Peering at the bushes for movement, for a clue, he remembered the old gander, which had not flown downhill with the others. He called out and within seconds heard answering squawks—all the birds came to be fed except the old gander. For nine years the gander had been his companion, he’d raised him from a two-day-old gosling, and the greedy affectionate bird had never missed a feeding.

Sharkey searched in the thickets and gullies of his property, expecting to find the torn body of white feathers or the cowering bird itself. He found nothing. No sign of the bird at all gave him hope that it was not dead, but it was a wan hope. He searched part of each day for a week, and after that week his hope was gone. Whose intrusive loping dogs? He did not know and never found out. They’d come silently, heavily, red-eyed, like dogs in a dream. Another portent.

Around the same time, which was in the month that preceded his hitting the man on the bike at Waimea, a woman confronted him in the supermarket, Foodland, at the bottom of the hill. She was attractive—lovely eyes, a surfer’s body, her hair girlish in braids, vaguely familiar—but in the moments she began speaking to Sharkey her anger made her ugly and unknowable. She was fierce-faced, affronted, her pretty mouth twisted in threat—he could tell that as soon as she spoke she was preparing to attack him.

“You don’t reply to my letter!” She stepped in front of him. She was loud, unembarrassed, and when bystanders paused to gawk at her she shouted, “You must think you’re too good for me!”

“I didn’t get a letter,” Sharkey said, wondering if she was joking, backing away, trying to get out of the store.

“I put it in your mail can a month ago!” Shouting, she reached for him. “I asked for a simple favor and you didn’t reply!”

She had the animal threat face, the bared teeth, the wild hair, the recklessness of someone enraged, and he believed she was going to hit him, or scratch him—her arms were raised. Though he could block her attack, he could not easily stop her. He felt obvious, the foolish target of a woman’s anger—some bystanders began to laugh, and they hooted louder when he ran.

Before he got away he heard the woman say, “You’ve forgotten all the people who helped you,” and the yelp, “Karma!”

In his car, driving up the hill, he wondered if that was true—and wondered too if he would see the frantic woman again, or was she gone, like his goose and the crazy woman with the tennis racket?