Because of the rhino's barge-like girth and laconic-looking trot, the swiftness of its advance was misjudged by both Stoat and Clapley – though not by the two guides, whose awe at the decrepit pachyderm's resurgence was outweighed by their aversion to violent death. Durgess, who anticipated the next phase of the fiasco, grimly flattened himself to the ground. Asa Lando spun on one heel and ran for the live oak. Governor Dick Artemus took the cue; dropped his gun and hit the grass ass-first. His two bodyguards dashed forward, seizing him roughly under the armpits and dragging him toward the zebra-striped truck. Meanwhile, Willie Vasquez-Washington backpedaled, snapping pictures in hasty retreat.

And Palmer Stoat, faced with a charging African rhinoceros, raised his rifle and took aim. Exactly sixty-six feet away, Robert Clapley did the same. Both men were too adrenalized to recognize their respective vulnerabilities in the lethal geometry of a cross fire. Both were too caught up in the heart-pounding maleness of the moment to sidestep manifest disaster.

It had been years since Stoat had shot an animal that was more or less ambulatory, and he trembled excitedly as he drew a bead on the grizzled brow of the lumbering rhino. As for Clapley, killing it would be more than a display of machismo– it would fulfill a fantasy that consumed him night and day. Through his rifle scope (laughably unnecessary at such close range), Clapley breathlessly admired the rhino's immense horn. He imagined presenting the hair-encrusted totem – upright and daunting – on a satin pillow to the twin Barbies, who would be curled up nude and perfumed and (he fervidly hoped) blond. He envisioned a grateful glow in their nearly completed faces. Next week: the chins. By Christmas: perfection.

As the rhinoceros thundered on a straight line between them, Clapley and Stoat swung their gun barrels to lead the beast, as they would a dove on the wing. Except, of course, they were not aiming upward, but level.

"Hold your fire!" Durgess shouted, strictly for the record.

That night, drinking heavily at a bar in Mclntosh, neither he nor Asa Lando would be able to say which of the fools had fired first. Judging by the stereophonic roar of gunfire – and the instantaneous results – Robert Clapley and Palmer Stoat could have pulled their triggers simultaneously. Both of them completely missed the rhinoceros, naturally, and both went down very hard – Clapley, from the Weatherby's bone-jarring recoil; Stoat, from a combination of recoil and shrapnel.

Reconstructing the split-second mishap wasn't easy but, with some help from Master Jack Daniel, Durgess and Asa Lando would conclude that Stoat's slug must have struck the trunk of the oak at the instant Clapley's slug struck Stoat's Winchester, which more or less exploded in Stoat's arms. At that point the lobbyist was not dead, although his right shoulder had been seriously pulped by splintered gun stock.

Asa Lando would recall looking down from the tree and seeing Stoat, hatless and dazed, struggling to his knees. Likewise, Durgess would remember helping Robert Clapley to an identical position, so that the two hunters were facing each other like rival prairie dogs. But the guides well knew that Stoat wasn't staring at Clapley, and Clapley wasn't staring at Stoat – both men were scanning intently for a fresh rhinoceros corpse.

"You missed," Durgess informed Clapley.

"What?" Clapley's ears ringing from the gunshot.

"Mr. Stoat missed, too," Durgess added, by way of consolation.

"What?"

As Durgess stood up to scout for the runaway rhino, he heard frantic shouting from high in the live oak: Asa Lando, trying to warn him. The ground under Durgess's boots began to shake – that's what he would talk about later.

Like a damn earthquake, Asa. Could you feel it, too?

The rhinoceros had cut back unexpectedly and now was rumbling up from behind the scattered hunting party; prey turned predator. There was no time to flee. Asa squawked from the tree. Palmer Stoat spit his broken cigar and gaped. Durgess dove for Robert Clapley but Clapley wasn't there; he was down on all fours, scrambling after his rifle. Helplessly Durgess rolled himself into a ball and waited to be crushed. Beneath him the earth was coming unsprung, a demonic trampoline.

Durgess felt the rhinoceros blow past like a steam locomotive, wheezing and huffing. He peeked up in time to see an outstretched black shape silhouetted briefly against the creamy pink sky, and to feel Labrador toenails scuff his forehead. Durgess decided he was in no hurry to get up, a decision reinforced by the sound of Clapley shrieking.

The guide would remember remaining motionless until hearing a man's heavy footsteps, and feeling a shadow settle over him. He would remember rocking up slowly, expecting to see Asa, but facing instead a bearded apparition with a gleaming grin and a molten red eye that might have been plucked from the skull of the devil himself.

"We've come for the dog," the apparition said.

While being dragged to safety, the governor lost the tender scabs on his buttocks. By the time the bodyguards got him to the Suburban, he had bled through his khaki trousers – the word shame appearing chimerically across his ass, like stigmata. If Willie Vasquez-Washington noticed, he didn't say so. He and Dick Artemus were hustled into the backseat. The FDLE agents hopped up front, locked the doors and radioed for a helicopter and ambulances.

Riding back to the lodge, the governor looked drained and shaken, his great cliff of silver hair now a tornadic nest. He sank low in the seat. Willie Vasquez-Washington rode ramrod-straight, a fervent amazement on his face.

"Sweet Jesus," he said. "Did you see that!"

"Willie?"

"Those poor fuckers."

"Willie!"

"Yeah?"

"I was never here. You were never here." The governor placed a clammy hand on Willie Vasquez-Washington's knee. "Can we agree on that?"

The vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. With his other hand he touched a button on the Nikkormat, still hanging from his neck, and set off the automatic rewind. The hum from a swarm of wasps would not have been more unsettling to Dick Artemus.

Ruefully his eyes fell on the camera. "You got some pictures, huh?"

Willie Vasquez-Washington nodded. "A whole roll."

"Color or black-and-white?"

"Oh, color."

Dick Artemus turned and stared straight ahead. Just then, a white-tailed buck crashed out of the cabbage palms and entered the path in front of the truck. The agent who was driving stomped the accelerator and swerved expertly around the deer.

"Nice move!" Willie Vasquez-Washington cheered, bouncing in the seat.

The governor never flinched, never blinked.

"Willie," he said, wearily.

"Yeah?"

"What is it you want?"

Twilly Spree tried to go after McGuinn but he was chased down and tackled by Clinton Tyree, who whispered in his ear: "Let it happen, son."

Said it with such a startling serenity that Twilly understood, finally, what sustained the man – an indefatigable faith that Nature eventually settles all scores, sets all things straight.

So they let the dog go, then watched as the rhinoceros snorted to action. It ran halfway up the slope before turning back toward the hunting party, which dissolved in bedlam. Viewed from the bank of the knoll, the debacle unfolded with eerie, slow-motion inevitability – the two idiots swinging their rifles as the beleaguered rhino attempted to cut between them, a triangulated aim turning linear and deadly. And when the shots rang out, it indeed appeared that Palmer Stoat and Robert Clapley had managed to blast one another in a brainless cross fire.