The rifle barrel leveled again, but aimed at where the bucks had vanished. Then Joe saw two men in blankets and snowshoes coming out of the pines, their faces and hands blackened with paint, long hair unbraided and loose. Although the first was stooped with age, he led the second with a long cord tied to the wrist, as if the man behind were blind. Following, he shouldered a net stuffed with dead bluejays; the net looked like a brilliant blue wing. There was also an owl in the net, and a nighthawk, birds that could only be netted against a moon. The men must have heard the shots, probably saw them fired, but they crossed the meadow between the elk and the trees where Augustino hid, neither quickening nor stopping, slowly trudging down the snowy slope with the prizes of their own hunt. Though they seemed to be headed in the direction of Santiago, Joe didn’t recognize them. They moved like an apparition, or a short parade from another world. Then they reached a line of aspen at the bottom of the slope and were gone.

“Sergeant!” Augustino called out. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to kill you. I do want to kill you, but I have more important things to do.”

“The hell you do.”

“I have duties to perform.” Augustino stepped forward into the clearing, his rifle in his left hand, barrel up. “I can’t allow myself to be distracted, to enjoy mere personal vindication, to sink to your level.”

“It was your idea to come here.”

“Shoot an officer and it’s your life, Sergeant.” Augustino dropped the rifle as he approached. “We came for an elk and we shot one, that’s all that transpired. Nothing else really happened.”

“Because you missed.”

“But you’re not in a position to publicly accuse me of anything, not a sergeant fornicating with the wife of the officer he accuses. This is an experience to put behind us. A morning’s hunt is all.” He stopped twenty feet short of Joe.

“You don’t shoot a cow that’s carrying.” Joe aimed. Head shot? At this range, a .45 would take off the captain’s head from the brow up.

“We have to get back to the Hill to pick up the Director and General Groves.” Augustino looked at his watch. “Mrs. Augustino will be going to Sunday services.”

“If you want to get rid of me, Captain, why don’t you just post me to the Pacific or Europe?”

“No, you serve me better where you are.”

“Doing what? Driving? Opening doors? Screwing your wife?”

“The information, Sergeant.”

“Useless.” Joe got to his feet.

“Not at all, Sergeant. It makes you an informer.”

“There’s got to be something else.”