Just then, beyond the mark, there was a shuffling of leaves. Some kind of movement in the woods. Loo dropped her hands from her face. She held her breath. She heard only the sound of the wind. The rattle of birch leaves flipping back and forth. The distant echo of the plane in the clouds. The scratch of a squirrel’s claws as it scrambled up the bark of a tree. But her father was listening for something else. His chin was down, his eyes cutting left. His face tensed and ready.

Hawley was always watching. Always waiting. He got the same look when they went into town for supplies, when the mailman came to their door, when a car pulled alongside them on the road. She heard him late at night, walking the living room floor, checking the locks on the windows. Digging on the beach for clams, he kept his back to the sea. These were small things, but she noticed. And she noticed now, as his whole body became still. He reached behind to his belt, and his hand came back with the Colt.

Loo spun around and picked up the rifle. Her fingers went tight on the grip. She scanned the woods, but she saw nothing. Her father was standing and he was staring in the direction of the tree. At the small white mark two hundred yards across the ravine.

“Loo! Now!”

He shouted her name as if their lives depended on it. And in one movement the Colt pushed through the air like an extension of his arm, and he was firing into the forest, the gun was flashing, blasting over and over, echoing against the hills. Loo spun, brought the rifle to her chest, and she pulled the bolt and fired, pulled the bolt and fired, pulled the bolt and fired, and it wasn’t until the fifth pull that she realized her father had stopped and that she was out of bullets. Click, click, click.

Loo lowered the barrel of the rifle, expecting to see—well, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was expecting. A monster waiting for them in the trees. A shadow from her father’s past. But there was only the narrow pine with a new yellow strip, as if Hawley’s Colt had peeled the bark straight from the trunk, and two feet under, in the middle of the white spot he’d painted, three dark holes.

Loo’s father jogged over to check the target. He took his knife from his boot and dug out one of the bullets. He walked back to Loo and dropped it into her palm. A tiny piece of metal the color of gold. The bullet was from her rifle, small and shiny and hard and broken. Remade by the impact of hitting its target. Hawley smiled, his eyes bright.

Then he said, “Just like your mother.”

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