Bunny swung the muzzle up and over, switched hands and slightly broke the bolt action with his right hand. Then he handed the rifle to Alex. Bunny's hands were dirty. Alex took the rifle, swinging the muzzle over them again. The rifle felt larger than a twenty-two but smaller than the various deer rifles. There was a large cartridge in the chamber.

"What caliber?" Alex said.

"Twenty-two two-fifty."

"New?"

Bunny nodded.

"Expensive?"

"Elmer's selling off the scrap on the farm."

Alex put the butt into the crotch of his shoulder. He sent the rifle off over Bunny's right shoulder and sighted down the scope. Alex had the rifle at an angle to capture the light of the horizon but so the sun wouldn't glare. He took himself across the road, then across Elmer's field, recently planted, onto the stand of box elders that cut a ribbon in the flat fields. That was nearly a half-mile off. Beyond and under the box elders lay a ravine at the bottom of which ran a narrow, silent creek. The ravine was a home for coons and deer, though under the thick alders and tall canes the deer were never seen, only sometimes heard crashing away.

Alex brought the rifle down and carefully, so as not to dislodge the cartridge, he closed and opened the action three times. He checked the safety and handed the gun back to Bunny.

"Shoot the possum and cats, too," Alex said turning away. "Everything's game but the game." He put on his gloves. "I'm mulching the asparagus and new trees on the wind row. The compost is ready and I want to free up the bins." Bunny stood there watching. Trying to explain things to Bunny was foolish. Bunny did not understand the value of manure or composting. "Where's Elmer?" Alex corrected himself. "He home?"

"He's getting ready to go out."

"Where?"

"Dancing."

"What time?"

"Later."

"Maybe I'll stop by and see him."

"He's going out soon," Bunny said. He changed hands with the rifle. "What time's John coming back?"

"He might not be back tonight."

"I'll be cutting through again later."

"Don't shoot in the yard late."

Alex took up the wheelbarrow and went past Bunny. The boy stood there following Alex with his head. Alex came back to the spring evening. He had just mown the yard for the first time and the short Kentucky blue was green and the young blue spruce were budding along the windrow. He brought the wheelbarrow up to the back steps and left it sitting there. He went up, laid his gloves on the steps, took his canvas coat from the handle of the back door and put it on.

Alex went out onto the drive. First he smelled the tar on the blacktop and then the old spruce where the drive curled around it. The sunset opened up in front of him over the even field and over the long line of box elders above the creek far off. In the front a young birch clump grew poorly because it stood unsheltered and susceptible to the elements like the wind and the sun and dryness in the summer. He passed the mailbox and crossed the road that southward curved past the swamp. On the other side of the road he crossed the ditch where the grasses were growing up and came onto the soil of Elmer's field. The corn was planted but hadn't come up yet. The field seemed barren to him. Alex stopped, bent down and put his fingers in the soft soil. Just beneath the surface lay the seed corn, light, pimpled and covered with a dusting of a reddish chemical.

Alex started across the field at an angle in the direction of Elmer's place, stepping into the furrows in between the rows. A hundred yards onto the field Alex came upon Bunny's tracks going in the opposite direction. Alex looked back on things. Beyond his father's windrow and outbuildings and the fallow fields ran the long north-south fields, flat and light brown, then the north-south hardwood ridge. Alex figured Bunny would be crossing the fields on his way up under the eaves of the hardwoods. Alex had the vantage but couldn't see Bunny. If Bunny were smart he wouldn't have disturbed the coyotes along fence line down towards the swamp.