He peered over the scope. Shepherd's Bowl was spread out before him. The bowl was misnamed, and was in fact a U-shaped valley. Fed by a small spring, Black Bear Creek originated in the valley and exited at the eastern end to wander two miles to the Gray ranch and then on to join the Big Wood River. Shepherd's Bowl was so named because a Basque shepherd— one of many who had come to Idaho in the early years — tried to raise sheep in the valley, had lasted one bitter winter, and had retreated with far fewer sheep than he had arrived with.
Gray was three-quarters up the north side of the bowl. The area was two miles long, running west — east, and a mile and a half across. The valley's center was thick with trees and undergrowth, particularly dense where Black Bear Creek formed itself and dribbled out of the valley. The creek was only a foot across at the mouth of the valley, but it provided water for hundreds of mature trees that trailed like a snake along the bottom of the valley. Also along the valley floor were a dozen patches of wild grass, each a half acre to an acre. These swaths of grass had convinced the poor shepherd he might be able to graze his flock in Shepherd's Bowl. The small meadows were covered with red-top grass, wild oats, rattlesnake grass, fireweed, and cheat grass, most growing to the height of a man's waist, with the fireweed protruding a foot or two from the soft blanket of weeds. The slightest wind pushed waves into the grasses. At this time of year the grass was yellow and dry.
Gray's hide was a small protrusion on the north slope, a cleft in the incline formed by stones and dirt sliding down the grade and building up behind a boulder over the centuries. The ledge was just large enough to lie on. By taking an indirect route, ducking through bushes and taking advantage of a few sparse trees on the north slope, it was possible to climb to the ledge without being seen from anywhere else in the bowl, but it took care and skill. Other distortions in the half-cone of the bowl's north side included more boulders, some with dogbane growing around them, banks of yellow-blooming Scotch broom, a few stunted lodgepole pines, and clusters of rolling brittle tumbleweed blown against outcroppings, but most of the north slope was open and clear. It curved around like the stands of a football stadium.
High on the bowl's north side at about Owen Gray's ledge the grade increased. He glanced over his shoulder at the surface that rose like a wave behind him. Here stones lay on each other, not cemented by soil but loose enough to sink or roll away under a footstep. Reflected sunlight flickered from quartz flakes in the granite stones. Occasional blades of cheat grass grew in the rubble. Papery yellow and red lichen topped many of the rocks. A few sego lilies dotted the scree, their blossoms resembling white butterflies. But these few living things did little to change the arid, tumbly, sun-baked nature of the north slope.
Gray looked back over the rifle to the other side of the bowl. The south side was hidden in shadows much of a summer day and all of winter, and was forested with pine and aspen and other trees. Gaps in the tree cover revealed green and flowering underbrush. So different were they that the north and south sides of Shepherd's Bowl could have been on different continents. Behind the bowl, jagged peaks were limned against the diamond-blue sky.
He lowered himself over the rifle's butt, stock, and grip, which snipers call the furniture. Gray checked himself again. His right cheek and right thumb — curled over the small of the stock — formed a spot weld. He could not feel where his body ended and the rifle began. This firm weld would allow Gray's head, hand, and rifle to absorb recoil as one unit. He brought his eye to a position behind the lens's eyepiece, sighting on a low knot in a pine near the valley's mouth. He kept his eye back from the lens to protect it from recoil. Too close, and the scope would cut a bloody circle to the bone around the eye. When he took a deep breath, the crosshairs moved down straight through the center of the target, indicating he was well balanced over the rifle.
Gray had always credited a rifle scope with magical qualities. He well understood the optics. He knew the objective lens at the front of the scope produced an upside-down and backward image of the target. In the middle of the scope, the erector lens magnified the image and returned it to its correct position. The eyepiece lens then magnified the image further. He knew that while the average eye can distinguish a one-inch detail at a hundred yards, a one-sixth-inch detail could be seen with a 6X scope. An object viewed from six hundred yards through a 6X telescope will have the same clarity as if viewed by the unaided eye from a hundred yards. He knew that the magnesium fluoride coating on his lens increased transmission of light from about 45 percent to 86 percent. No sorcery in any of this.
But those same optics that magnified the view and flattened the perspective also flensed away humanity. In Vietnam when Gray peered through a scope, the image quartered by the cross-hairs was not a human but a target, nothing but a mathematical problem of windage and velocity and direction. The scope had a marvelous ability to eliminate sloppy moral issues and extraneous questions of commitment to the cause. If it appeared through the scope, Gray could kill it.
The scope's magic survived time and tragedies, it seemed. He had accepted the rifle with stomach-churning trepidation, but even after the decades he had felt its supernatural power of simplification on the Brooklyn roof as he found the target. Once his eye was on the crosshairs he was ready in all respects to pull the trigger. The ghastly outcome — the death of Mrs. Orlando — had sickened him, had left him exhausted with grief. Yet here he was on a perch high in a mountain bowl ready again to pull the trigger, as long as all the world's complexities were filtered out by the rifle scope.
He lifted his head to avoid eyestrain. At the mouth of the valley, several low branches of a dogwood were rattling, whipping left and right. The only animals that would make such a commotion were a bear using the tree to scratch its back or an elk or moose trying to rid its horn of felt. Gray sighted in on the dogwood, not intending to pull the trigger, but saving himself from reaching for his binoculars. He narrowed his eye slightly. The rifle was dead calm in his hands, so still that a bead of mercury placed precisely on top of the barrel would have remained there.
Adrian Wade's face popped into the crosshairs, her eyes like flares in the scope. She had emerged suddenly from under the tree, but now caught her jacket on a branch. She yanked on it and finally freed herself.
Gray jerked his eye up from the scope.
He pivoted the weapon aside. He found her with his unaided eye. Her red coat and black hair stood out like a sailor's emergency dye on a calm sea. He brought up the binoculars. She was scanning the bowl, moving her head randomly, an amateur's visual search that would miss him entirely. He stood, removed his coat, and waved it back and forth until she started in his direction. She crossed a wide clump of purple heather and ducked through a barricade of Scotch broom. She climbed the slope, coming at him from the southeast, gaining elevation as she hiked deeper into the valley.
She was hurrying. More than hurrying, she was frantically pedaling her legs. Again Gray brought up the binoculars. Sweat flowed freely down her face, and her mouth was open and panting. He used the field glasses to search the trees behind her, but she was not being chased. As he watched her ascend the bowl, he pulled an apple from his pack and ate it from the bottom up, and consumed every part of it except the stem, which the twins had told him was the weirdest thing in existence. He had learned to eat an apple that way in Vietnam because an apple core might be found by an enemy trying to follow him.