned, "Then we close the barrels," and clicked them shut. He aimed the gun away from the boys and turned it slowly to the right in a semicircle, as he would leading a turkey passing in front.
"Allrightee! We're set to fire. It's as easy as that. One, two, three, bang, dead turkey."
Raff didn't think it would be that easy, and with each passing moment he was getting more anxious about the whole thing.
Ainesley cradled the gun under his right arm, with the barrels pointed downward and slightly in front of his feet. He started down the trail, and without looking back continued his lecture to the boys. They double-timed to catch up.
"Always carry a shotgun like I'm doin' it now. That way if you stumble and fall, or you're accidentally bumped by somebody, you don't shoot him or blow your own damn fool head off."
He paused, then added, "Remember this too, and it's real important. Watch every step you take."
The party proceeded several hundred yards down the path, which soon became hemmed in by dense second-growth pine and oak. After a while they came to a shallow wash partly covered by wire grass and dotted with rotting pine stumps. Two bobwhite quail exploded out from behind one of the stumps and flew away through the trees on the opposite side.
"You don't see much of them anymore," Ainesley said. "Ever since they started protecting coyotes and chicken hawks and other vermin such as that, a bobwhite's most likely to get gobbled up before it even gets out of the nest."
Crows could be faintly heard calling from treetops a mile away. High above them a turkey vulture circled, its wings rigid and unmoving, the terminal feathers curved upward. The air in the clearing was still and dry. The heat of the sun bounced back up from the patches of hard bare soil, and the air around them was still and uncomfortably hot.
Ainesley turned to Junior and handed him the shotgun sideways, so the boy could take it with his hands held well apart.
"That's good, that's the way, so you won't slip and drop it. Next, you shoot