voice, saw the change in her manner, and responded. Cloud stood and shook, surrounding herself for a moment in a nimbus of fine white hairs. Peter heaved himself to his feet, his hand on Cloud's shoulder. He tucked his thumbs behind the waist band of his shorts, then paused. "Would you mind?" he asked, gesturing at her shoulder bag with his chin.
Vicki sighed, suddenly feeling old. The distance between thirty-one and seventeen stretched far wider than the distance between thirty-one and four hundred and fifty. "I assume your nose tells you it's still safe?"
"Cross my heart and bite my tail."
"Then give them here," she said, holding out her hand.
He grinned, stripped them off, and tossed them to her. Peter stretched, then Storm stretched, then he and Cloud bounded back toward the house.
Vicki watched until they leapt the closer of the two fences, stuffed Peter's shorts in her bag, and turned toward the woods. The underbrush appeared to reach up to meet the treetops reaching down, every leaf hanging still and sullen in the August heat. Who knew what was in there? She sure as hell didn't.
At the edge of the field she stopped, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and pushed forward into the wilderness. Somehow, she doubted this was going to be fun.
Barry Wu blinked a drop of sweat from his eye, squinted through his front sights, and brought the barrel of his .30-06 Springfield down a millimeter.
Normally, he preferred to shoot at good old-fashioned targets set at the greatest distance accuracy would allow but he'd just finished loading a number of low velocity rounds - the kind that reacted ballistically at one hundred yards the way a normal round would react at five - and he wanted to try them out. He'd been reloading his own cartridges since he was about fourteen, but lately he'd been getting into more exotic varieties and these were the first of this type he'd attempted.
A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the grizzly waited, scaled in the same five to one ratio as the rounds he planned to put into it.
The bullet slammed into the target with a satisfyingly solid sound and Barry felt a little of the tension drain from his neck and shoulders as the grizzly went down. He worked the bolt, expelling the spent cartridge and moving the next round into the chamber. Shooting had always calmed him. When it was good, and lately it always was, he and the rifle became part of a single unit, one the extension of the other. All the petty grievances of his life could be shot away with a simple pull of the trigger.
All right, not all, he conceded as the moose and the mountain sheep fell in quick succession. I'm going to have to do something about Colin Heerkens. The trust necessary for them to do their job was in definite danger. Rising anger caused him to wing the elk, but the white-tailed deer he hit just behind the shoulder.
We clear this up tonight.
He centered the last target and squeezed the trigger.
One way or another.
A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the timber wolf slammed flat under the impact of the slug.
Vicki rubbed at a welt on her cheek and waved her other hand about in an ineffectual effort to discourage the swarms of mosquitoes that rose around her with every step. Fortunately, most of them appeared to be males. Or dieting females, she amended, trying not to inhale any significant number. Barely a hundred yards into the trees, the field and the sheep had disappeared and looking back the way she'd come, all she could see were more trees. It hadn't been as hard a slog as she'd feared it would be but neither was it a stroll through the park. Fortunately, the sunlight blazed through to the forest floor in sufficient strength to be useful. The world was tinted green, but it was visible.
"Somebody should tidy this place up," she muttered, unhooking her hair from a bit of dead branch. "Preferably with a flamethrower."
She kept to as straight a path as she could, picking out a tree or a bush along the assumed line of fire and then struggling toward it. Somewhere in these woods, she knew she'd find a fixed place where their marksman had a clear line of sight. It hadn't taken her long to realize that this place could only exist up off the forest floor. Which explained why the wer had found