The Triggerman Dance

"Well, the quail aren't bad either, and they barbecue up real nice!" said Valerie.

She and Titisi smiled at each other.

Holt, for the thousandth time, was proud of his daughter' uncommon common sense. "It would please her father immensely if she would take over the reigns of Liberty Operation when he goes to the happy hunting grounds."

"Oh, Dad," she said. "You're going to live to be ninety and we both know it."

She climbed over him and squeezed her way to the rear of the copter, where the dogs stood bracing their front paws on the kennel screen, tails blurred at Valerie's arrival.

Two hours later they were near the Anza Valley meadow that Holt had hunted for the last thirty years. The morning was cool, no breeze. The short golden grasses of the meadow stretched across five hundred rolling acres punctuated by clump of red manzanita, dark oak and sprawling green ghettos of prickly pear cactus. Around the perimeter of the meadow stood the old-growth manzanita and madrone, twenty feet high and to dense for anything but a determined dog to get through. Here, at nearly 4,000 feet and far from any city, the air was clean and

the colors and shapes of the flora were unambiguous and rich as paint.

Holt's white Land Rover bounced along a winding dirt trail and came to a stop amidst the high cover of the meadow's edge. Holt told everyone not to slam the doors, then got out. Another rig, red and driven by Lane Fargo, followed just a few yards behind. Holt had already briefed his party on how they would hunt this morning: park the trucks on the west perimeter of the field, drop down into the low grass where the quail should be feeding this time of day, push them outward into the meadow, try to keep them from getting to the far side, where the deep cover would make them impossible to hunt.

The party spread out and formed a loose front—thirty yards between each of them—to work the field. Holt and Sally, his ten-year old bitch, took the far right end. Next came Randell, then Titisi, around whom Holt was feeling slightly unsafe because he had never hunted with the Ugandan before. To Titisi's left, thirty yards down, came Valerie, with Lewis and Clark, just ten months old. They were already working out in front of her, cutting left and right, scrambling back within shotgun range with every sharp chirp of Valerie's whistle. Lane Fargo had the far left end, putting at least forty confident yards between himself and Valerie.

Holt had organized his party like this not only to spread out the dogs and share them, but because he liked to watch his daughter without her knowing. He fell back just a little so he could see her. There she was, just eighty or ninety yards away, taking long deliberate steps through the grass, a tall, healthy woman, with her khakis tucked into her boots, a 20 gauge side-by-side cradled in her arms, a whistle between her lips and the red cycler's cap stuffed down over her pale bouncing curls. She stopped, canted an ear toward a big patch of cactus in front of her and called the dogs over and to the right. Holt never knew when it might hit him, but sometimes, all it took was a look at Valerie to send his heart into a sweet, swelling tumble of sadness and joy. The joy came from beholding her life, her spirit, her being. The sadness came from beholding the fact that she was practically all he had left, all that would outlive him, at any rate, so long as nothing happened to her. And always on the edge of Holt's consciousness was the blip, the reminder, that in the world today, anything can happen. Anything. At moments like that,

when his heart was pounding hard with the alternating current of joy and dread, he wanted to hold her tight to his chest; he wanted to surround her with an invisible shield impermeable by any form of harm; he wanted to lock her away and preserve her forever.

None of those thoughts came to Vann Holt as he stepped quietly through the low grass and watched Sally work a ground patch. Instead, next to the pride he felt watching Valerie, what he felt most strongly now was his focused anticipation of the birds that would soon be rising. He could hear them, chirping alarmedly out there in front of Sally. He could feel the perfect balance of the Remington in his hands. He noticed the heightened perception of his eyes, though he knew that they were failing him. Even his sense of smell was acute now, the astringent perfume of sagebrush and desert scrub, the dankly human odor of the gourds, passing straight up through his nostrils and into his brain. Like nothing else in the world, hunting made Vann Holt feel alive.