Free You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Page B

weight against the big heavy rabbit, really a miracle of sorts.
    “You were an old one,” Leonard said. “You should have been prepared, shouldn’t you?” touching it with the rifle tip. “How many near misses from coyote or fox or rifle have you had?” He reloaded the clip and grinned. I cannot miss today, he thought. Everything comes down today.
    He went down the hill, breathing hard, his head aching a little now, his neck itching. The doctors had encouraged exercise but not too much, to keep his strength, the way the doctors always could blandly respond in clichés, yes one needs milk and exercise and sunshine. For what should he keep his strength, and he knew, for those days of debility that awaited him, this debilitating disease that would grind him down to an emaciated parody of himself until he contracted something like pneumonia that would kill him. Build strength for that.
    The cattle at the pinch of the pasture along the creek did not go on ahead of him, as they would before, but turned and came back, right around him.
    “Something scares you more than I do,” he murmured.
    There was brush and trees along the creek there. A blackbird, the redwing fighter came to heckle him, right over his head, squawking fiercely, and he thought of shooting, decided against it for no good reason. The bird drifted back, apparently keeping near its ground nest, and another little bird came to whistle and shriek at him, a tiny bird, a wren he believed, tiny and brown and very beautiful; he had seen the kind up by the farm. The bird fluttered away, across the creek and to a cottonwood tree quite a distance from him, and he, feeling daring at the chance because of his shooting well that day, balanced the rifle on his left hand, fastened it tightly with his right, and feeling absolutely nothing at all at that distance, shot. There was an astonishing puff of feathers and it came down.
    At that moment too he sensed rather than saw a motion, and there through the brush, on the other side of the creek, not fifty feet away, was a car parked, and he saw in the clearing a little distance from the car the figure come up, and he knew suddenly why the cattle would not come any further, this alien thing blocking their way.
    There was a motion of the figure as if reaching for something, groping wildly for something, the person had been asleep, Leonard could tell that, and startled with suddenness, and now blinking, staring around, and coming in his alarmed awakening at last to a position on his hands and knees on the blanket behind the car, he at last seeing Leonard and from the drifting feathers, what Leonard shot at—and hit.
    He stared like one engulfed, sprung there in his strange posture, caught absolutely, the astonished face, the disheveled hair,the impotent look in the eyes, and the outrage on the face at being caught thus, impotent. For he, Leonard, had the gun.
    Leonard knew in that instant that this was the man who was wanted, this was the killer, putting it all together, the necessity of having to take down the fence to park here, the isolated location, the mid-afternoon sleep, and the fright of the young man. He wondered if there was another or two or three. He could see nothing, no one in the car or along the creek.
    “Shooting birds, hunh?” the young man over there said, his voice choking. “That was quite a shot.” He knelt, leaning forward on his hands, crouched like a dog, really, looking at Leonard, and Leonard realized then that the other was waiting too, trying to determine Leonard’s exact purpose there, whether he was caught. “You handle a gun pretty good.”
    “Not as good as some others,” Leonard said. “Are you alone here?”
    “Oh sure, just me.” He tried a grin. “Came down for a break; such a nice peaceful spot.”
    He was twenty or twenty-one, Leonard guessed, although he found it difficult to give precise ages, always had, a young man with a decent face, slender, a hundred and fifty pounds or