“What's the most important part about it.” Jeremy made the question into a statement. “Is that what you asked?”

Andy nodded, seeing the folly of the question now. “I always try and cut to the heart of things.”

“Well, then I would say for you, the most important part of the hunt would be patience. You can't make things happen out there. You gotta learn to let things happen.” Jeremy oiled up the thin brush on the end of the metal twig and pushed it through the shaft of the rifle in his lap. Logs popped in the fire.

“I know that.”

“Do you?” Jeremy said, looking at the boy and letting the end of the rifle fall to the floor. “So how much do you know? Maybe you should be showing me?”

Their eyes locked for a moment, but Andy looked away first. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“How is it to live that way—where no one can show you anything?”

“I said I was sorry.” Andy judged from the look he got that even that was too belligerent. Rain patted against the window, and the wind scratched the tree branches against the roof of the cabin.

Jeremy spilled cleaning oil on a rag and wiped down parts of the rifle that Andy couldn't name. He'd watched Jeremy clean the rifle a dozen times, and he couldn't get what he needed to know fast enough from the older man. Now with the stupid question that started this session, how much longer would it take before his first hunt?

Jeremy finished the cleaning and cased the weapon. He set water to boil on the stove and left Andy sitting in front of the fire.

Andy watched the empty chair the way you watch a stage when waiting for an encore at a concert. When Jeremy returned, he carried two cups of coffee spiked with Bushmills. “This will get you thinking straight,” he said, handing Andy a cup.

Taking his seat, Jeremy sipped his drink and winced. “Yeah. This'll do just fine.”

Andy sipped his drink and waited. He'd been here enough to know that when the time suited Jeremy, he'd get into hunting techniques. The cabin had no clocks, and Andy knew that you didn't check your watch while waiting for Jeremy to talk. The fire's glow lessened.

“Fire needs a log,” Jeremy said.

Andy checked the metal log cradle near the hearth, but it was empty. He took a long breath to sigh, but held it. Without a word, Andy got up, grabbed his coat, and stepped out into the snow.

At the bottom of the sloping lot about 20 yards behind the cabin, a shed kept the firewood dry. As the price of a lesson on aiming and shooting, Andy had chopped the wood himself and piled it there for the better part of a day last spring. The snow flew in from left to right, and caught on Andy's stubbled face. The sting of the cold made him silently curse Jeremy and long for his coffee back in the cabin.

The cold made the shed's door stick even after Andy worked the lock and undid the latch. He chipped at the ice around the door the best he could with the keys. His breath obscured his vision more than the dark did. If there were a wheelbarrow, this would be so much easier.

With an armful of logs, he trudged back through the snowy ground, fighting to keep his balance. Twice, logs fell from his arms, and he questioned whether this was all worth it. He set the logs on the cabin's porch, knowing that Jeremy wouldn't open the door for him even if he knocked.

“Cold out there?” Jeremy said.

Andy dumped the wood by the hearth. He added a few small logs to the fire and saved the bigger one for when they caught. He fell into his chair and waited for the heat to come. His coffee had gone cold, so he crushed his arms against his body.

“Stealth,” Jeremy said.

Andy started as if he were woken from sleep. “Huh?”

“I think stealth in all things is the most important. Stealth in the hunt.” He nodded in the fire's building glow.

“Stealth?” Andy tried to keep the sarcasm from his voice. This is what he had been waiting for? He traded being a house servant for this kind of wisdom?

Jeremy nodded and sipped his drink, which Andy knew must have been refilled while he froze his ass off for firewood. “Stealth in all things is important.”

From experience, Andy knew that pushing Jeremy to get to it faster would backfire, and they might sit wordless the rest of the night. For something to do, he passed the coffee cup from one hand to the other.

“First, literally, silence is golden. You can't call attention to yourself and expect success.”

Andy nodded as if this were groundbreaking information.

“You have to blend in,” Jeremy said, nodding.

“You mean like camouflage?” Andy asked, hoping he sounded like he had never thought of such a thing.

“It's more than that. It's about knowing your background and how to blend with it. Being noticed is failure.”

“You mean like not being seen?”

“Being seen?” Jeremy scoffed and tossed the comment aside with a flick of his hand. “It's about gusts of wind being more noticeable than you.”

Andy watched Jeremy's gaze travel the cabin from ceiling to floor and waited.

“You take only the essentials with you. Anything more just draws attention.” Jeremy crossed his left ankle over his knee and stretched back in his chair. “And if attention is what you want, be a politician.”

The fire popped and the logs readjusted themselves. The room glowed red, and Andy added the bigger log to the fire.

“And what you are hunting…”

“The prey,” Andy said.

Jeremy smiled in the fire glow. “You remembered. Yes, the prey. If the amount you know about the prey and the amount they know about you is an indirect proportion, then you will have success.”

“Know your prey.” Andy had heard this countless times. So many, in fact, that he questioned whether Jeremy really had more to teach him or if he just needed someone to bring in firewood. “You need to know their habits and instincts. You need to know what they'll do before they decide to do it. The prey itself must be one of your advantages against them.”

“How do you learn that?” Andy said his line the way he did every time, remembering the weight of the glowing log and the bite of cold he walked through to get it.

“You study them. You watch them and read up on them all you can if there's anything about them worth reading. Try hunting with a camera first; memorize all their idiosyncrasies, reactions, and anything else you think you see in the pictures. Get as close to one as you can. We have to use our senses—it's not like we can interview them.”

Andy gave the usual obligatory laugh. “I guess not, huh?”

Jeremy had laid the rifle's site on a worn towel near the fire. He leaned over with a groan and picked it up, returning it into the fitted compartment of the metallic case.

“When can I go with you?” Andy said, knowing the question to be a waste.

“Patience,” Jeremy said, setting the case at the foot of his chair.

Andy let the words hang in the air. He squinted and blurred the fire into an inferno of glowing streaks. “I'm up to my ass in patience,” he said.

“Then you'll need more. You still have half a body to fill.”

Andy crossed his arms. Outside, the wind picked up and rattled the cabin's windows. Jeremy made him wait.

“You can lose the shot with a careless move. You must be precise and calculated.”

“You know, all your talk is vague. You never get into what any of this even means. I'm starting to wonder if you even know. I'm starting to think you just need someone to do the heavy lifting around here.” Andy resisted the temptation to stand.

“You mean you don't think I could handle things in here myself?”

“Can't or won't—your choice.”

“Andy, I told you when I brought you into this that it would move at my pace. And that if you had the right build here,” Jeremy tapped his gnarled fist against his chest, “then you wouldn't find the training tedious. I'm starting to sense the wrong build.”

“You say the same stuff to me every week.”

“Hunting doesn't change. It's been the same forever.” Jeremy uncrossed his legs and sat up in his chair.

“And so has this training,” Andy said.

Jeremy shrugged.

“Next you'll go into the bit about opportunity. You'll tell me how you need to know the opportunity when it comes and sense it when it's almost there. It's mystic the way you drag this out. We're not looking for the meaning of life here, we're talking about shooting.”

“It's all so simple to you, isn't it?” Jeremy rubbed his eyes with his palms and stretched in the fire's dim glow.

Andy shook his head in disgust and stood from the chair. He paced the floor. “And there's your classic technique. You make it seem like there may be more to things than there are. You make it seem like there's still some crucial trick of the trade you haven't yet revealed, and then when we meet again, you'll feed me the same crap.”

“Get me some more coffee, and I'll teach you the rest.”

“Get your own damn coffee.” Andy shook his head and turned to look out the window. If the snow wasn't too bad, he'd drive out right now.

When he turned back, the black nose of a pistol hovered two feet from his head. Jeremy clenched it. “You see…stealth, blend in, know your prey, and patience. You didn't even hear me get up, and from the look on your face, you're a little surprised that I can move as quick as I must have. Blend in—it's my cabin, I already do. I've had ample time to study you, and I know that you get irritated and impatient. I know what it took to piss you off enough to make you turn your back.”

“What the hell?” Andy put his hands out in front of him.

“Get ‘em behind your head,” Jeremy said. “The contract for you was not enough for me to take care of this in my cabin. We'll need to step out back.”

Andy linked his fingers behind his head and followed the direction that Jeremy twitched the pistol's end. “You were training me. I was gonna work for you. I was gonna do this.”

“The prey can never know it's being hunted.”

Andy cringed at the sound of the all too familiar sentence and cursed himself for not paying attention. “Who bought this?”

Jeremy jabbed the pistol into the back of Andy's neck and reached around him to open the door. “It doesn't matter who hired me. If you were listening as much as you were bitching, you'd know that.”

“Not much I can do.” Andy said, stepping from the wooden stairs of the cabin's back deck. “You already got half the money.”

“Ah…” Jeremy said, “You did listen a little.”

The snow crunched beneath their steps. Andy laughed.

“Excuse me,” Jeremy said.

“Funny how you automatically think shit. I was just thinking how I should have put a jacket on.” He walked in front of Jeremy, who kept the gun trained on his head and watched for any signs of an escape attempt.

“That's weird, yeah.” Jeremy said. “Here's good.”

“Where?”

“Kneel down and stick your head against that tree.”

The last thing Andy felt was the cold scratch of the frozen tree trunk against his forehead and a gust of cold wind.