He had to get out of the saddle to assess the wounds to his horse and to his leg. The arrow wouldn’t come out as is. So he took another gulp of air, leaned forward, grasped the shaft with both hands, broke the back end off, and tossed the piece with the fletching behind him. Then grasping his own leg like he would heave a sandbag, he slid it up and off the broken shaft. The movement and the pain convulsed him when his leg came free and he tumbled off the left side of the horse onto the forest floor, out.

When he awoke, he was surprised it wasn’t raining because he thought he’d heard the soft patter of rain in his subconscious. But the pine needles were dry. Joe had no idea how long he’d been out, but he guessed it had been just a few minutes. The dappling of sunlight through the branches, like spots on the haunch of a fawn, were still at the same angle. He was on his side with his left arm pinned under him and his cheek on the ground. His right leg with the holes in it was now largely numb except for dull pulses of pain that came with each heartbeat. His left leg throbbed from being crushed against the tree trunks.

It came back to him: Where he was and how he had got there.

Joe groaned and propped himself up on an elbow. Buddy stood directly over him. That’s when Joe realized it wasn’t rain he’d heard, but drops of blood from his horse striking the dry forest floor.

He rose by grasping a stirrup and pulled himself up the side of his horse. He paused with both arms across the saddle as he studied the dark and silent tangle of trees they’d come through. He saw no one. Yet.

The saddle was loose due to Buddy’s exertion and it was easy to release the cinch. He stood on his horse’s right side where the arrow was and gripped the saddle horn on the front and the cantle on the back and set his feet. “I’ll make this as painless as I can, Buddy,” he said, then grunted and swung the saddle off, careful to pull it straight away from the arrow so the hole in the leather slid up the shaft and didn’t do any more side-to-side damage. Buddy didn’t scream again or rear up, and Joe was grateful.

He examined the wound and could see the back end of the flint point just below a flap of horsehide. The point wasn’t embedded deeply after all. Apparently, the leather-and Joe’s leg-had blunted the penetration. So why all the blood? Then he saw it: another arrow was deep into Buddy’s neck on the other side. So both brothers had been firing arrows at him from opposite sides of the meadow. The neck wound was severe.

The first-aid kit was in the panniers. In the kit, there was hydrogen peroxide to clean out the wounds and compresses to bind them and stop the bleeding.

He had to stop the flow. But how?

Joe sat in the grass with his pants pulled down to his knees. His left leg was bruised and turning purple. There were two holes three inches apart in the top of his right thigh. The holes were rimmed with red and oozing dark blood. They were the diameter of a pencil and Joe was fascinated by the fact that he could move the skin and view the red muscle fiber of his right quadriceps. He’d need to bathe the wounds, kill the growing infection, and close or bind the holes. Quickly. The excruciating pain had receded into the numb solace of shock and the blood had the viscosity of motor oil. He clumsily wrapped his bandana over the holes and made a knot. He stood with the aid of a tree trunk and pulled his pants back up. Buddy watched with his head down and his eyes going gauzy as his blood dripped out.

“I’ll take care of you first, Buddy,” Joe said in a whisper, “then I’ll take care of me.”

Before limping back through the timber toward the meadow and Blue Roanie’s body, Joe emptied most of his canteen over the wound in Buddy’s neck until the water ran clear. He drank the last of the water and tossed the canteen aside, then tied Buddy’s reins to a tree trunk.

“Hang in there and don’t move.”

He was encouraged by the fact that Buddy’s head was down and his ears weren’t as rigid. It might mean the brothers had left the area. Or it might mean his horse was dying.

Joe moved slowly. His legs wouldn’t allow him to go any faster. He lurched from tree to tree, holding himself upright by grabbing trunks and branches, anything that would help him take the weight and pressure off his leg wound. He made a point not to look down at his injury for fear he’d pass out again.

It took twenty minutes before he neared the meadow where he’d been bushwhacked. If the brothers had come into the trees after him, he would have run into them by now. He had no doubt they’d have finished him off. Maybe with arrows, maybe with knives, maybe with his own guns. He found his hat and fitted it back on his head.

Joe hated the fact that his only available weapon was his.40 Glock service piece. He was a poor pistol shot. Although his scores on the range for his annual recertification had risen a few points in the past two years, he still barely qualified. He knew if it weren’t for the sympathy of the range officer who’d followed his exploits over the years and graded him on a curve, he could have been working a desk at game and fish headquarters in Cheyenne. Joe’s proficiency was with a shotgun. He could wing-shoot with the best of them. His accuracy and reaction time were excellent as long as he shot instinctively. It was the slow, deliberate aiming he had trouble with.

As he staggered from tree to tree toward the meadow, he vowed that if he got off the mountain alive he’d finally take the time to learn how to hit something with his service weapon.

He felt oddly disengaged, like he was watching a movie of a guy who looked a lot like him, but slower. It was as if it weren’t really him limping through the trees with holes in his leg and his best horse bleeding to death on the side of an unfamiliar mountain. Joe seemed to be floating above the treetops, between the crown of the pines and the sky, looking down at the man in the red shirt moving toward what any rational observer would view as certain death. But he kept going, hoping the numb otherworldliness would continue to cushion him and act as a narcotic, hoping the pain would stay just beyond the unbearable threshold so he could revel in the insentient comfort of shock. And he hoped the combination of both would keep at bay the terror that was rising within him.

Now, though, there were four things of primal importance.

Find Blue Roanie’s body and the panniers. Recover his shotgun. Return to Buddy with the first-aid kit. Get the hell off the mountain.

The pine trees thinned and melded into a stand of aspen. He couldn’t remember riding Buddy into aspen at all, but at the time he’d been addled and in furious pain. He recalled gold spangles in his eyes and realized now that they’d been leaves that slapped against his face as Buddy shot through the trees.

Aspen trees shared a single interconnected root system that produced saplings straight from their ball of roots through the soil. They weren’t a grove of individual trees like pines or cottonwoods, but a single organism relentlessly launching shooters up through the soil to gain territory and acquire domination, to starve out any other trees or brush that dared try to live in the same immediate neighborhood. A mountainside of aspen was enjoyed by tourists for the colors and tone, but it was actually one huge voracious organism as opposed to hundreds or thousands of individual trees. Joe had always been suspicious of aspens for that reason. Additionally, the problem with aspen for a hunter or stalker or a crippled game warden was their leaves, which dried like brittle parchment commas and dropped to the ground. Walking on aspen leaves was akin to walking on kettle-fried potato chips: noisy. Joe crunched along, left hand on a tree trunk or branch and right hand on the polymer grip of his Glock, when he realized how loud he was, how obvious. And how silent it was, which meant the brothers were still there.