Go on, fight it, boy, thought Bob. The more you fight it, the faster it gets you.

At last the man stood. His legs ached and he suddenly noticed how cold it was. He flexed his fingers to make certain they still worked. His hand flew to the ache in his hip, then denied it. He shivered; under the down vest, he was bathed in sweat. Numbly, he went over and retrieved the shell casing he’d just ejected.

After shooting, Bob felt nothing. He felt even more nothing than he did in shooting. He looked at the animal in the undergrowth a hundred-odd yards away. No sense of triumph filled him, no elation.

Yeah, well, I can still shoot a little, he thought. Not so old as I thought.

Creakily, he walked down the hill to the clearing and over to the fallen stag. The sleet pelted him, stinging his face. The whole world seemed gray and wet. He squinted, shivered, drew the parka tighter about himself.

The animal wheezed. Its head still beat against the ground. Its eye was opened desperately and it craned back to see Bob. He thought he could see fear glinting out of that great black eyeball, fear and rage and betrayal, all the huge things that something that’s just been shot feels.

The animal’s tongue hung from its half-opened mouth as the deeper paralysis overcame all its systems. The buck was a brute all right, and its legs were as scarred as a football player’s knees. Bob could see a pucker of dead tissue high on the flank where Sam Vincent’s sloppy.45-70 had flashed through years earlier. But the horns, though now slightly asymmetrical, were beautiful. Tim wore an enormous rack, twelve points of staghorn, in a convoluted density of random growth, like a crown of thorns atop the narrow beauty of his head. He was all trophy, maybe a record for the Boone and Crockett book.

His flanks still heaved, showing the struts of his ribs. His living warmth and its musty, dense animal smell rose through the plunging sleet. You could almost warm your fingers off of him. His left back leg kicked ineffectually, as even now he fought it. Bob looked at the bullet strike. He could see the impact just where he’d willed it to be and just where the Remington had sent it to go: a crimson stain above the shoulder, immediately above the spine.

Figure I hit you just about dead perfect, partner, Bob thought.

Tim snorted piteously, thrashing again. It irked Bob that he thrashed and splattered the mud up on his tawny hide, spotting it. The animal could not take its eye off Bob as Bob bent and stroked it.

Bob touched the throat, then pulled out his knife, an old Randall Survivor, murderously sharp.

Be over in a second, partner, he thought, bending toward Tim.

“Wait a minute,” said Payne.

Dobbler swallowed. In the dark Payne looked over at him with a pathological glare. Everybody was afraid of Payne except Shreck.

“Colonel, I been around a lot of guys like that in the service, and so have you,” he said to Shreck. “Proud to say, I served with them in my twenty-two years in the Special Forces. Now, when it’s killing time, there ain’t no better boy than your white country Southerner. Those boys can shoot, and they got stones the size of cars. But they got an attitude problem, too. They got this thing about their honor. Cross one of them boys, and they make it their business to even the score, and I ain’t shitting you. I’ve seen it happen in service too fuckin’ many times to talk about it.”

“Go on, Payne,” said the colonel.

“They’re true men, and when they get something in their heads, they won’t let go of it. I saw enough of it in Vietnam. I’m just telling you, cross this man and I’m guaranfuckingteeing you the worst kind of trouble.”

“I think,” said the doctor in a loud voice, “that Mr. Payne has made an excellent point. It would not do at all to underestimate Bob Lee Swagger. And he is especially right when he notes Bob’s ‘honor.’ But surely you can also see that it’s his honor that makes him so potentially valuable to us. He is in fact quite a bit like the precision rifle with which he earned his nickname – extremely dangerous if used sloppily, yet absolutely perfect if used well. He, after all, knows more about what we are interested in than nearly any man alive. He is simply the best sniper in the Western world.”

He shot a glance at the silent figure of Shreck, and received in reply only more stony silence.

“But there is a problem. Bob the Nailer, as perfect as he seems, does present one terrible, terrible problem. He has a deep flaw.”

Bob leaned over Tim, gripping the Randall in his left hand.

Tim snorted one more time.

Bob spun the gnarled haft of the weapon in his hand, bringing the serrated upper teeth to bear. With the saw blade, he hacked at the base of the left antler, not in the veiny, velvety knob but an inch or two higher, where the horn was stone dead. In a second the teeth cut into and through the horn and Bob yanked as a half of the heavy crown fell into his hand. He tossed it away into the undergrowth, bent, and just as forcefully sawed the second antler off.

Then he backed off to avoid getting trampled.

The beast lurched halfway to its feet.

Bob gave it a hard swat on the rump.

“Go on, boy. Git! Git! Git outta here, you old sonovabitch!”

Tim bucked up, snorted once, shook his unchained head with a shiver of the purest delight and, his nostrils spurting a double plume of rancid, smoky breath, he seemed to gather even more strength and bounded off crazily, bending aside saplings and flinging shards of ice as he plunged into the forest.

In a second he was gone.

I own you, you sonovabitch, Bob thought, watching as the stag disappeared.

He turned and started the long trek home.

“His flaw,” said the doctor, “is that he will not kill anymore. He still hunts. He goes to great lengths and puts himself through extraordinary ordeals to fire at trophy animals. But he hits them with his own extremely light bullets machined of Delrin plastic at a hundred yards’ range. If he hits the creatures right and he always does – he aims for the shoulder above the spine – he can literally stun them off their feet for five or six minutes. There’s a small compartment of red aluminum dust for weight in each bullet, and as the bullet smashes against the flank of the beast, it smears the animal with a red stain, which the rain quickly washes off. Extraordinary. Then he saws their antlers off. So that no hunter will shoot them for a trophy. He hates trophy hunting. After all, he’s been a trophy.”

Colonel Shreck spoke.

“All right, then. It’s Swagger. But we’ll have to find a trophy this asshole will hunt,” he said.

It was funny how a rifle will sometimes go sour on you. Bob’s fine old pre-’64 Winchester Model 70 in.270 had been a minute-of-angle gun for five years, shooting within an inch at a hundred yards, or two at two hundred or three at three, holding ever true to that abstraction of rifle accuracy. But it had suddenly opened up. On today’s target, the bullet punctures formed a raggedy constellation over three times an inch.

Yet, baffled as he was, a certain part of Bob was tickled. It was so damned interesting. It was one more thing to find out about, another trip deep into the maze that kept him, or so he believed, sane.

Take this damn 70. He could spend a week on it. He’d take it apart, down to its finest screw and spring, and go over each tiny bit of it, looking for burrs in the metal, for pieces of grit in the works, for signs of wear or fatigue. He’d steam clean the trigger mechanism. With his fingers, he’d probe every square centimeter of the stock, feeling for knots, splinters, warps, anything that could lay just the softest finger of pressure against the barrel to nudge the rifle out of true.