Deep breath. Let half out. Hold. Crosshair once. Crosshair twice, softly, ever so softly, squeeze.
The Winchester bellowed and leaped back into Gray's shoulder. He lost the target in his sights but he quickly brought the rifle back down, searching through the scope for the target.
Gray's left hand vanished in a spray of blood and gristle that filled the air in front of him. He cried out and yanked himself down to the ground, his head bouncing against two whitebark limbs. His face plowed into the ground and he rolled onto his belly to flatten himself. Only then did he hear the distant roar of a rifle shot as it chased the bullet. The echo raced around the bowl's walls, washing over Gray again and again.
Gray frantically grabbed the Winchester and rolled to his right, out from under the pine and across a bed of needles and through bunches of cheat grass, turning over and over like a child down a hill. He left a trail of blood. But a second shot did not come. Gray bumped into a tree. Only then did he look at his arm.
Trusov's bullet had blown out a third of Gray's left palm. Several bones lay bare and others might have been missing. Much of the carpus was gone. Flaps of skin and shattered tendons dangled in the breeze. The little finger and ring finger seemed only nominally attached to his hand. Blood spurted from the wound with each of Gray's heartbeats, shooting out three feet as if from a squirt gun. Gray had brought no twine or a thong to use as a tourniquet.
He fought the churning white clouds of shock that dipped down at him from above. He had felt no pain, just a dead tingling somewhere near his left elbow. But then his mouth was pried open by a spear of agony that flew up his arm and neck and landed behind his eyes. Gray's head snapped into the ground, jolted by the pain. The entire left side of his body was spiked by it. He desperately wanted to run away, to leave behind the maimed part of himself and all the suffering it was dispensing.
The day seemed to fade. Tiny dots of neon colors blinked on and off in front of Gray's eyes. He was growing faint with the loss of blood. Holding his breath, Gray reached into his pack. Even this small motion amplified the pain. He breathed deeply, but this acted like a bellows on the pain. His body shook. Blood splattered the tree trunk and rifle. He guessed he had only a minute or two before the heart would have no more blood to pump.
With his right hand he brought out one of the matchbooks. He bit off a match, then dropped the matchbook to the ground. He scraped the match against the score several times before his trembling hand could press down hard enough. When the match head sputtered to life he held the flame to the matchbook. It flared. Gray pinched the matchbook at the staple and held the flame under his wounded left hand.
The fire cooked his hand, turning the ragged gash brown, then black. Flesh crackled and hissed. The air was filled with a nauseating scent. Pain was an acid coursing back and forth in his body. Gray's teeth sank deeply into his tongue, and blood squirted from between his teeth and down his chin.
The hanging flaps of skin curled and shrank. Grease dripped from the cooking flesh. And still Gray held the matchbook in place. His trigger finger and thumb burned as flames consumed the matchbook down to the staple and score. Finally blood from the exposed radial artery stopped spurting. Gray dropped the matchbook and lowered a knee over it to extinguish it before pine needles and dry grass caught fire. He did not have the mental capacity to pray that Trusov had not seen the smoke from the matches. Gray coughed with agony. Every limb shook with suffering.
His thoughts careened to Pete Coates. Then to Mrs. Orlando. He owed them.
He reached for his rifle and began crawling again. His mind was gone. He did not have the capacity to order his body to continue. It acted on its own. He came to the cap and rifle that had fooled him. The hat was on a stick, and the weapon was balanced on a log with a length of twine between the stock and a nearby maple trunk. When the wind moved the maple, the trunk swayed and so did the rifle, just a little, not as much as the background foliage, making the rifle appear to move independently of the foliage. A good ruse, he decided dimly.
When hunting for animals it is always assumed the target has been hit, but when hunting for men that assumption is never made. Trusov grimaced as he ejected the smoking brass casing. The distance had been only four hundred yards, but Trusov had seen human movement, so he had snap fired. He had fired too quickly. After the shot he had seen a fine mist of blood in the air, so he had hit something. But he dared not waltz over to find out. Now he could see nothing but underbrush through his telescope. He brought out binoculars for a wider view. Nothing. But then he detected again the smell of burned flesh.
There was a chance Owen Gray still lived, but it would be foolish for the Russian to remain in one place to speculate on it further. Tree to tree, Trusov moved downhill toward the bowl's center. Either Gray was dead, in which case the vultures and ravens would soon alert Trusov, or Gray was alive but soon dead, and the birds would have to wait awhile. The Russian moved softly across the ground, a specter flowing along silently and smoothly, closing in on the American.
The Winchester pulled Gray along. Down the slope, toward the seam of the bowl, crawling, one hand on the wood stock, the other uselessly waving in the air. His head was downhill, and gravity seemed to pull the pain into Gray's head. Even blinking hurt. His arm and ruined hand were lost in agony somewhere beyond his left shoulder. He scrabbled over stones and through barricades of thistle and wild raspberry. Because his ears rang with pain to the exclusion of all other sounds, Gray could not judge his own sound. He guessed he was making as much noise as a belled cow. But his thoughts were few and growing fewer. He did not have long. His body and mind were moments from surrendering.
Gray glimpsed a patch of skin — maybe a cheek, maybe a wrist or forearm — off to his left four hundred yards. Too little and too fast to dope it in before it disappeared in the kaleidoscope of leaves and boughs. That fleeting patch was moving closer, yet in a roundabout way. Trusov was following his nose, Gray vaguely suspected. Gray could no longer care.
Gray came to the porcupine he had killed. A bird or rat had eaten out its eyes, but otherwise it was intact, its quills dully reflecting the morning sun. Each time Gray exhaled, his lungs paused, as if wanting to be stilled forever. He tried to rise to his feet, but his legs gave out and he toppled sideways into the dry cheat grass, his hand brushing the porcupine's quills. Gray's vision misted, then began to go dark. A quill stabbed at him insistently.
The tantalizing scent of cooked flesh had lingered in the bowl all night and now again in the new morning. Gray was shackled to the odor like a ball and chain. The smell was an inescapable telltale.
Trusov moved south and then back north until he had centered the odor. He moved toward it, through a thick stand of pine, the smell growing stronger. Owen Gray, Trusov's great tormentor, had to be within four hundred meters, dead ahead.
The Russian dropped to his knees. The trees offered thick cover. Because he was low, he could see only thirty or forty meters in any direction, and that also meant that he was not presenting a target for a distant shot. The scent was like a homing beacon. Owen Gray was ahead, now perhaps only three hundred meters. Trusov pushed himself through the underbrush as silently as a shrew.
Then at two hundred fifty meters the woods opened slightly, and there on the ground was a body, partially obscured by trees and brush and just visible above bunches of wild grass. Gray's olive pant leg and his khaki shirt, dappled by intervening syringa leaves. The clothes were charred. Here was the source of the odor that had been beckoning Trusov.