he never killed anything that he couldn’t eat, and he aimed to despatch his prey with the very minimum of pain. Harlan felt the same way, and for that reason he had always preferred a good rifle with which to hunt; he didn’t trust himself with a bow. During archery hunting season in October he preferred to accompany his friend as a spectator, admiring his skill without ever feeling the need to participate.
But as Paul grew older, he came to prefer the rifle to the bow. He had arthritis in his right shoulder, and in a half dozen other places too. Paul used to say that the only major part of his body in which he didn’t have arthritis was the one place where he would have appreciated a little more stiffness, if the good Lord could have seen His way to answering that kind of prayer. Which, in Paul’s experience, He never did, the good Lord apparently having better things with which to occupy Himself than male erectile dysfunction.
So Paul was the better shot with a bow, and Harlan the superior hunter with a rifle. In the years that followed, Harlan would muse upon the likelihood that, had it been he who took the first shot at the deer, none of this business, for good or bad, would have happened.
But then they had always seemed opposites in so many ways, these two men. Harlan was softly spoken where his friend was loud, dry where he was obvious, driven and conscientious where Paul often seemed aimless and unfocused.
Harlan was thin and wiry, a fact that had sometimes led drunks and fools to underestimate his strength, even though only a strong man could have carried a grief-stricken boy for miles across rough, snow-covered ground without stumble or complaint, even in his seventies. Paul Scollay was softer and fatter, but it was padding over muscle, and he was fast for a big man. Those who did not know them well had them pegged for an odd couple, two men whose diverse personalities and appearances allowed them to form a single whole, like two matching pieces of a jigsaw. Their relationship was much more complex than that, and their similarities were more pronounced than their differences, as is always the case with men who maintain lifelong friendships with each other, rarely allowing a harsh word to pass between them, and always forgiving any that do. They shared a common outlook on the world, a similar view of their fellow man and their obligations toward him. When Harlan Vetters carried Barney Shore home on his back, the beams of flashlights and the raised voices guiding him at the last to the main search party, he did so with the ghost of his friend walking by his side, an unseen presence that watched over the boy and the old man, and perhaps kept the girl in the woods at bay.
For after Barney Shore had spoken of her, Harlan had become aware of movement in the trees to his right, a roving darkness obscured by the falling snow, as though the mere mention of her existence had somehow drawn the girl to them. He had chosen not to look, though; he feared that was what the girl wanted, because if he looked he might stumble, and if he stumbled he might break, and if he broke then she would fall upon them both, boy and man, and they would be lost to her. It was then that he called upon his old friend, and he could not have said if Paul had truly come to him or if Harlan had simply created the illusion of his presence as a source of comfort and discipline. All he knew was that a kind of solace came over him, and whatever was shadowing them in the forest had retreated with what might have been a disappointed hiss or just the sound of a branch surrendering its weight of snow, until at last it was gone from them entirely.
And as he lay on his deathbed, Harlan wondered if the girl had remembered him, if she had recalled him from that first day, the day of the deer, the day of the airplane . . .
They had started late. Harlan’s truck had been acting up, and Paul’s was in the shop. They’d almost not headed out at all, but it was beautiful weather and they had already made their preparations: their clothing – their checked Woolrich jackets, their wool pants from