On his hands and knees, Joe shinnied over downed logs to the meadow. With each yard, the lighting got brighter. His wounded leg alternated between heat and cold, pain and deadness. When his leg was hot, he knew he was bleeding. He could smell the metallic odor. When it was cold, his leg felt better. But it scared him, because dragging his leg felt like pulling thirty pounds of cold meat through the leaves. If it was cold, it was gone. So in a way, he welcomed the waves of heat.

Trees thinned. The meadow pulsed green and bright in the sunlight. Joe heard one of the brothers laugh like a hyena: Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack. The sound made the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck prick up, as if he were a dog.

And he thought: This is as basic as it can be. I’m a dog. They’re animals as well. Or something like animals.

What he saw through the tumbled pick-up sticks of untrammeled timber made his skin crawl.

The brothers were on either side of Blue Roanie. They were laughing in the way they laughed, which was blunt and brutal, the laugh of men who were comfortable with themselves and had no desire to please anyone else.

Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack.

One of them held his bow with one hand and a bundle of arrows in the other.

The other brother dropped a knotty pine war club so he could admire Joe’s shotgun. The.308 carbine was in the grass near his feet.

Blue Roanie didn’t move. He was dead. The arrow that had pierced his neck had severed an artery and he’d bled out, and the black blood formed a large pool like liquid tar in the grass. Joe was grateful his end had come quickly.

The Grim Brothers stripped the body of Blue Roanie, taking his saddle and bridle and tossing them to the side. Caleb ducked under his front leg and lifted it on his shoulder with a grunt. Camish produced his bowie knife and used it to pry Roanie’s horseshoe off. When he was through, he moved on to the other three. As the horseshoes came off, they were tossed into a pile near the saddle. They landed with a metallic clink.

The dead horse was now scavenged of anything valuable, he thought. But they weren’t done. With brutal efficiency, they skinned the horse and pulled the hide away from the carcass as if it were a new living room rug. Then, with the skill of a butcher, Camish severed the front quarter, barely touching a bone or joint with his blade.

Caleb struggled under the weight of the severed front quarter but still managed to carry it away. Joe had never contemplated what the front leg of a horse weighed, but he guessed one-eighty to two hundred pounds. More than heweighed. He thought, They’re strong, too. Inhumanly strong.

Joe knew he was up against a force he’d never faced but somehow he’d always imagined was out there. He didn’t like his chances.

He briefly closed his eyes and thought of Marybeth, how she’d miss him. Worse, he thought of his daughters, who simply assumed he’d always prevail and come home and be Dad. If only they knew this situation. But the last thing he’d want them to see was a man named Grim carry away the front quarter of a horse they’d loved. Blue Roanie was in the second generation of Pickett Family horses, and like his predecessor, he’d been killed in action.

They’d be righteously angry, Joe thought. And Marybeth. How to explain that her horse Buddy had bled out in the middle of nowhere because Joe couldn’t recover the first-aid kit? She’d understand, of course. So would the girls. But he didn’t want them simply to understand. He wanted them to think of him as their hero and their bulwark against everybody and everything out there. He didn’t want them to think of him as the man who failed. As the dad who failed and let himself die.

He thought: I’m in trouble, but I’ve got more to live for than just me.

He had a sidearm he was no good at shooting and the Brothers Grim had his shotgun, carbine, gear, first-aid kit, intimate knowledge of the mountains, and a violent sense of purpose. All he had was his determination to help his horse, fix his leg, and get home to his family.

He was outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched.

Still disembodied, still watching himself from above, still not able to really believe what was happening before him and his sudden unwelcome descent into brutality, he observed with clinical detachment as the Brothers Grim disemboweled Blue Roanie with a knife and slid her bundled entrails out onto the grass like a mass of steaming ropy snakes. Caleb reached down into the gut pile and came out with the huge dark liver. It was shaped like a butterfly with black fleshy wings. Caleb raised it to his mouth and took a ferocious bite. With rivulets of black blood streaming down his mouth, he offered it to Camish, who took a bite as well. The pagan hunting tradition complete, the brothers set about further dismembering Blue Roanie.

He could tell by the way they shot wary glances at the trees for him that when they were done, he’d be next on their schedule.

At the same time, in Saddlestring, Wyoming, Marybeth Pickett saw the last thing she wanted to see through the living room window: her mother’s full-sized black Hummer as it roared into the driveway. The grille, a mouthful of chrome canine teeth, stopped inches from the back of Marybeth’s parked minivan.

“Crap,” Marybeth said.

“Excuse me?”

Marybeth turned quickly from the window and felt her face flush. “I’m sorry,” she said into the telephone to Elizabeth Harris, the vice principal of Saddlestring High, “I didn’t mean you. I just saw something outside that. alarmed me.”

“Goodness, what?”

“A predator,” Marybeth said, immediately sorry she had voiced it.

Harris said, “I read in the paper where people in town have been seeing a mountain lion. Did you see it?”

“No, I was mistaken,” Marybeth said, and quickly moved on. “But you were saying?”

What Harris was saying was that April Keeley, their fifteen-year-old foster daughter, was absent again for her math tutor. It was the third time she hadn’t shown up since summer makeup courses had begun the week before, she said.

“This is news to me,” Marybeth said acidly. “I should have been informed before this.”

“It sort of fell through the cracks,” Harris said. “We’re short-staffed in the summer and we thought you’d been called.”

“I haven’t been.”

“Obviously, we know she has plenty of making up to do,” the vice principal said, lowering her voice to sharing-a-conspiracy level. “We’re fully aware of her. difficulties. But if we want April to be able to be competent with her classmates at the ninth-grade level-and we do-she needs to be there on time and prepared to complete the remedial coursework before the school year begins.”

“I’m sorry,” Marybeth said. “I had no idea. I mean, she left for school on time after breakfast. ” She recalled two of April’s friends, Anne Kimbol and Michelle McNamara, standing shoulder-to-shoulder together on the front porch waiting for April and clutching their math textbooks. Those girls were trouble.

She looked up to see Sheridan, eighteen, standing in the threshold of the hallway in her maroon polyester Burg-O-Pardner smock, about to go to work for the afternoon. The logo for the restaurant-a hamburger wearing a cowboy hat and boots with spurs, and holding a carton of their special Rocky Mountain oysters-was on a patch above her breast pocket. Sheridan, like Marybeth, was blond and green-eyed and serious.

Sheridan wanted to save some money for her senior year in high school, and she’d discovered to her surprise she was a pretty good waitress. She was juggling her part-time job with “optional” summer basketball practice. Sheridan played forward for the Saddlestring Lady Wranglers. Although she had her mother’s concentration and determination to make it all work, her basketball coach-a venal, sideline-strutting peacock of a man who interpreted Sheridan’s job and other interests as a personal affront to himand his potential success-had threatened to take her out of the starting lineup if she missed another practice. The coach, she thought, would make her senior year in high school miserable.