Sloane finished while the hotel boy still cradled a stack of pigeons, just left the gun broken open over his arm and reached into his pocket to hand the boy a tip and turned and stalked up through the field toward the fence. The boy restacked the clays in the wooden case and then bent to gather up the spent shells. Sloane walked toward Jamie, not looking at him on his perch, just walking up out of the field with the gun held like a child in the crook made by his left arm while his right hand passed a handkerchief over the length of the barrels and the wood of the stock.

Jamie watched him come: a man of medium height and build, full-fleshed but not fat, his features birdlike, replete and avaricious at once—a hard brow and nose falling to soften with a full chin. Hair the color of old silverware, cut as if it were a utensil. Jamie watched the fingers of his hand running over the gun, concentrated, meticulous and unaware at their work. Sloane came up to the opening in the fence and glanced up at Jamie and his eyes slid past to the hotel beyond as he turned himself sideways to come through the stile, his eyes going off Jamie as if he were a bush or shrub, some ornament set out by the hotel. A sundial. A weathercock. No one he needed to know.

And because of this Jamie spoke to him. He hadn’t planned or wanted to. He’d wanted to be the stranger out of place. An observer. Instead he felt like a boy. So he said, “Good shooting.”

Sloane then paused and looked up at him. He said, “You a hunter?”

“Not so much anymore,” Jamie said. “For a while I did. And I’ve been thinking about taking it up again.”

“Well, you should. It’s what a man is. Most directly and without dressing himself up. Everything else we do, that’s just for show. Don’t waste your time young man. Don’t waste a bit of it.” His eyes already turned away, toward the hotel, the lowered dusk, the dinner formed in his mind. Jamie sat rocking on his buttocks and heels, both sharp against the fence rails, nothing to say as Sloane stepped through the stile and walked up toward the hotel, not looking back.

He walked back to the Sinclair and spoke with both bartenders and again lifted a bottle of bonded whiskey from the shelving behind the bar and went out into the night. He drove out of town, this time taking the back road to Franconia, the long way around the shoulder of the mountain, the road washed and gullied and ripped by boulder-backs even in the dry pack of summer, driving slowly, at times idling the car by inches along the broken and spavined crust of roadway, drinking from the opened bottle held between his legs, the headlamps pale illumination as the car rutted its way. A mile or more above Franconia he came out into a brief meadow that broke the treeline sufficient to show Mount Lafayette in the moonlight, the cleft between the flanks of the mountain clear in the night air. He rolled the car to a stop and shut it down and got out carrying the bottle with him and walked into the meadow where the hay had just been mown and lay in long swaths. He sat there with his knees up, working at the bottle and smoking cigarettes, the moonlight over everything faint and brittle as the crisp sugar of the drying hay.