They left the weapons carrier by the road and trudged up a sloping meadow. A pre-dawn grayness filled the Valle, and in the distance the higher peaks of the Jemez were flagged with mist. Joe had the Winchester and a pocket of rounds; the captain had chosen the Marlin. In spite of himself, the crisp air and snow excited Joe; it was a perfect morning for a hunt. And daybreak, the perfect hour. Ridiculous as it seemed, he saw an identical eagerness in Augustino. They moved quickly upwind to the black edge of the tree line and crouched. Elk would be more likely to cross the meadow; mule deer were louder moving through trees. Joe worked his way along the tree line, further upwind, and Augustino followed as naturally as if he’d hired Joe as a guide. They stopped where the trees formed a spit on the edge of the meadow, commanding 100 degrees of white slope and another tree line facing them only sixty yards away. Their disadvantage was that they’d be in sunlight before the opposite tree line, but they couldn’t have everything.

The Winchester’s sights were set for one hundred and fifty yards. He’d aim low on deer coming out of the trees. He might hit nothing; he’d never fired the rifle before and didn’t know whether it pulled right, left, up or down. Augustino pointed to faint dimples in the snow at their feet. Joe knelt and blew the loose flakes away, exposing impressions the shape of dragging double crescents. “Heifer?” Augustino mouthed. “Elk,” Joe mouthed back. No more than an hour before.

No more than an hour before. This was the best part of hunting: the parsing of time. He had probably hunted in this same spit of spruce and pines twenty years ago with his father.

When solid forms were so faint, it was easy to see into memory. It was a quality of the hour, neither night nor day, that lent every second its weight. Eyes seemed to grow huge and adept even as they were fooled by the nod of a branch. An owl seesawed through the trees. Joe didn’t care if deer or light ever came. If someone was going to shoot him through the head, this was as good a time as any, but the captain was watching with the same concentration. Of course, mice, shrews and rats ran back and forth all night, and hunters saw their snow tracks only in the morning. At daybreak a man could only see well enough to shoot something his own size. Shadows clung, half-born. When what was real and what was shadow was uncertain, a man could meet his opposite, Joe thought. Like this white racist officer from Brownsville, Texas. He and Joe could huddle under the same spruce bough.

“Sergeant, tell me,” the captain whispered, “have you ever thought of this as the Century of the Jew?”

“No.”