*
Steve and JP see the leveled summits of the Guadalupe Mountains. The range is far off, its rocky slopes scorched to orange. Haze hangs thick around them, burning off in the early sun. JP follows Steve, who drags his feet as he walks, scuffing up the dry, cold earth. All Steve carries is a JanSport, the type of backpack kids take to school. He’s brought only a sleeping bag, some of the leftover donuts, water, and a half-bag of trail mix. A pair of expensive binoculars dangle around his neck.
JP also carries food and water, but his rucksack is much heavier with the Remington and its scope, ammunition, and bipod. He sags under the weight of the rifle, struggling to keep up.
The two climb and descend the oxbow foothills, making steady progress toward the hunting grounds. They pass over barren crests kept clear by strong and consistent winds, but in the valleys the earth bottoms into a tangle of sagebrush and ash trees. Large birds, harriers mostly, hover over the tops of the hills, easily held aloft on the drafts. Occasionally the birds pull their wings back and dart into the valleys, pouncing on rodents or at times each other when a challenger trespasses.
All morning, JP watches the birds. Every so often Steve stops to glass a far ridgeline, but he never says anything about the birds, except to laugh a little when he hears the bloody scream of some unfortunate varmint.
By noon the air is warm and the haze lifts. Far off, the veins in the rock appear on the sheer cliff faces of the Guadalupes. JP and Steve descend yet another rise. Halfway down, Steve stops and crouches on his haunches, looking toward the valley, sighting through his binoculars. JP comes up alongside him and flops backwards onto the dirt, resting against his pack. Steve holds the binoculars steady for JP. “You see right there,” Steve says. “The mud at the bottom of them trunks, you see?” The picture inside the binoculars bounces around and then comes into focus, and JP notices the dry and graying mud brushed up against many of the trunks. “Those are skunk pig rubs,” says Steve. “They like to scratch up against them trees.”
Steve leads JP onto the backside of a nearby hill. The two unroll their sleeping bags and look down into the valley: a wallow for skunk pigs. They stack a perimeter of sagebrush around themselves, making a hide, and are soon settled inside it, the sun warm and pleasant overhead. Steve lies on his back munching a donut while JP sets up the Remington on its bipod. He takes out a wind computer, something that looks like a battery-powered hand fan, and pushes a button, holding the fan blades to the air as he reads a number from a screen at the base. He puts the wind computer away and lies prone, his body behind the rifle, the butt- stock cradled in his shoulder. He turns several heavy knobs on the scope, notching the windage in, setting everything into place, and then looks through the aperture again.
Steve speaks in a whisper, “If you get two pigs and give me the second, I’ll stuff the first for you half-price.”
JP nods.
Steve smiles. “That’s a good deal,” he says, pulling out his phone for a game of finger bowling. On the first roll the frame of pins explode. JP throws a sharp look at Steve, who smiles again. He mouths the word strike before turning down the volume.
Above them, the sky is clear and blue and the harriers still lull on the wind, plunging to the valley at lazy intervals, taking what they want. It is at this moment that JP wishes he hadn’t come. He thinks about how it used to be when he worked with Carlos, how it felt when the waiting was over and everything was lined up in perfect balance, how he used to whisper to his friend: Fire. Fire. Fire.
Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone. He lives in Istanbul, where he writes on the Syrian Civil War.