Free Hunters by Chet Williamson

blowing through the ravine and
up into his face, so he knew the deer couldn't get his scent. For
some reason he couldn't name, he wanted them to know that he was
there, and had no intention of harming them.
    "You guys are cool," he said to the deer,
loud enough that they could hear. They stopped as one, and the
heads went up in his direction. The only movement was their tails
flicking, as though the tails were making up their minds what to
do. "Got your brains in your ass, huh?"
    That was enough. The first deer, the doe,
bolted, and went crashing through the brush up the other side of
the ravine. The two bucks followed immediately, and Chuck watched
the flag-like tails vanish in the brush across the ravine. He
chuckled to himself. "Yeah," he said softly. "Definitely cool."
    In a half hour hunters came. There were three
of them, walking north along the ravine without stealth, as though
they had somewhere to be and wanted to get there as quickly as
possible. When Chuck heard the crunch of their boots on the dry
leaves, he crouched lower behind the rock. They never saw him as
they passed, and he had no urge to try for a triple kill. It would
be too dangerous. Jean Catlett's first rule might be to get the job
done, but Chuck's was not to get caught. If you were caught, you
couldn't do shit.
    He waited another hour without seeing a deer
or a hunter. Throughout the morning, he had heard random shots,
most of them sounding as though they came from at least a half mile
away. But now he heard a shot that sounded much closer. In a few
minutes a deer came down the ravine from the north, the direction
in which the hunters had gone. It ran in a jerking stagger,
lurching from side to side, caroming off trees and rocks, falling,
getting up, and struggling on again. From its side a nearly
constant stream of blood jetted, leaving a crimson trail behind
it.
    Chuck watched it helplessly as it made its
ragged way through the ravine, passing him where he now stood high
above, heading south, the path of least resistance to its
stuttering flight. Then he saw the man coming out of the brush, one
of the hunters he had seen before. The hunter was running in a
weary trot, his rifle at port arms position across his chest. Once
he stopped and aimed, but apparently could not center the buck in
its erratic flight, so kept running after it.
    The shot wasn't as hard for Chuck as for the
hunter. The deer was broadside to him, and the next time it
stumbled and scrabbled for a foothold to run again, he caught it in
the crosshairs of his scope and pulled the trigger of his Remington
.30-06.
    The bullet caught the animal low and behind
the shoulder, directly where Chuck knew the heart to be. The buck
never got to its feet. The legs collapsed, its head slapped the
ground chin first, and the body followed. Within two seconds it was
still, except for the front legs, whose movement was reduced to a
mere reflexive shadow of their previous pumping action.
    Chuck lowered his rifle, worked the bolt to
put another shell in the chamber, and looked at the hunter, fifty
yards away from the dead deer. The man was looking up at him and
glowering furiously. "Goddam it!" the man yelled up at him. "That
was my deer. Another hundred yards and I woulda had him. He
was mine! "
    Chuck let a wide grin split his face. "You
want him?" he called down to the man.
    " Yeah . You're damn right I want
him!"
    "Take him then. He's all yours," he
shouted.
    For a moment the hunter looked at him as if
he thought he was crazy, then slowly walked toward the dead deer,
his eyes on Chuck, frowning as he went. When he got to the deer, he
looked down at it. The animal's feet had stopped jerking. There was
no movement at all. When he looked back, Chuck had his chest in the
crosshairs of the .30-06.
    The hunter's mouth fell open. His jaw waggled
for a moment, and then he said, just loud enough for Chuck to hear
him, "Hey, you want it, you can have it."
    "Asshole," Chuck whispered as he pulled