He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.