These hopes of construction he believed could be achieved as easily as he’d built his hundred-yard driveway: easing his pickup back and forth between the trailer and the road fifty times. But the savings he’d planned to replenish never materialized, and therefore neither did the house. Finally it came to the point where he could no longer afford the trailer either. When the first overdue notices arrived, Heck recalled to his dismay that the bank had loaned for the trailer on condition it take back a mortgage on the land as well-all his beautiful acreage.

The same land that as of a week from Saturday was going to be somebody else’s.

Heck folded the papers and stuffed them behind a statement from the veterinarian. He walked to the plate-glass picture window, which faced west, the direction the storm would be coming from in just a few hours. In the truck, on the drive back home, he’d heard several announcements about the storm. One of them reported that a twister had cut a swath through a trailer park in a town seventy miles west of here. There’d been no deaths but several injuries and a great deal of damage.

Hearing this newscast, just as he happened to click on the old radio, seemed to Heck a bad omen. Would his trailer survive intact? he wondered, then whispered, “And what the hell does it matter?” He picked up a roll of masking tape and peeled off a long strip. He laid down one long diagonal of an X. He started to do the cross strip, then paused and flung the tape across the room.

Walking into the bedroom he sat on the spongy double bed. He imagined himself explaining this whole matter to Jill-the foreclosure, the lawsuit-although he often grew distracted because when he pictured this conversation he pictured it very explicitly and couldn’t help but notice that his ex was wearing a hot-pink peekaboo nightgown.

Heck continued to speak to her for a few minutes then became embarrassed at the unilateral dialogue. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the roiling clouds, and began another silent conversation-this time not with Jill but with Heck’s own father, who at this moment was many miles away, presumably asleep, in a big colonial house that he’d owned for twenty years, no mortgage, free and clear. Trenton Heck was saying to him, It’s just for a little while, Dad. Maybe a month or so. It’ll help me get my life together. My old room’ll be fine. Just fine.

Oh, those words sounded flat. They sounded like the excuses offered by the red-handed burglars and joyriders Heck used to nab. And in response his father glanced down the long nose that Heck was grateful he hadn’t inherited and said, “For as long as you like, son, sure,” though he was really saying: “I knew all along you couldn’t handle it. I knew it when you married that blonde, not a woman like your mother, I knew…” The old man didn’t tell his son the story about the time he was laid off from the ironworks in ’59 then got himself together and started his own dealership and made himself a comfortable living though it was tough… He didn’t have to, because the story’d been told-a dozen times, a hundred-and was sitting right there, perched in front of their similar but very different faces.

Times aren’t what they were, Heck thought as he nodded his flushed thanks. Though he was also thinking, I’m just not like you, Dad, and that’s the long and the short of it.

He took a swig of beer he didn’t really want and wished that Jill were back. He imagined the two of them packing boxes together, looking forward to a joint move.

A truck horn sounded in the distance, an eerie carrying wail, and he thought of the lonely whippoorwill in the old Hank Williams song.

Oh, come on, he thought, rain like a son of a bitch. Heck loved the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the trailer. Nothing sent him off to sleep better. If I ain’t going to get my reward money, at least give me a good night’s sleep.

Trenton Heck closed his eyes, and, as he began to doze, he heard the truck’s plaintive horn wail once more in the distance.

Owen Atcheson knew the harrowing logic of cornered animals and he understood the cold strategy of instinct that flowed like blood through the body of both hunter and prey.

He would stand motionless for hours, in icy marshes, so still that a drake or goose would pulse carelessly thirty feet above his head and die instantly in the shattering explosion from Owen’s long ten-gauge. He’d move silently-almost invisibly-inches at a time, along rock faces to ease downwind of a deer and without using a telescopic sight place a.30 slug through the relaxed shoulder and strong heart of the buck.

When he was a boy he’d doggedly follow fox paths and set dull metal traps exactly where the lithe blond animals would pass. He’d smell their musk, he’d see the hint of their passage in the grass and weeds. He’d collect their broken bodies and if one chewed through the stake line he’d track it for miles-not just to recover the trap but to kill the suffering animal, which he did almost ceremoniously; pain, in Owen Atcheson’s philosophy, was weakness, but death was strength.

He’d killed men too. Picked them off calmly, efficiently, with his black M-16, the empty bullet casings cartwheeling through the air and ringing as they landed. (For him, the jangle of spent shells had been the most distinctive sound of the war, much more evocative than the oddly quiet cracks of the gunfire itself.) They charged at him like children playing soldier, these men and women, working the long bolts of their ancient guns, and he’d picked them off, ring, ring, ring.

But Michael Hrubek wasn’t an animal driven by instinct. He wasn’t a soldier propelled by battle frenzy and love-or fear-of country.

Yet what was he?

Owen Atcheson simply didn’t know.

Driving slowly along Route 236 near Stinson, he looked about for a roadside store or gas station that might have a phone. He wanted to call Lis. But this was a deserted part of the county. He could see no lights except those from distant houses clinging to a hilltop miles away. He continued down the road several hundred yards to a place where the shoulder widened. Here he parked the Cherokee and reached into the back. He slipped the bolt out of his deer rifle, pocketing the well-oiled piece of metal. From the glove compartment he took a long black flashlight, a halogen with six D cells in the tube, the lens masked by a piece of shirt cardboard to limit the refraction of the light. Locking the doors he once again checked to see that his pistol was loaded then walked in a zigzag pattern along the shoulder until he found four hyphens of skid marks-where a car had stopped abruptly then sped off just as fast.

Playing the light over the ground he found where Hrubek had jumped from the hearse: the bent grass, the overturned stones, the muddy bare footprints. Owen continued in a slow circle. Why, he wondered, had Hrubek rolled in the grass? Why had he ripped up several handsfuls of it? To staunch a wound? Was he trying to force himself to vomit? Was it part of a disguise? Camouflage?

What was in his mind?

Six feet from the shoulder was a muddle of prints, many of them Hrubek’s, most of them the trackers’ boot prints and the dogs’ paw prints. Three animals, he noticed. Here Hrubek had paced for a time then started running east through the grass and brush just beyond the shoulder. Owen followed the trail for a hundred yards then noted that Hrubek had turned off the road, plowing south, aiming for a ridge of hill paralleling the highway fifty feet away.

Owen continued along this track until it simply vanished altogether. Dropping to his knees he scanned the area, wondering if the man was smart enough to deer-walk, an evasion technique used by professional poachers: stepping straight down on the ground, avoiding the most telltale signs of passage (not prints but overturned pebbles, leaves and twigs). But he could find no bent blades of grass-the only evidence most deer walkers leave behind. He concluded Hrubek had simply backtracked, aborting his southward journey and returning to the path beside the road.