Everyone took a few steps back from the edge, wary of stray bullets. “Dust in the Wind” kept playing, echoed by the distant explosions below. All in all, Frank thought it was a nice sendoff, a genuine modern Viking funeral. It was kind of cool, really. Still, as he watched the lunatic grinning scar carved into the back of Sturm’s head, bathed in the backwash of the headlights, he felt as if the hunts had been a failure. Two men were dead. Sturm’s dog had been shot.

Sturm turned around.“Gentlemen, that was the finest goddamn funeral I ever attended. When it’s time, I’ve decided I want to go out the same way. Same spot. Put me in my truck and send me down the mountain. Goddamn right. And hell, same music, whatever long-haired hippy band that was. But use more ammunition. I want God to hear me coming.”

DAY EIGHTEEN

Sturm stopped by the vet hospital around noon. Theo was driving, but Sturm made him stay in the pickup for some reason. Frank opened the front door and watched Sturm slowly shuffle up the walk. Something was wrong. Sturm moved as if he couldn’t trust his legs.

“I need to seem them cats,” he said.

Frank nodded, Sturm stumbled and Frank caught his arm. It felt like grabbing a piece of petrified wood. “Dammit,” Sturm said. He seemed ashamed. Frank led him to the back where Sturm leaned against the chain-link cage.

“I think …” Sturm began, looking at the concrete. He brought his gaze up to stare at the lioness curled in the far corner. She ignored the men. “No. No. I don’t have the luxury of thinking anymore. I don’t have the time. I don’t know if this is it or what the hell is happening to me. But I do know this. My boy needs me to teach him before I go. He needs some straightening out, that’s for goddamn sure. All I got left is instinct.”

Frank wondered what the hell Sturm was talking about.

“So I’ve made up my mind,” Sturm continued. And I need your help. I’m gonna go on instinct. You being a vet, you should understand instinct. The way an animal doesn’t have to think, understand?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not running off like some whipped dog to die by myself. That’s no way to die for anybody. I’m gonna go out like a man and teach my boy how to live his life right.”

Frank waited, still unsure where Sturm was headed with all this.

Sturm turned and stared Frank full in the face. His face cracked into a brief, thin smile. “You did well here son. This was a hell of thing.” He faced the cage again. “This one, I don’t want her fed today. I want her hungry. I want her mean.” He licked his dry lips. “This’ll be something folks will remember for the rest of their lives. You were right. This will be my legacy.”

He pushed off the cage and headed for the office. “Jack and Pine’ll be by later. Take that lioness to the auction yard and wait for me.” He slammed the door behind him.

* * * * *

Men started arriving at sundown. It looked like the same crowd from the fights. Frank wondered how the word had gotten out. Maybe everybody carried cell phones. However they got the news, everyone seemed to know that something serious was up. There was no laughing, no yelling; the men acted as if they were at a funeral, talking in low, somber tones, keeping their eyes down. Frank couldn’t shake the feeling that he had missed something, something big, this morning; like he’d slept right through whatever Sturm had been trying to tell him.

And since he didn’t want anyone to know that he was in the dark, he kept his mouth shut and pretended to know exactly what was happening.

No one went inside the auction yard. Men clustered in small groups around pickups, once in a while casting a few sidewise glances up at the trailer on the hill. The clowns didn’t move either, except to get more beer, although once in a while Frank caught Jack watching the highway towards town.

Soon enough, he saw a pair of headlights getting closer and closer until they flooded the parking lot in high beams. Without saying anything, the clowns rose to their feet. By that point, men had lined the driveway. A few of them removed their hats as the Sturm’s black pickup rolled past. Theo was driving. He parked right near the front doors and let his father out. Sturm climbed out. The tentative shuffle was gone. He moved like he expected the air itself to get the hell out of the way. He nodded at the men once, then again at the clowns on the hill. When Theo came around the pickup and joined his father, they walked into the building together.

The clowns chugged the rest of their warm beers, tossed the cans on the ground. “It’s time,” Jack said, almost whispered really, and rubbed at his eyes. His thumb and forefinger came away wet. Pine leaned into the trailer and grabbed the rifle Chuck had nearly used at the rest stop. Then they walked down the hill and joined the rest of the men flowing into the auction yard.

* * * * *

Inside, a tunnel had been built out of hog panels, leading from the livestock pens in the back right into the center ring. Frank and the clowns marched down to it. The men filled the place, quiet, respectable.

Pine took up a position in the front, chest against the fence, rifle butt on his hip. “Stick close,” he murmured to Frank. Chuck stepped up to the ring on the other side of Frank, working his unlit cigarette back and forth across his mouth. No one sat. No one moved. No one breathed.

Until Sturm appeared in the doorway to his office, moving purposefully down to the ring. Frank heard the men exhale as one. Sturm climbed the gate and strode to the center. He was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and nothing else except for a knife scabbard on his belt that held a Hibben Iron Mistress. The knife, a replica of the mythical Jim Bowie blade supposedly forged using ore from a meteorite, was over sixteen inches long, with a ten and half-inch blade that tapered down into a vicious point. The white, milky skin of his chest and arms stopped abruptly at his wrists, giving way to hands tanned as brown as dirt, as if he was wearing gloves.

Sturm slowly turned, meeting the eyes of every man in the room. When his eyes locked with Frank, Frank felt the impact reverberate down into his bones. Sturm went back to the edge of the ring and grabbed Theo by the shoulders in a fierce grip. He kissed his son on the forehead. Then he leaned back, staring into Theo’s eyes. “Be strong. Be a man,” he whispered through clenched teeth, then abruptly let go, and stalked slowly back into the center of the ring, shoulders back, head high.

He drew the Iron Mistress and tossed the leather sheath to Chuck. Out of the corner of his eye, Frank saw Pine crying. Silently. Motionlessly. Tears slowly rolled down the side of his nose. He refused to wipe them away, as if acknowledging his weakness would make it real somehow. If he simply ignored the tears, then it wasn’t happening.

Jack had now come back and was standing next to the tunnel, hand on the gate. “Are you ready?” His voice cracked as he called to Sturm.

Sturm took a deep breath, lips tight, frozen eyes clear. He slowly brought the knife up in front of his chest, blade down and away, widening his stance, crouching down, ready. He faced the darkness of the tunnel. “Do it.”

“It was an honor, sir. We’ll never forget,” Jack said as he swung the gate open.

The starving lioness padded silently and smoothly out of the tunnel. She stopped, pawed anxiously at the sawdust. But her eyes were on Sturm and her nose expanded, contracted. Frank knew the cat was hungry; she hadn’t eaten fresh meat in nearly twenty-four hours.

“Go get it, Horace! Kill it!” someone shouted in a broken voice, but that was all.

The lioness growled low, circling Sturm to the right. She never took her eyes off him. Sturm bared his teeth. The crowd seemed to recoil; this unexpected, brazen display of emotion from the man scared them.