Meat held his bolt action Winchester out. “You want to take a shot? I’d like to see you try it.”

The guide said, “Why not?” but he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he spit once more to the side, rolled forward from a seated position into a prone position, unzipped his camouflage jacket, and reached into the folds of his clothing. To the utter confusion of the three fraternity brothers in the grass next to him, he slowly drew a perfectly ordinary-looking black handgun.

Jay said, “You’re crazy.”

The guide did not speak. He just leveled the semiautomatic pistol out in front of him, holding it in his right hand and resting his right forearm on top of his left forearm, which he positioned perpendicular to his body on the ground.

Stuart said, “That’s an impossible shot with a handgun.”

The guide spoke now, but it sounded as if he was talking to himself. “Humidity’s got to be seventy percent. Four-point-five-inch barrel, forty-cal hollow point, it’s gonna be pretty draggy, but I’ve got a full-value five-mile wind to work with. I’d say I need about a twenty-four-foot holdover.”

Meat said, “Even if you could hit one of those hogs from here, you couldn’t possibly kill it. That bullet will go an inch into its hide and get stuck in the fat or the muscle.”

The guide nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off his pistol’s iron sights. “You’re right. Let’s do a twenty-five-and-a-half-foot holdover, go for the brain pan.”

The three boys sat there agog, staring at the big bearded man lying in the grass next to them. They saw the barrel of the black pistol rise just slightly.

“You are fucking nuts,” muttered Jay, but then he quickly brought his binoculars up to his eyes. The other two did the same, and they focused on the target.

A single gunshot pounded the air next to them. Jay jerked his binos away from his eyes with a flinch, but he got them recentered on the dark brown hog on the far hill. The animal just stood there, his snout rooting idly in the pine needles.

“You missed,” Jay said.

And then the hog shuddered, its head twitched, and it dropped snout-first into the shallow hole it had been digging. It fell on its side, its legs kicked out, and then it stilled.

Only then did all the other wild boar on the hillside begin running off in different directions. And seconds after that, the echo of the pistol’s report made its way from the far hillside to the four men.

Jay, Meat, and Stuart all moved as one. Eyes slowly lifted out of their binoculars and turned to the man next to them.

Mouths opened slightly, but no one spoke.

—