Free Crossers by Philip Caputo

door, and as he retrieved his stained hunting vest from the interior, Sam jumped in, immediately settling herself on her sheepskin bed.
    “Out,” he said, tugging her collar. The dog looked at him, confused. “C’mon, out. We’re sticking close to home today.”
    She leaped to the ground. He turned on the beeper and set off, climbing the ridge behind the house. Sam was over it well ahead of him, the two-tone ranging beep growing fainter as she ran down the far side. At the top he paused to catch his breath and take in the intimidating vastness of the country. A narrow arroyo ditched the canyon below, while in the distance, beyond cinnamon-brown foothills dotted with dark green oaks and junipers, the Huachucas rose to nearly ten thousand feet, their upper slopes darkened by dense pine forests and their peaks covered in snow, as if some fragment of the Colorado Rockies had broken off and drifted into the southwest. His eye followed the mountains in their fall toward Mexico, where a desert plateau reached to a horizon as ruler-straight as the horizon on a tranquil sea, except for a cone-shaped mountain, rising far away in Sonora.
    The collar’s point-beep went off, steady and insistent. Sam had found birds. He couldn’t see her, but she sounded fairly close. He sidestepped down the ridge toward the arroyo, stumbling on the rocks and shale camouflaged by the knee-high grass. Last night’s sadness had faded, and yet this thought—If there is a God in heaven, and if He sheds his awful grace, He will cause me to trip and fall this moment and the gun to go off and make an end—streaked into Castle’s mind. It streaked out when he spotted Sam, on a hard point under an oak tree, her white coat shining in the broken light, her neck outstretched and nose low to the ground, her tail extended like a feathered lance. It was a sight he’d beheld countless times, and it never ceased to thrill him. In the quivering tension between her instinct to pounce and her breeding to hold fast, there was a beauty that made him feel he could go on after all. This was why he hunted with her—she got him through the day.
    The birds Sam was pointing were Mearns’ quail, a species that held so tight, a hunter practically had to step on them to put them in the air. Castle approached slowly, the gun in his crooked elbow. He’d decided not to shoot these quail. Shooting them would somehow spoil the magic. He was two feet behind Sam when a male and female broke cover, flying away in a V. Sam flinched but stayed put.
    “Good girl,” he said softly. “More in there, eh?”
    He took a few steps and stood alongside the dog. The covey exploded almost from underfoot, a land mine of feathers and beating wings. One bird slapped his hat brim as it took off, the others flushed in every direction, the sudden change from silent arrest to swift and noisy motion simply breathtaking. Castle fired twice into the air, to give Sam the impression that he’d shot and missed. He didn’t want her to think that all her effort had been wasted.
    Immediately she bounded off, circling to find the singles and doubles from the broken covey. Partway up the ridge, where a couple of birds had flown, she stopped as if she’d hit a wall. She did not strike a point but merely stood still, staring into a manzanita thicket.
    “What’ve you got?” he said, walking toward her.
    Something moved in the thicket, a dark shape. Thinking it might be a javelina, he put the gun in his shoulder and thumbed the safety. A boar javelina could disembowel a dog with its tusks.
    “Get away from there, Sam. Sam! Come!”
    She didn’t move. When he was five or ten yards away, Castle heard a low groan, almost human. He crept closer—and made a quick jump backward when he saw a man lying amid the tangled, reddish branches of the manzanita, a young, brown-faced man with matted black hair wearing sneakers, dirt-smeared khaki jeans, and a dark blue padded jacket. As Castle parted the branches with