Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  He had gone to ground, and ground was in his name: terrier, from the Latin, always digging after quarry. No matter, I could have set a baby down in the clearing in the forest and the pit-bull terrier that was Hobbes would defend that baby from bears, from mountain lions, from anything abroad in that forest, human or otherwise, because it was his job to defend it, even with his own life. And you don’t have to starve them and chain them up to make them tough, it’s built in, they come out tough. I had treated him like a baby, that’s true, and plenty of people will object to that, treating an animal like a human when there’s so many hungry people around, why not feed the people first who need feeding. I was sure they fed those hungry people themselves when they got the chance: I didn’t know these things. Good luck to them. They could live in their world as long as they stayed out of mine. The trouble with people like that is they can’t stay in their own world. And two of them had now evidently strayed where they didn’t belong. I rose and walked to the edge of the woods and said to the woods in general,

  There’s fresh snow fallen, can’t you hold off?

  I ignored them as best I could for another couple of hours. I read the lists of Shakespeare, from F, Firstling and Flanker, to G, Garboil, Geck, Gallowglass, Gallimaufry, and Gulf. I liked the Gs then. But still the shots continued, the two of them and the ammunition that could have sustained a company of soldiers.

  My thoughts, it is true, had turned black, the color of Hobbes’ world, turned it fast. I could not enjoy the writing and put the list away, walked to the barn and placed the sherry on the bench and lifted the Enfield out of its case, set it across my shoulder with a fresh clip in the magazine. I saw another clip handy on the bench and wanted to carry it too, but it would drag in my pocket, so I left it behind me. I also left the telescopic sight behind.

  I took the white blanket off Hobbes’ grave and draped it on my other shoulder over the long coat and set off into the woods toward the sound of the shots. It was easy to follow them, they came regular, a couple a minute. Those men must have brought a garrison’s worth of cartridges with them. What were they hunting, the entire northern herds? Were they not aware that it was one deer per person per season? These I could tell were heavy-caliber rifles, auto-repeaters, also illegal for hunting as far as I knew. Well-armed men, shooting well and careless as to the law. Could easily have been one of those two then who had done the shooting. It was even likely, if that man weren’t dead already.

  42

  TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE WOODS AND IN THE GENTLY falling flakes I came silently upon a man. He was wearing orange and made no attempt to disguise himself.

  I had not heard anything for five minutes and then there was this crack of fire in the middle distance: he stood in his orange huntsman’s vest, shooting rapidly at two deer feeding in the adjacent field. Another minute and I would have stumbled on top of him had he been quiet enough, or stumbled down dead if he had been waiting for me.

  I unslung the rifle and watched him. One of the deer crumpled at the rear, he had caught it in the hind leg. The deer looked ahead to where the other ran, trying to follow, to gain a foothold on the flat grass. The hunter shot again, this time splashing a bullet into the neck and flattening the deer motionless on its right side.

  I waited for another minute. The huntsman did not move from his firing position, did not walk to check on the shot, which I thought strange. Perhaps he was waiting for the mate to return to shoot it too, but he knew surely that the deer would not return, not that soon. Now where was the other shooter? Had I mistaken the sound of one rifle for two? Was he alone?

  I heard myself whisper, perhaps too loudly: By your shots I deciphered two of you, and each with his rifle exhaled, expedient back and forth in the woodland.

  Yes, I did count two rifles. The other must have been off hiding or tracking another animal. I waited for another couple of minutes and then eased up the safety and gently pulled the bolt, and then I looked up to aim as I raised the rifle, and I saw the man’s gun pointed at me, and he looked panicked. I stepped to the left as his finger pulled the trigger, that same instant, and the bullet smacked the bark of the tree at my right ear, scoured a foot of bark that shredded itself onto my shoulder and into my eye. He should not miss the second time, not at this range, even in a panic. I moved back to the right and brought the rifle up. I breathed in and he shot again, and some god-awful fire ran the skin of my left shoulder; I aimed with my good eye and breathed out and pulled the trigger, and his head cracked around the hole and he fell like carrots from a torn bag, dead a long time before he hit the ground.

  I pulled back the bolt handle and checked the wound: superficial, nothing that would bleed much. My father had taught me well. Never hurry a shot. This man could have had me if he had waited a tenth of a second. He may have been expecting me: his shooting might have been bait to draw me out. But that was brave of him to stand out like that and shoot in an orange top. And why kill the deer? But why kill a dog? And foolish of him in the end, surely, though you don’t want to be mocking the dead.

  It was a good thing I didn’t budge, because a truck ripped through the saplings and tore the foliage as it made for me, a big half-ton with blue paneling and tinted glass. A pump gun hung out the driver’s side window and sprayed shot pellets with the first report, and the second sound I focused on was the driver sliding the pump action. Must have been turning the steering wheel with his knees, most likely. I ducked as the shot sliced the undergrowth around my feet and a hot knife stabbed my knee.

  I slowed the truck down in my mind: he was six, seven seconds from me, and if I ran he would drive over me within a few steps, there were so few large trees in this spot. I remembered the position of the grille and tracked the trajectory by its chrome, brought the rifle up and aimed three feet and seventy degrees from the front corner and fired. The cartridge splintered the windshield a hand wide and entered his right eyebrow. His head flicked to his left and he stared out the window as the truck locked in a circle and slammed against a tree, trying to mount it as the tires spun.

  I did not move, a frozen man in his white blanket. I would not make that mistake twice. The engine of the truck ran high: the driver’s foot must have jammed against the pedal. The woods were so quiet, the truck so loud. As if another person beside me performed the action, the bolt slid and another round went into the firing chamber.

  I had three bullets to my name.

  I stayed low and watched, breathing the relief. I was lucky with the speed of reloading: the bolt handle on a Lee Enfield is set back behind the trigger, which makes chambering smooth and fast, twelve shots a minute. My grandfather said that when the Germans first faced the British infantry lines equipped with Enfields, they thought they were under machine gun fire. The bolt action, the engineering of the thing, had saved me.

  I decided to check the truck, now that both men were down, and placed the rifle on the snow and moved to the passenger side window, the white blanket covering my head. He was still alive, and I recognized him. It was Pascal, the complaining man from outside the supermarket, the one with the gun, the law and order man. By way of comfort I said something to him from Hunt magazine, something a hunter would understand:

  I honor your sacred spirit, and the firstling too, your friend. But I had to take you.

  I’ll kill you, he whispered, and slumped like a man snoozing. I must have seemed like a ghost to him, a spirit come to take him away. Some men won’t go quietly.

  They say you glimpse the bullet that will kill you. I am sure I saw this one. It came from his side of the truck, through his side window, passed in front of his face and along my right temple and whipped the saplings behind me like a spit.

  A third man.

  43

  THE SNIPE IS A SHOREBIRD, A FAST WADER IN MARSH ground with a long, slender bill that sews for insects and such. When it sees you it crouches until the last moment and then bursts out of the grass, flying crookedly, an impossible dart through the air. A long time ago som
e men were fast enough with a rifle to put an aim on one and shoot it out of the sky. Those men went sniping.

  Sniper. The word drifted across the trenches in 1914 and became a soldier’s word: a hidden man who made people disappear one at a time, a man who knew camouflage and wore the countryside on top of him, whether crouched or crawling, selecting a position, or observing the stir of a hand at a hundred yards and putting a shot through it. If captured he could expect little other than be executed like a spy, because his uniform was the invisible, because his eye looked along the sight and made entire platoons take cover, because he killed people’s friends. There must be something missing in him, an empathy gone or never there to begin with, so he receives none in return.

  These days, from what I’d heard recently, anyone who lifted a rifle was called a sniper, when most likely it was just an angry man or a cruel boy with a powerful weapon on a clock tower or in a bush along the highway, shooting innocents because they happened to be there. Sniper: the very word is quickly said, but the best of them are slow, patient, deliberate men. I had heard that word on the open street in town the day before, heard discussion of a possible shooter who had lately killed some hunters, for what else could have happened to these men, gone off and left their families? No such thing. And when I went for groceries, the word was that they were definitely missing, these men, and it was clear to me that the people in the supermarket were giving themselves up completely to rumors and talk of rumors. The authorities were searching now, but that is the nature of hunting, that shots are fired in the wilderness. Anyway, I knew myself as no sharpshooter, lacking the training and true patience required. They must have been discussing another individual, though it is true that I was involved in a few incidents recently.

  They say it takes an unbalanced mind to hold a rifle that steady. But my father said the English sniper who gave my grandfather the Pattern 14 Enfield was a happy man who said he was glad to see the end of the fighting and wanted to spend the rest of his life in a small country town with a church spire and the tinkle of bells in the evening, the rustle of sheep and the warm smell of the sea in summer. Of this reputed imbalance in the heads or minds of marksmen my father said little, other than that the best sniper is passionate and cold at the same time, awkward up close, best at a distance.

  That sounded like balance. I hoped this third man was not of that kind. If so I was breathing the last of this life into me already.

  44

  I THOUGHT I SAW A FACE AT TWO HUNDRED YARDS, AND I ran from the truck to my rifle and dove to the ground, hooking the Enfield in my left hand and sliding to a halt while holding the blanket above me with my right, to cover my hair.

  To my right I heard the truck still trying to straddle the tree—that noise could be my undoing—no way to track the sniper, to gauge his shooting. That blasted truck. The trigger of the rifle was five inches forward of my hand. No, this was the thing, not to move. I lay under the blanket and breathed face down, deep and slow. A shot punched the snow a yard to my left, another then two yards to the right, judging by the shiver and puff. He was trying pot luck. Good: he could not see me. That meant he didn’t have a telescopic sight or wasn’t willing to sacrifice his wide but poor view for a better one and possible exposure. He should have. Another shot, this one inches from my skull. Maybe he did see me but aimed poorly.

  I kept my face in the snow. The chill petrified my bones and lips. Not to show my face, this took some restraint as my mind kept imagining him sneaking up on me and all I had to do to save my life was look up and see him stalking. Now he stands over the blanket and aims down on me. Look up, Julius. Look up! But I knew that if I looked up I would distinguish myself from the snow with my pink face and die. I felt my heart palpitate, a tremor cordis in me.

  I had time to kill, so I whispered to the snow the two words under F that I had read before leaving for the woods. I could not bring to mind a third, something of no use, it must have been.

  Then I slid back the first inch and waited.

  No shot came.

  Then I moved another inch, this time to my right, toward the truck. No shot. At two hundred yards, the eye cannot catch an inch of movement at a time, a foot, definitely, but not the tiny inch. For thirty minutes after that I moved but one inch at a time, with ten seconds’ rest between each inch, a World War One battle maneuver against an active sniper, a story told by my grandfather to my father and so to me. It still worked. Not long now. I knew I was safe when I felt the truck’s tires spin at my ear. I held up a pinch of the blanket and glanced sideways. Yes. The truck was now between me and the rifleman: I had covered fifteen feet. He was cautious, too cautious for a hunter. I rolled to one side and brought the rifle to my chest, moved the bolt and chambered a new round. He heard it somehow through that damned engine, and a bullet ripped the snow where my head had lain thirty minutes before.

  For him to shoot now was surely foolish: he had given away his position for no reason. Better to have remained silent and alert. Sooner or later I would have had to rise and he would see me, or night would fall and we could both have gone home.

  I rolled a yard to the right and held the blanket out before me, waited, then moved my head under it, nudging at the flap with a finger one quarter inch and inserted my eye into that space.

  I found him where I saw him first, and clear as daylight. He had made a crucial mistake: he forgot about his boots. He had worn a white top and scarf for his head, good camouflage, but when a man lies prone in the snow, the heels of his boots are at a higher elevation than his head, about two inches, and his boots were black. You have to paint the heels of your boots the color of the landscape if you want to lie down with your rifle. And there they waved like two black flags. By aiming right between the boots and down a fraction, I had a headshot.

  Three bullets. How confident was I? The truth was my hands and face were numb from lying in the snow. I could not trust the aim and had to go around him. I don’t know how much time I spent closing the distance, though it was easier with the trees as cover. I can say that about one hour after he fired upon me, I brought my rifle to my shoulder at a distance of ten yards from him, off to his side.

  Something told him. He looked and saw me.

  This man’s face in front of me now was cleaned away with fear, but the traces left on it told me all I needed to know.

  45

  I RECOGNIZED HIM, WHICH IS TO SAY THAT I DID NOT shoot him dead on the spot, this man who had sent three or four cartridges my way, any one of which would have crumpled my frame like a wet egg under my blanket and coat. He turned on his side and arched his rifle over his head, but I had the barrel centered between his eyes and he looked at me straight down along the sights and let it fall, still holding it, into a depression at his side, a place he should have put himself in to begin with, his body lower than his rifle.

  It’s you, he said. I knew it was you.

  I said, If you knew it, you didn’t take advantage.

  I brought the aim to his chest so I wouldn’t miss if he moved. So we’re on speaking terms after all, I said.

  Shooting me will be different.

  Really, I said. I don’t think so. I shoot you, you die. It’ll be the same, I think, that’s the truth of it.

  I mean shooting a police officer.

  No, It’ll still be the same for you, I said. And as for what happens to me, you needn’t worry about that. You won’t worry.

  He seemed to have exhausted his store of words, so I spoke again for him.

  And I’m surprised to hear you say anything to me, I said.

  He eyed his rifle, brazen as could be. As if I was just going to stand there.

  I have a question, I said, using my shoulder to wedge the rifle while I fished the drawing out of my pocket half way before stuffing it back suddenly. Didn’t want to be fiddling with paper now. He’d have that thing up in a flash.

  Did you shoot my dog, I said. It was around here, as a matter of fact, that he was shot, this close
to my home.

  I did not, he said. Is this what this is all about, a dog?

  I brought the rifle up. Your final words on the matter?

  Then he broke all at once like a china cup on a concrete floor, his hands covering his face, as if they’d stop a .303 shell. A loud shriek. Jesus, please don’t kill me. Please. I don’t want to die.

  Troy, I said, keeping the rifle at eye level while risking the familiar first name, I’m far from being Jesus these days.

  I won’t tell anyone. No, no dog shooting, it wasn’t me.

  He grabbed for his weapon and I kicked it away, shot at the ground in front of him as he lunged after it and re-chambered while he jerked from the shock, scrabbling around in the snow and around himself for bullets, grabbing away at nothing in his clothes, no holes, no blood. He looked up at the rifle and flinched as it went back to him. He covered his head and waited for it.

  What line of business are you in, I said, aiming.

  He screamed, then realized I had spoken and not shot.

  He said, You know. His voice shook like a pond under a breeze.

  I don’t mean your job. I heard once you have a business on the side, evenings possibly.

  Security, he said. I own a security firm.

  Security, I said.

  He nodded.

  Is it a success?

  He nodded.

  I said nothing then. The truck engine was tiresome and I wanted to switch it off, was tired of speaking loudly over it, this dead man over there riding his truck.

  It is true that frightened men urinate. The body ditches everything for flight. Troy’s pants ran.

  I said, Take off your jacket.

  He pulled off the white jacket. I told him to empty the pockets and saw a phone and keys and such fall out. He stood in a flannel shirt, black, with beige at the collar.