For those who arrived first, it quickly became hard to say exactly when the party began. Some people had come by early in the afternoon to set up the stages, the speakers, the surprise. Around then, Barbara began overseeing the thirteen cooks who would ready the Festival of Meats. The smokers and bi-level grills were protected from the Goblin sky by large white tents erected beside the Nash’s swimming pool. Carcasses hung from racks like the sort bellboys used to cart the Nashes’ luggage in and out of hotels, and Paul Romeo, Goblin’s best-known butcher, sliced and shaved.

The meats were as varied as the guests. A game ballet.

Suspended from the upper supports of the tents, as if suspended in flight, were the ducks, pheasants, quail, geese, grouse, partridge, and swans. The walls of each tent were made of caribou, elk, moose, antelope, boar, and bear. Tabletops of gator, mountain goat, jackrabbit, and hare created aisles for Barbara and the cooks to walk about and check the status of their dishes.

Barbara breathed in the cumulative scent of so much dead. She smiled, because she understood better than most the preparation that had gone into bringing the Festival of Meats to the party.

“Thinner,” she said, pointing to where a cook had half sliced through a reindeer’s flank.

She looked out from under the tent to the house, where she knew her husband was sitting cross-legged before a mirror, readying himself for the night.

She smiled. Whereas some men would be frightened of the aging, the number sixty meant a great deal to Neal. Goblin’s Original 60 settlers came to mind (and oh, what Neal would give for even a phalange of one of them), but there was more significance than that.

“Every year he lives,” she said to nobody but herself, “is another year in which he triumphed.”

As if being a renowned hunter, he had managed, thus far, to elude the greatest hunter of all: Death.

“Mrs. Nash!”

She turned to see a cook holding a skinned rabbit by its ears.

“Stew,” she said. And again she thought of the preparations her husband had made, the work he had done for this day.

A week prior, Neal had rounded up his inner circle, his oldest and wisest hunting buddies, and proposed they hunt the meat for the party themselves. Roger Fletcher was there. Harvey Buttonbuck and Saul Stein, too.

“How the hell are we going to pull that off?” Harvey had asked. Practicality was his way.

But Barbara knew Neal better than that. And his response was no surprise.

“The animals are already on their way,” he said. “And they’ll be running free on the estate when they get here.”

Caged. Gated. And yet…a hunt.

Barbara watched as Neal handed out leather jackets to the fifteen hunters he’d invited.

“Notice the patches,” he told them.