“I'll skip it. I don't like heights,” I told her. “You are certainly knowledgeable about the battle.”

“It's hard not to be when you live here. And my husband was such a historian that he made it all quite real for me.”

“You must hate the idea of moving,” I said.

“I'm not going anywhere. Why did you think I'm about to move?”

“It was something someone said. The checkout clerk at Sheetz asked if I were going to buy the place. I assumed it was for sale.”

“Mack and I had talked about moving to Arizona for his health. Obviously there's no need for me to move now. Let's hurry. The others are already out of sight.”

“Don't you want to be up front with your friends?” I asked as we rode up a steep hill.

“Not really. They all know their way around the battlefield. You don't.”

We were now on a narrow trail, which wound through dense woods. “You can see how easy it would be to get lost,” she pointed out.

Despite the closely set trees, I saw a man walking slowly, holding something in front of him. He noticed us at about the same time, and ducked out of sight behind a tree.

“What do you suppose he's doing?” I asked.

“Poaching. That's a metal detector. He's looking for shallow graves to dig up and rob.”

“Isn't that illegal?”

“Of course it is, but people do it all the time. There's a lot of money to be made in selling things from the battlefield. In the old days, you didn't even have to dig. The stuff was lying all over the ground.” We were on a ridge, now, overlooking woods, fields, and rocky plains.

“That's Little Round Top,” she said, pointing to a hill. That rocky area beneath it is Devil's Den. And just to the side of it is the Wheatfield. There were more than four thousand dead and dying down there on the second day of the battle.”

I wanted to show I knew something about the Battle of Gettysburg, so I asked, “Where did Pickett's Charge take place?”

“Near the visitor center. That's where the High Water Mark is, the place where the South lost the war. After that, on July Fourth, Lee's army began to retreat.”

We rode downhill, through another heavily wooded area. This time, when we came out of the trees, we were not alone. There were two groups of about a dozen people each, gathered around picnic tables, but they didn't look like ordinary picnickers. Many in the first group carried American flags, others signs that said SPARE THE DEER AND NO MORE KILLING AT GETTYSBURG. The picketers in the second group carried signs that said HUNTERS DO IT WITH CLASS AND HUNTERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO. A man with silver hair in the first group looked up at us in surprise. He was no more surprised than I when I recognized Ken Nakamura.

Charlotte dismounted. “Let's stretch our legs a minute. I take it you two have met.”

Professor Nakamura walked over to us and bowed low to me. I did the best I could, bowing from the saddle on top of my horse. He inclined his head just slightly when he turned to Charlotte, a sign of disrespect that she didn't seem to recognize.

Before I dismounted, I took a look around to see if there was a wall or something nearby that I could stand on to get back on Maizie. I spotted a stone wall, about three feet high, and figured that would do.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Ken.

“Protesting the deer hunt. Every year, the park service sends out sharpshooters to thin the deer herd. We want to stop the heartless slaughter of these innocent animals. We try to post a presence every Saturday, at least until we're chased away.”

“And that other group?”

“Hunters who think they, and not the park's official gunmen, should be allowed in to shoot the deer.”

“Can we sit down, please?” Charlotte was fanning her face mask. “This thing is so damn hot. I feel like I've been sweating in a sauna.”

She perched on a boulder near the edge of the woods and patted a spot next to her. “Come sit down, Ken. We haven't talked since Christmas.”

He didn't move.

As if he forgot he was holding a flag, his fingers opened, and he dropped it. “I'll get it,” I said, stepping forward and bending over. I heard a cracking sound and something rushed past my left ear with a whistle. “What the-?”

Another crack off in the distance, caused me to turn back around. Ken Nakamura was on his knees, clutching at his chest. As I stared in disbelief, blood oozed between his fingers. He toppled sideways, and I dropped to the ground beside him.

“Get help,” I cried. The men and women from his group rushed over to us. “Someone's shot him.” I ripped off my jacket and was using it to stanch the flow of blood from his wound.

Even the pro-hunting group had gathered around us by now. With them there, I felt safer, for they protected us from more flying bullets.

“I called 911,” a woman said, showing me her cell phone. “So did I,” said half a dozen other people.

Ken was still conscious but was losing blood rapidly, and I feared for the worst. I kept pressure on the wound and hoped for a miracle. After what seemed like hours, but was in reality only a few minutes, a park ranger car pulled up, followed by an ambulance.

The emergency medical team from the ambulance made us all move back, put an IV in Ken's arm, did their best to stabilize him, then carefully placed him on a stretcher that they then carried to the ambulance.

“Can I go with him?” I asked. “I'm a friend of the family.” That wasn't exactly a fib; after all, I'd had dinner with his daughter-in-law only a few days ago.

“I guess,” one of the EMTs said, and I climbed into the back of the ambulance before he could change his mind.

I leaned out of the door. “My horse!”

“I'll take care of Maizie,” Charlotte called. “Please call and let me know how he's doing.”

As the emergency vehicle bounced across the field, the EMT asked me, “What happened?”

“Somebody was shooting in our direction. I heard at least two bullets. I was right next to Professor Naka-mura, talking to him, when he was hit.”

“Lots of boulders in Devil's Den. The shooter could have been hiding out there. I'd better call the park service and have them search the area.”

“He's had plenty of time to get away. We were all so busy tending to Ken that we wouldn't have seen him.”

“I wonder why this happened,” the technician said. “Was it some nut protesting the protest? Or a hunter taking advantage of the confusion to bag himself a deer?… Does Professor Nakamura have any enemies that you know of?”

“I don't really know him all that well,” I admitted. The medic looked sharply at me. “I'm more of a friend of a relative.”

At the hospital, I hung around outside the emergency room until Moonbeam arrived. “My ex is on the road with the high school football team, so I can't even let him know.” We hugged, then she went inside to see how Ken was doing. I promised to wait for her.

Soon I was approached by two policemen who said they wanted to ask me some questions. One of them whipped open a notebook and asked my name.

When I said, “Tori Miracle,” the two men exchanged glances I didn't understand. I proceeded to tell them everything I had seen and heard just prior to the shooting, which wasn't much. “I didn't even realize what was happening, until I saw Ken Nakamura bleeding from the chest.” I couldn't even tell them what direction the shots had come from.

The man with the notebook wrote down everything I said. When I was finished, he said, “Are you Tori Miracle from Lickin Creek?”

“Why, yes, I am. How did you know that?”

“I have a report on my desk from the park service. There was a Tori Miracle caught acting in a suspicious manner around the exhibit cases at the visitor center yesterday. Was that you?”

I acknowledged that it was indeed me. “But I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was only trying to see how difficult it would be to steal something.” They exchanged those glances again, and I realized that had not been a smart thing to say.