But it was Sunday now, past two p.m., thirty hours after setting out, and the frat boys still hadn’t killed a damn thing. They sat in a hide on the side of a hill that looked down over broken ground divided by a winding creek. On the other side of the valley, some 250 yards away, sat another rocky hillside, thick with pines and brush that was lush and green in the wet spring.
All three boys had sat silently on the cold ground for the past hour, waiting for something to happen, but Jay ended the silence when he turned to the guide and cleared his throat. “Hey, man. This is bullshit. You promised us we’d shoot some hogs.”
The bearded man covered in camo didn’t even turn Jay’s way. He kept looking out over the valley, then he spit chewing tobacco on the grass between his knees. “We’re hunting, not chasing. Best when your prey comes to you.”
Stuart looked at his watch. “Any idea when that might be?”
“You just have to open your eyes, ladies. They are out there if you look.”
The boys all picked up their binoculars and searched the valley floor with their lenses. They’d missed most all their shots under two hundred yards, so they didn’t bother to scan any farther out than that.
Finally Meat said, “There’s nothing down there but squirrels.”
The guide said, “I thought you said you kids came from Case Western. Sure you don’t go to the School for the Blind?”
Jay took his eyes out of his binos and looked to the guide. “I don’t want to be a dick or anything, but you know I could make one call to my dad and get you fired. He’s friends with the old dude who owns the lodge, you know.”
The guide spit again in the grass in front of him.
Stuart finished scanning the valley floor, then he moved the glass up and searched the opposite hillside. He stopped the movement of his binoculars suddenly.
“Wait. You aren’t talking about those hogs up there, are you?”
It took a minute, but Stuart got his two fraternity brothers to see what he was looking at. Far on the other side and almost as high as the hunters’ hide site, eight wild boar rooted in the wet grass and pine needles.
Jay said, “You’re kidding, right? Those hogs have to be four hundred yards away.”
The guide looked across the valley with his naked eyes. “Not an inch more than three seventy. Actually, I’d say . . . three sixty-three.”
Jay pulled his brand-new laser range finder out of his brand-new backpack. After nearly a minute’s work with the device, he retracted his eye out of the eyecup and turned to the guide, a look of astonishment on his face. “That’s incredible. The closest hog is three sixty-one.”
The guide spit again. “That one in front is a little underdeveloped. I was talking about that big black fella about two meters behind him.”
Meat just muttered, “Holy shit.”
Stuart said, “But we aren’t shooting from here.” A pause. “Are we?”
“Why not?”
Jay got over his awe at the guide’s natural distance-calculating ability. “Look. It’s your job to get us within range, not just to within sight.”
The guide replied with annoyance, “I could hit him.”
Jay laughed now. “Well, you’re the fucking guide, so you’re supposed to be better than us. But since you didn’t even bother to bring a rifle, you can’t prove it, can you?”
Meat held his bolt action Winchester out. “You want to take a shot? I’d like to see you try it.”
The guide said, “Why not?” but he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he spit once more to the side, rolled forward from a seated position into a prone position, unzipped his camouflage jacket, and reached into the folds of his clothing. To the utter confusion of the three fraternity brothers in the grass next to him, he slowly drew a perfectly ordinary-looking black handgun.
Jay said, “You’re crazy.”
The guide did not speak. He just leveled the semiautomatic pistol out in front of him, holding it in his right hand and resting his right forearm on top of his left forearm, which he positioned perpendicular to his body on the ground.
Stuart said, “That’s an impossible shot with a handgun.”
The guide spoke now, but it sounded as if he was talking to himself. “Humidity’s got to be seventy percent. Four-point-five-inch barrel, forty-cal hollow point, it’s gonna be pretty draggy, but I’ve got a full-value five-mile wind to work with. I’d say I need about a twenty-four-foot holdover.”
Meat said, “Even if you could hit one of those hogs from here, you couldn’t possibly kill it. That bullet will go an inch into its hide and get stuck in the fat or the muscle.”
The guide nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off his pistol’s iron sights. “You’re right. Let’s do a twenty-five-and-a-half-foot holdover, go for the brain pan.”
The three boys sat there agog, staring at the big bearded man lying in the grass next to them. They saw the barrel of the black pistol rise just slightly.
“You are fucking nuts,” muttered Jay, but then he quickly brought his binoculars up to his eyes. The other two did the same, and they focused on the target.
A single gunshot pounded the air next to them. Jay jerked his binos away from his eyes with a flinch, but he got them recentered on the dark brown hog on the far hill. The animal just stood there, his snout rooting idly in the pine needles.