What bowled out of the door resembled nothing so much as a human cannonball, very large in diameter and with many moving parts, most of them whaling on other moving parts. Punching, kicking, elbowing, kneeing, yelling, screaming, swearing, it was a mesmerizing concatenation of self-directed human energy and single-minded enthusiasm. Kate, fascinated, decided that cannonball was the wrong analogy, it was more like a fight in a Batmancomic book. She thought she might even see Pow! and Bam! rising up out of the fracas.

That seething ball of human rage rolled right out the door and into Chopper Jim Chopin. Jim was standing in front of Mutt. Mutt was standing on the very edge of the top step. The ball hit Jim. He lost his balance. Mutt caught the backs of his knees and in another startled scramble tried to get out of the way in several different directions at once. Jim pitched back into a flawless backward somersault, any Olympic judge who wasn‘t sitting on the pairs competition for ice skating would have been ashamed to give it less than a 9.9.

Sergeant Jim Chopin, pride of the Alaska State Troopers, the law of the land in blue and gold, thereafter ascribed a perfect circle, his head and his feet spinning 360 degrees around a straight torso in a movement that Kate dimly remembered from some long-forgotten math class as angular motion. His constant velocity was such as to defy enough gravity to miss every single one of the eight steps leading up to the Bingley Mercantile entrance, and so in his favor were the laws of physics this day that he made a neat two-point landing with both feet smack on the ground, facing in exactly the same direction from which he had originally launched.

A long time ago Kate remembered him saying that one of the first things they taught cadets at the trooper academy was that when a trooper arrived at the scene, the first thing they must do was establish an air of authority. Today, Jim had approximately two and a half seconds to appreciate this undeniable achievement before the human cannonball boiled right down the steps, hit him with all the force of a runaway train, and flattened him on his back in the dirt and the mud and the half-melted snow.

Mutt, also a victim of physics, was already off balance when Jim flipped over her, and was sucked thereafter into the cannonball‘s turbulent wake. She avoided landing in the middle of it by a levitational feat heretofore only achieved by Nadia Comaneci, and managed to jump clean over the melee. She landed running, a gray streak close to light speed, and she didn‘t stop until she got to Kate, behind whom she promptly took refuge, uttering a distinctly un-Muttlike whine.

Those nearer to the action were too busy diving for cover to receive a clear impression of events. Kate, standing next to the door of her truck, and Dan, standing next to the door of his, got the wide-screen version and were able thereafter to replay the events of that afternoon in glorious Technicolor detail for the benefit of many, many enthralled audiences at Bernie‘s Roadhouse. Under pressure they would admit that their recounting of events was something of a reconstruction, as both of them had been laughing so hard at the time that their vision was somewhat blurred.