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  The road took them past the shipping corrals for the Vaca Ranch, largest in the valley after the San Ignacio. In the distance, in a trough between two wavelike hills, horses grazed.

  “And after I got out of the army, I rode for the San Bernardino down in Sonora.” Blaine wasn’t finished with his paean to big outfits. “You didn’t think acres there, you thought square miles, a thousand of ’em, big as Rhode Island. Some of the last old-timey vaqueros worked there. It’s where me and Gerardo first got to be amigos. He was the remudero back then. We’d be three, four months in the saddle. There was nothin’ like it, ridin’ the far wing on the big drives in the fall and them vaqueros singin’ Norteño songs at night round the fire. That was cowboyin’. What we do here, it ain’t much more’n farmin’.”

  “Got your point,” Tessa said.

  “I wasn’t makin’ a point. Just conversation.”

  “Conversation implies that other people get to say something.”

  Blaine clasped his big, raw hands behind his neck and leaned back. “Well, say somethin’ then. Tell my cuzzy here about the health benefits of that or-ganic beef you raise.”

  “Improves your sex life,” she said breezily. “Organic beef is low in cholesterol, therefore less plaque in your arteries, therefore increased blood flow to vital areas. You can throw your Viagra out the window.”

  “And if you butcher them grass-fed beefs in the spring, before they’ve got summer grass in their bellies and fat on ’em, it’s like bitin’ into your belt.”

  “See, Gil, your cousin doesn’t think what I do is real ranching. It’s a New Age hobby. Right, Blaine?”

  Blaine said nothing. Castle got the impression that he and Tessa had argued these points before. They went on, banging through ice-crusted potholes, the land now closing around them in embraces of low hills, now opening up to present vistas of wind-ruffled meadows lunging into Mexico.

  “Some country, one of the last short-grass prairies left in the whole Southwest,” Blaine commented. “I never get tired of it. No matter how bad things are goin’, you feel good just lookin’ at it.”

  “It looks a lot like East Africa,” Castle said. “The yellow grass, those low trees.”

  “Some of that grass is African.” Tessa shifted to low to ease the truck down a steep, rocky incline, the rear end slewing sideways on the slick film of surface mud. “Why they imported it here, I have no idea. It’s not as good as native grama—”

  “Them brilliant minds with degrees in range management are who done it,” Blaine interjected. “Blue or black grama, you can graze up to thirty-two head a section. Love grass, twenty-five. That’s what comes of tryin’ to improve on God.”

  “You’ve been to Africa?” Tessa asked, shooting a sideways glance at Castle.

  “Yes. Kenya.”

  “Photography or hunting?”

  “Birds, not big game. Guinea fowl, francolin, sand grouse.”

  In the early African morning, after a gargantuan breakfast in camp, Castle, his hunting partner, Mandy, and a guide were moving through a dense scrub thicket when a loud snort close by sent the guide into a crouch. He signaled for quiet and raised the .470 double he carried in case they encountered a lion or Cape buffalo. “Heard a buff,” he whispered, and Mandy clamped a hand to her mouth to smother laughter. “What’s so bloody funny?” the guide snapped. “That was me,” she answered with embarrassed hilarity and pointed at her backside. And everyone, in a release of tension, broke out laughing. Castle was so much there that he started to laugh now, which instantly provoked an urge to sob. He managed to stifle it.

  “I’ve wanted to go to Africa ever since I was a girl,” Tessa said. “Maybe one of these years …” She broke off and motioned at a bird that had just launched itself from off a fence post. “Look, a prairie falcon.”

  It was a merlin, not a prairie falcon, but Castle did not correct her, fearing that his voice would break if he spoke. The memory, coming with such clarity and without forewarning, depressed him.

  “I’m new to birding,” Tessa was saying, apparently aware that she might have made a misidentification. “I suppose it’s a contradiction, bird watching and bird shooting. But consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, whoever said that.”

  “Emerson.” Castle said. “‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do.’”

  “Well now. And Monica told me you’re a stockbroker.”

  This remark rankled Castle. “Was. And brokers have been known to read more than quarterly reports.”

  His defensiveness drew a flinch from her. “Hey, I wasn’t implying that.”

  Yeah, you were, Castle thought, but kept it to himself.

  They were on lightly grazed government land now, and the grass bordering the road rose almost to the truck’s door handles. Tessa stopped at a Texas gate. Blaine climbed out and went to it with his stiff-kneed walk, bent slightly at the waist.

  “An old stove-up cowboy,” she remarked. “He’s like something out of another century, and I don’t mean the twentieth.”

  Blaine swung the gate open, Tessa drove through, then waited for Blaine to close the gate. She followed a faint two-track alongside a wash and parked next to a windmill, its blades turning, stopping, turning again in the spasmodic wind. They got out of the truck. When Tessa reached behind her neck to gather her chestnut brown hair and pile it atop her head, Castle caught himself staring at the back of her slender neck. She placed a baseball cap over her hairdo and pointed toward a range of oak-studded hills cut up by grassy canyons.

  “What we’ll do is follow one of those canyons more or less east till we come to a tank. We can water the dogs there. Then we swing north and back west down the next canyon.”

  She spoke like an infantry officer planning an attack. The dogs were pacing in the truck bed, letting out eager whines. Castle turned on Sam’s collar, Tessa did likewise with Klaus’s—it mimicked a hawk’s screech—and then opened the tailgate and released them. Both animals leaped out and tore off at a dead run, mad to do the one thing they’d been born to do. Castle and Tessa blew whistles to call them back in. The temperature had climbed considerably in the past hour—it was warm enough for shirtsleeves. The hunters crossed the wash in single file, then spread out and set off up the first canyon. The dogs had settled down and were quartering ahead, their collars giving off a cacophony of low beeps and shrieks. The canyon narrowed, and the arroyo that cut through it fell in a series of rocky ledges, the pools below the ledges covered by membranes of ice. A short time later Sam’s collar fell into the quick, steady pulse that meant she’d stopped. Klaus’s signal joined in. Beep-beep-beep, scree-scree-scree. The dogs were out of sight, somewhere in the oaks covering the ridge on the right side of the canyon.

  With his arthritic joints Blaine had fallen behind. Castle and Tessa waited for him to catch up. They found Sam on a hard point on the slope of the ridge, Klaus honoring alongside her. It would be nearly impossible to shoot the quail amid the dense trees, so Castle volunteered to kick them out while Blaine and Tessa positioned themselves on the meadow above. If the birds broke in their direction, they would have clear shots. He came up behind Sam, locked up so tight she looked like a statue of herself. Nothing happened as he walked slowly past her—the quail had moved recently, leaving enough scent to convince the dogs they were still there. There were egg-shaped scrapes in the dirt, where the birds had been scratching for seeds.

  Sam and Klaus broke point and stalked uphill to the meadow. Klaus, a young dog, seemed a little unsure of himself. Sam was all business, utterly focused on her task, transformed from the sweet, slightly goofy pet she was around the house into a predator. Castle’s belly tightened as she locked up once more, her long snout aimed at a clump of catclaw. Klaus honored again. A splendid sight—the orange-ticked white setter and the mottled-brown shorthair in total arrest.

  A cock broke cover, streaking straight away for the trees on
the far side of the meadow. Knowing the rest of the covey would flush at any second, Castle and Tessa held their fire; but Blaine couldn’t resist and shot twice, downing the bird with his second barrel. Four more burst from the catclaw, a wild, thunderous beating of wings. Three curved sharply behind Castle, but the fourth, another male, quartered in front of him, a dark blur against the pale winter sky. He swung out ahead and fired and felt all the old, confused feelings of regret and elation as the bird tumbled, feathers drifting in the path of its fall. The dogs remained staunch—the entire covey hadn’t yet flown. With the quickness that came from long practice, Castle ejected the spent shell and reloaded the bottom barrel.

  “Got one of the hens,” Tessa said, breaking her gun to insert two fresh shells. The remaining birds exploded at that moment, flying right at the three people and only a couple of yards overhead. They had to pivot 180 degrees to shoot. The reports of their six shots were almost simultaneous. Four quail dropped as if they’d flown into an invisible wall. Castle accounted for one, Blaine for another, Tessa for a pair.

  “Nice double!” he said to her, a little out of breath. “Nice shooting!”

  She acknowledged the praise with a nod. “I’m forced to admit that it was.”

  They spent the next fifteen minutes trailing the dogs in erratic circles to retrieve the dead birds. Blaine’s first was the biggest, round as a ball, and they stood around admiring its black breast and belly speckled with white, the clownish whorls of the facial markings that gave the Mearns’ its other name—harlequin quail.

  “Beautiful things, ain’t they?” he said. “Weren’t so damn good to eat, I couldn’t hunt ’em.”

  “And I wouldn’t hunt with you if you felt any different,” Tessa said.

  Castle complimented his shooting—he was better than Sally said he was.

  “Yeah, you listen to her, I never done anything right in my life except to marry Monica.”

  Half an hour later they came to the dirt tank. The dogs leaped in to drink and cool themselves, scaring a killdeer that rose with a cry of alarm. Soaking wet and looking sleek as an otter, Klaus bounded away and got his first point of the day: three birds, two of which flew into cover before anyone could get a bead on them. Castle killed the third. They worked westward down another canyon, found no more coveys, and returned to the truck, where they rested the dogs and field-dressed the quail and placed them in freezer bags.

  “Eight,” said Castle. “Sally told me she wanted a mess of ’em.”

  “Good old Mama, givin’ orders to everybody.”

  From the cooler in the backseat Tessa got the sandwiches and soft drinks Monica had packed. Sitting against the truck, looking out toward a butte called Saddle Mountain and the snowy peak of Mount Wrightson in the far-off Santa Ritas, they ate lunch. Sam, curled up beside Castle, lifted her head, perked her ears, and barked. Rising to see what had aroused her, Castle saw four young Mexicans dressed in black—black baseball caps, black jackets, black trousers, black tennis shoes—approaching the truck. They halted when Castle showed himself.

  “¡Señor!” one shouted. “¡Quisiéramos agua! ¿Tiene agua?”

  At the sound of the voice, Blaine and Tessa stood up.

  “¡Tenemos mucho sed! ¡Quisiéramos agua!”

  “Drug runners, Gil. You can tell by the way they’re dressed,” Blaine muttered. “Dropped their loads, and now they’re hoofin back to old Meh-hee-co.”

  “¡Por favor! ¡Necesitamos agua! ¡Agua y nada más!”

  As the Mexicans advanced, Blaine’s face blushed with anger. “¡No tenemos agua! ¡Vamos!” he yelled, and shocked everyone by drawing his pistol, which he held in both hands and aimed squarely at the man who had spoken. “Go on, get the fuck out of here!”

  “Okay. Está bien,” the man called, raising his hand. “No problema.” He turned and disappeared into the wash with his companions. Dissolved was more like it. They were there and then not there.

  “Christ, Blaine,” Castle said. “Did you have to do that?”

  Blaine holstered the Luger. “Yeah, I did. Maybe when those boys get back to Mexico, they’ll pass the word that there’s one gringo ain’t gone to put up with their crap.” He stood looking at where the drug runners had been. “Quisiéramos agua. Fuckin’ horseshit. It wasn’t water they wanted, it was the truck. They didn’t see us sittin’ behind it and figured they’d hot-wire it and give themselves a ride home.”

  Tessa looked at him as if she’d never seen him in her life. He sat down again and in a moment recovered himself. “You two want to hunt some more, go ahead. I’ll hang back and give my legs a break and guard the wagon train.”

  Castle, a little shaken by the encounter—the drug runners’ black garb and the suddenness with which they’d appeared and disappeared, his cousin’s swift rage, his transformation into someone else—was ready to call it a day; but he didn’t want to disappoint Sally’s hopes for a quail feast.

  “Well, that was a surprise,” he said to Tessa as they pushed up a new canyon. “Think Blaine was right? They were going to steal the truck?”

  She shrugged in the most charming way, a quick, awkward, school-girlish lift and fall of her shoulders. “Probably not. Guess I can’t blame him for being a little edgy, after what happened. But pulling that pistol—”

  Sam, lunging over a narrow arroyo, interrupted her. In a glorious display of skill and athleticism, the setter caught bird scent in midleap, spun halfway around while still in the air, and hit the ground on point, her body bent like a bow.

  Mearns’ quail sometimes double-covey, and the one Sam had scented was such a covey—two dozen birds blasted skyward. Castle and Tessa each shot a double, then, flushing half a dozen singles on the follow-up, killed four more.

  “That’s about enough,” he said. “Any more, and it’ll just be butchery.”

  Taking a breather before the hike back, they sat under the umbrella of a tall Emory oak. Castle asked where she’d learned to shoot so well. Her father had taught her. Not just an avid wing shooter, an obsessive one, she said, volunteering that he’d been a film industry lawyer in L.A., where she’d been raised with two older brothers who shared their dad’s enthusiasms.

  “If I didn’t learn, he wouldn’t have paid any attention to me at all. This was Dad’s favorite gun.”

  “May I?”

  She handed the over-and-under to him. He snapped it into his shoulder, felt its balance, and admired the scrollwork on its receiver, the finish of its walnut stock. A Parazzi. New, its price tag would roughly equal the cost of a low-mileage used car.

  “Dad did pretty well for himself,” she said, noticing that he’d appraised the shotgun’s value “For us, too. I guess you could say I’m a trust fund brat.”

  “So what brought you here from L.A.?” he asked. “Or is that prying?”

  Brown eyes, each above a spray of cheekbone freckles, looked at him with an expression that was earnest and forthright but not innocent. “Dad hunted this valley every year and loved it. He bought the Crown A years ago. Planned to retire on it, but lawyering for Columbia, Paramount, and so forth—that wasn’t the fast lane in the legal business, that was Daytona. Mucho stress, mucho three-martini lunches. Heart attack at sixty-one. That doesn’t answer your question, does it?”

  Castle handed the gun back to her. “Uh … No, but if—”

  “I’m a hermit,” she said. “I don’t like people all that much.”

  “You don’t strike me as a misanthrope.”

  “I’m not, but that’s my ambition. I lived in Scottsdale when I was younger. Worked as a graphic designer, lived way out in the desert with two dogs and two horses. I woke up one day and found that the desert had disappeared. I was surrounded by houses and golf courses and said the hell with this and moved out here. So what brought—” She stopped herself.

  “What brought me out here?”

  Tessa was silent for a moment. “A slip of the tongue. Monica told me, and to not mention it. I’m sorry. For mentioning
it.”

  “That’s okay.” He intended to leave it at that but was somehow compelled to go further. “She was a freelance photographer. Travel magazines mostly. She had an assignment to take pictures of some posh new resort in Hawaii. She’d decided to spend the weekend with her family in Boston because I was going to be away in Atlanta that same weekend. Monday morning she flew out of Boston for her connection in L.A. The plane she was on was the one they crashed into the north tower.”

  “She was on one of the planes? Monica didn’t tell me that.”

  “American Airlines eleven,” he said. The flight number had a fateful ring, like the Titanic. “Know where I was when it happened? Shooting skeet with a customer I was wooing in Atlanta. A big-shot sports agent. I was hoping to convince him that his stable of quarterbacks and home-run hitters should invest with our firm. He wasn’t shooting well, he was frustrated and pissed off with himself. I gave him some instructions and he improved and that relieved me. See, I wanted him to be in a good mood when I pitched him. That’s what I thought was important. We finished up and went into the clubhouse for lunch. The TV was on, and that’s when I first heard of it.”

  Tessa reached out to touch him sympathetically but quickly withdrew her hand, as if he were a man who’d been struck by lightning and still carried the charge. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

  “I couldn’t either, before it happened. There were a lot of things I couldn’t imagine.”

  “You think you’re immune,” she said, with a knowing movement of her head, an indication that perhaps something terrible and unexpected had happened to her.

  “Now I can imagine just about anything,” Castle carried on. “Like the way those drug runners popped up out of nowhere. I said it was a surprise. Really, it wasn’t. Spooky, but not a surprise. I think if a meteor crashed right in front of us right this second, it wouldn’t surprise me. One minute the person you love most in the world is here, and then, quick as you can flip a light switch, she’s … she’s … ashes, she’s air. Like she’d never been … And what drives you crazy is that somebody did that to her …”