With a piece of Velcro holding the barrel of the dart rifle in place, Coats produced a double-reed elk bugle from his pack and held it to his lips. The bull elks bugled when in rut, and, though the season had just passed, the snow had come early, and it was not impossible that a male might still be out here, sounding his call. A vet would know this. Only the most effective bugling would ensure success.

But he was a professional hunter. Few understood the art of duplicating the wailing oboelike sound of an adult bull elk as he did. He believed any vet, any hunter, would be drawn by the chance to see a bull elk up close. There were few animals as beautiful and regal.

The procedure took some practice: sound the bugle; secure the device in his belt, reach for the D93S, and pull his eye to scope. Bugle, belt, rifle, scope. He waited. He tried another dry run. It took five seconds for him to get the bugle stashed and his eye to scope. It would take a person in that cabin at least a few seconds to get to a window upon hearing it.

Bugle, belt, rifle, scope.

He was ready.

He let out an enormously loud bugle, quavering with tremolo- more of a shriek than a cry. His eye focused on the cabin window… waiting… waiting.

No one came.

Another try: a second loud bugle-a trill up and down an out-of-tune scale, a screech, like fingernails on a blackboard.

Eye to the scope.

Light shifted on the far side of the window. It was an incredibly subtle change, but something was moving inside the cabin. Coats exhaled and then drew in a deep breath, his index finger moving from the trigger guard to in front of the trigger.

Demonstrating the patience of a martial arts master, our hunter slows his bodily functions in apprehension of the shot.

Steady.

His trigger finger never falters as he holds himself as still as a statue.

Another change of light. A slight movement of the curtain.

There! The curtain was pushed aside. Seen through the scope, the hand looked gigantic. A head moved into the frame: a man. Middle-aged. He could see the day-old whisker stubs on the man’s cheeks.

Aker.

The scope’s crosshairs stopped a few centimeters from dead center. He trained this magnified empty space on Aker’s chest, his own heart thumping wildly. His left hand came up and found the CheyTac’s trigger. He had yet to breathe, still working on the same breath. He squeezed: left, then right.

The CheyTac’s recoil ripped it off the limb, but that scraping sound was the only noise it made. The D93S popped, sounding like one strong handclap.

Through the scope, he saw flashes of blinding light as the window shattered. Pieces of glass rained down both inside and out. The curtain fluttered.

Then nothing.

No indication of success.

No indication of failure.

Nothing.

He jacked the CheyTac into place, ready to unload the magazine, if need be. If he’d missed with the dart, if the doc made a run for it…

He waited. One minute… Two…

He had no choice.

Time for Uncle Bruce.

THE BARREN, SNOW-COVERED HILL ROSE STEEPLY FROM THE locked gate like a bubble of shaving cream. A primitive road had been cut into the winding hillside, jutting out like a frown. Walt saw what might have been tracks-it could have been game or people-but there was too much drifting snow to know for certain.

The top of Mark Aker’s four hundred acres abutted the western edge of the Challis National Forest. A quarter mile to the west ran Yankee Fork Road, a dirt track, snowed in for the winter, that connected the town of Challis to the abandoned mining town of Sunbeam. To the east were a few sprawling ranches. This was God’s country, the last vestiges of community before the National Forest spread north and east for hundreds of square miles.

“No sign this gate’s been opened recently,” Brandon complained. “You still want to go through with this?”

A sharp but distant rifle report sounded. Small-gauge, Walt thought, as he connected the sound to the one he’d heard the night of the search: like a limb snapping. If anything was the Wild West, it was Challis, Idaho; the sound of a rifle, even out of hunting season, would normally have been of no interest. The reverberating dull echo prevented Walt from determining the direction of origin, but its proximity to Aker’s cabin put a spur in his backside.

“Hurry!” It had taken him all morning to round up Brandon and to make the three-hour drive. The sound of a gunshot fueled his impatience.It made sense that Mark might hide his family here-with the property listed under Francine’s maiden name there was little chance it would be connected by others to Mark-but maybe they hadn’t been the only ones to figure it out.

They vaulted the gate. Walt pulled his snowshoes through and was strapping them on as Brandon beat him to it and started up the unplowed road.

Walt charged off and quickly caught up, the technique more familiar to him. Larger and heavier, Brandon sunk down more deeply and couldn’t find a rhythm to his mechanics. Within a minute or two, Walt found his pace and passed Brandon. Brandon then leaned into the hill and regained lost ground, pulling even with Walt. It didn’t escape Walt that they were acting like schoolboys, but it didn’t slow him any either.

After a quarter mile of climbing, steam pouring off them, and just as they rounded the last of three ascending turns, the buckle on Walt’s snowshoe popped loose and he went down into a face-plant.

Brandon glanced back but didn’t slow down.

Walt sat up and tried to make sense of the equipment failure. He couldn’t find the buckle. He knotted the straps together, as tightly as possible, and took a few steps. It held.

Ahead of him, Brandon was closing in on the tiny cabin. It had a covered porch that wrapped around two of its sides. A stovepipe jutted out of the roof, no smoke coming from it. The one window on this side was blocked with a curtain.

“Hold up!” he hollered to Brandon. Procedure dictated they approach the structure with one man covering.

But his deputy took this as Walt’s attempt to fix the race and continued ahead.

“Stand down, Deputy!” Walt tried again.

Brandon glanced back, grinned, and then bent over to loosen the snowshoes. He came out of them fast and climbed up onto the porch, banging a shoulder into a wind chime. Light flashed from the spinning metal, and the tinkle of bells carried on the wind.

A spurt of blood burst from Brandon ’s shoulder, and the exterior wall of the cabin splintered with a thwack. He spun, reached out, and pulled down the wind chimes with him as he fell to the deck.

“Tommy!” Walt dove into the snow, rolled onto his back, and dumped his gloves in order to lose the snowshoes. He fumbled with the straps, finally kicking the snowshoes loose. Beretta in hand, he belly-crawled toward the cabin. “Stay down!” he shouted. “And don’t move!”

He stole a glimpse up the hill toward the woods, believing the shot had come from somewhere out there. Fresh tracks led through the snow in that direction. Then he lowered his head and continued his belly crawl, staying below the snow’s surface. He crawled… paused… listened. It felt as if the cabin was moving away from him; as hard as he crawled, he didn’t seem to get any closer.

“Fuck!” It was Brandon, from the porch.

“Stay down!” Walt shouted.

“I’m hit.”

“Stay down and don’t move.”

“Shut the fuck up! I’m hit.”

“I’m coming.”

“The fuck you are. He’ll pick you off.”

There’d been only the one shot. It offered two possibilities: a shoot and run or a shoot and hunt to the death.

Walt needed cover: he saw the move, as he finally drew closer. He jumped up onto the deck, spun, back first, to the house, tucked himself into a ball, hands over his face, and vaulted backward through the window. The glass exploded and rained down around him. He hit a table, caught a lamp with his toe, and brought both down on top of him. He scooted away from the glass, came to a standing position, and rushed the front door.