It sprinted a good fifty yards and came to a nervous stop, its white tail bristling. He brought the scope up. Its nostrils pulsed with agitation.
Deck let it calm down, then drew a bead on the wary left eye.
He began squeezing down on the trigger and held his breath.
"Damn!"
Savagely, Doyce Deck stood up. The antelope was leaping along now, cutting through the sage.
"What is with you!" he snarled. Could it be psychic? Deck had never heard of a psychic antelope before. This one seemed to know exactly when to hightail it.
Deck started down off the rise. What the hell? Stalking was half the fun, anyway. And the day was just starting. Maybe he'd get lucky and a light plane would fly too low. Now that would be a kick. Bodies raining from the sky like milkweeds.
From a crook in a tree, Remo Williams watched the man with the hunter's rifle come down into the valley.
Once, he could have identified the make of the rifle. Now it was just a carved stick with a pipe shoved through it, as far as Remo was concerned. That was how far the Master of Sinanju had elevated him from the world of guns and mechanical things.
Way back in his Vietnam days, when he was a Marine sharpshooter, Remo appreciated firearms, their grace and raw power. His ability with an M-1 had earned him a nickname. "The Rifleman." Long ago. Now he saw them in a different light. Crude machines. All noise and smoke and as subtle as a baseball bat with a railroad spike driven through the thick end.
His weapons were his hands, his feet, and most of all, his mind. He was a Master of Sinanju. He was the human animal raised to the pinnacle of perfection. In his way, he was the most ferocious killing machine since Tyrannosaurus Rex.
It made a grim smile come to his thin lips to think that. Remo Williams, Human Tyrannosaur. He hoped they were still lizards.
Remo had killed many men in his life as America's secret assassin. In the beginning, in those long-ago days, he enjoyed it, enjoyed the awesome power he wielded. Later, after that cruel joy had been pummeled out of him by the Master of Sinanju, it cooled to pure professional pride.
Today, he was not going to kill a man. He was going to right a wrong. But that didn't mean he couldn't get a kick out of it.
The man with the unimportant rifle found a clump of sagebrush and carefully lay down in it. He slipped the barrel through the clump until the muzzle was pointed at the skittish antelope.
Remo had a fistful of small round pellets. He thumbed one into his free hand, set it so that it perched on his hard thumbnail, held in place by his crooked forefinger.
He watched the man. He wasn't moving now. But his coarse woolen shirt expanded with each breath. The cloth would fall still in the instant before he pulled the trigger on his prey, Remo knew.
Remo used to daydream about hunting big game. He never had. And in the years that separated his old life from the being he was now, that idle daydream had faded into insignificance.
He had come to understand killing in a new way. He no longer ate meat, and since there could be no joy in the work of the assassin, hunting animals for sport seemed beyond cruel to him. It was senseless.
People feeding their egos at the expense of innocent animals.
The shirt stopped moving. And Remo flicked the pellet.
This time, he waited until the last possible second. Whistling, the pellet struck the antelope on its hindquarters and it sprang away.
The rifle bullet sliced through the air exactly where the antelope's head had been, to kick up an eddy of dust yards beyond.
The man with the insignificant rifle cursed and jumped to his feet.
Remo slid off the tree branch to commiserate with the poor hunter who was having a bad day.
"That bastard of a buck did that on purpose!" Doyce Deek was raging. He wanted to break his rifle over his own knees. He wanted to kick a cactus. There were no cactus in this part of Wyoming. It was cattle country. Always had been.
The antelope was running in a ragged, bullet-eluding zigzag. It would be in the next county before long.
"Hell, there's other pronghorns," he said.
"Not for you," a confident voice said.
"Huh?" Doyce Deek brought his rifle down and around until he found the source of the voice.
It was a man. Coming from the south. He was not dressed for hunting. He wore tan chinos and a black T-shirt.
"Who in blazes are you?" Deek demanded, not lowering his weapon.
"The spirit of the hunt."
"Ha. You look more like the spirit of the pool hall."
"That's my night job," said the man. His eyes were set so deep in his head that the climbing sun threw them into skull-like shadow. He walked with an easy, confident lope. His wrists were freakish, like cartoon water mains about to burst under pressure.
"Did you see that buck! Consarned thing up and lit out on me!"
"Thunderation," said the man, coming on despite the threat of the Marlin rifle. His voice was thin, his accent eastern. His "thunderation" might have been an understated taunt.
On reflection, Doyce Deek decided it was a taunt. He decided that the moment he realized he was all alone out here with the man. The obviously unarmed man.
He grinned wolfishly. He brought his rifle up a hair.
"I don't cotton much to easterners," he said.
And he fired.
The shot was clean, sweet. The bullet should have gone exactly where the man's smile was. Maybe it did. Because the man didn't move, other than to keep approaching real casual-like.
Levering another shell into the chamber, Deek fired again.
He blinked. The powdersmoke was in his eyes. And the man was still coming on, like he had all the time in the world.
"You ain't really the spirit of the woods, are you?" he muttered in a weak, reedy voice.
"Nah," said the man who seemed impervious to bullets.
"Then I'm gonna keep shootin' you 'til you lay down and die!" snapped Doyce Deek, bringing his weapon up once more. This time, he saw something he hadn't before. He forced his scope eye to stay wide and not blink like before. He held his breath and fired. The bullet moved too fast for him to see where it did go, but the skinny easterner seemed to see it coming. He shifted his shoulders as if to let the bullet blow on past; it straightened again with such eye-defying speed that the action was a kind of after-image blur.
He was fast. Not magic. Just fast.
So Doyce Deek tried for a sucking chest wound. That always put the fear of God in a man.