Pete Pearson was never happier than when he was hunting in some remote wilderness area, alone, or with a guide or companion. There was something primeval about the very act of tracking, stalking and finally harvesting a wild animal. Although in the ‘civilized’ world of the 21st century there was no longer a strict necessity for a man to venture into the forest and bring home meat for the family, the hunt reminded Pete of how the world had been — for many people, even into the 20th century.

Those who distain and belittle the hunter, he reflected, misunderstand the close connection between the man and his prey. The hunter studies and observes the ways of the animals he hunts, more closely than the city dweller would think possible, and he holds nature in a special awe. Looking at the trophies on his walls, Pete felt an almost atavistic urge to pay homage to the animal spirits. He had knelt beside these animals in the field, wishing their souls good speed putting a sprig of a tree branch into the mouth.

Pete looked up, leaving his musings behind, to see his wife and the twentyish young man with lanky dirty blond hair, dressed in faded camouflage clothing, entering the great room in his lodge at the foot of the mountains in northern Colorado.

“Are you ‘bout ready, Mr. Pearson?” the young man asked.

“Almost, Randy,” Pete replied, “I just need to pop into town to pick up another box of ammunition. Won’t take but forty minutes. Why don’t you just wait here for me.”

Pete turned and kissed his wife, not a deep lover’s kiss, but not just a perfunctory peck, either.

“You hold the fort here, Jean?” he teased, looking at his wife’s face, framed by the shoulder length brown hair. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

“I can ‘hold the fort’, but if you don’t get going, you sure won’t bring home that trophy elk you’ve wanted!” she teased back.

“Okay, Okay, I’m going,” he said laughing and turning towards the kitchen, leaving by the back door of the cabin into the pre-dawn darkness.

“Anyway, I have my trophy elk already; I’m just going for meat this year. To my taste, there is no better game meat than elk.”

He was about half-way to the meadow where he parked his old 4-wheel drive utility vehicle, when a thought struck him. He was suddenly sure that he had picked up some ammo in the Spring that would do for his hunt. Instead of continuing, he turned towards the barn, which had once-upon-a-time been painted bright red, but now looked more like a faded rust color. He didn’t have any livestock on his small place, the remnant of what had at one time been a large ranch, so the barn was used for storage and as a workshop. And in one corner, he kept his shooting supplies in a set of old cabinets that had been in the kitchen of the ranch house before he remodeled the place.

Sure enough, when he opened the doors on the cabinet that held his various ammunition and reloading supplies, there was a box of twenty .300 Winchester Magnum (typically called “300 win mag”) cartridges that he’d purchased earlier in the year. At the time, he’d picked up two identical boxes of the ammo, but had used part of one up sighting in the scope for the lighter weight bullet.

In Africa and Alaska, he’d shot 300 grain bullets in his .375 H&H magnum; for elk in Colorado, he was going down to a 180 grain bullet. Even that was a little bit of overkill for an elk. He thought that he should dig out his .30-’06 and a box of 165 grain ammo, which would be more than enough.

He’d grown fond of his .300 win mag during his African safari. It had more recoil than his .30-’06—even with a muzzle brake and recoil pad—and it cost a fortune to shoot. On the plus side, if he found himself face-to-face with a bear rushing towards him, one who wanted to contest ownership of his elk, the rifle would take care of the situation.

He had a Kodiak Brown Bear rug on the bedroom floor of the cabin that would attest to that. They’d had a disagreement over a moose, and knowing that he couldn’t outrun a charging bear, Pete had stood his ground relying on his rifle. Luckily, he’d had a bear tag in addition to the moose on the hunt, so he ended up with a moose head and shoulder mount on the wall, looking down on the bear rug on the floor.

Still, after debating the merits of the .30-’06 and the .300 win mag with himself, he’d had decided to take his lightweight .300 win mag instead. It was an effective round further out; with its flat trajectory, 500-yard shots weren’t uncommon.

Pete was pretty pleased with himself as he walked briskly back up to the cabin, having saved himself an additional trip into town, and taking less than five minutes instead of forty.

He was about to open the kitchen door and walk back into the cabin when he chanced to glance through the glass window next to the door. He was taken aback, sure that he was seeing things, that his eyes had deceived him.

He looked again, this time carefully peering into the window to reveal as little of himself as possible, and it confirmed what he’d seen the first time.

His wife, Jean, was standing in the great room, visible through the kitchen, with her flannel shirt open, her breasts exposed, allowing that pissant Randy to fondle them.

As Pete watched, they disappeared from view, and he took the opportunity to remove his boots and silently slip into the kitchen. From there he could hear them as they spoke.

“Oh, you like those don’t you, Randy?” came Jean’s voice. Randy made a muffled sound.

“Yes, suck on my titties, I just love that,” she continued.

Pete found himself frozen into immobility, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“Okay, now lean back and let me take care of that fine tool of yours,” she declared, followed by the sounds of clothing rustling.

Pete took a chance and peeked out enough to see a reflection in the opposite window, revealing his wife and Randy sitting on the couch, his wife’s shirt still open with her breasts exposed, and Randy with his pants down, as his wife was using her hand on the young man’s cock.

Pete shook his head because there was something wrong with this whole scene, but then Jean began talking to Randy, as she stroked his tool.

“Now remember, this hunt is just right for the little ‘accident’ we’ve been talking about. If Petey doesn’t come back from this trip, then you and I can be together. Then you’ll fuck my pussy anytime you want to. I’ll suck your cock and even swallow, when you want me to. Forever. Do you understand?”

“Jean,” Randy asked, although thinking was increasingly difficult for him as he approached his climax, “why don’t you just divorce him? Why do I have to kill him? Pete’s not a bad guy.”

“I’ve explained all of this before, you silly man. If I divorce Petey, he will keep all the money. There is this paper, called a ‘Prenuptial Agreement’ that lets Pete put me out into the cold with nothing. But if there is an ‘accident’, then WE get his money, and WE get to be together. Do you understand now?” she explained as if to a five-year old. “We can’t be together unless we have the money. And you want to be together with me, don’t you, honey? And we’ll need the money to set up your guide business.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Randy exclaimed, although whether he was answering Jean’s question, or because he was climaxing all over Jean’s hand wasn’t clear.

“Good,” Jean replied, choosing to take his words as an affirmative answer.

Pete retreated, once again silently slipping through the door, this time to go back outside, where he slipped his boots back onto his feet, ran to his 4X4, and drove into town. Although he didn’t need the ammo for his rifle, he did need to make a private call from his office.

On the drive into town, he was still in shock, but as always, he was a realist. The woman who he thought he was so lucky to have found had suddenly revealed herself. She was not the soulmate that he had thought she was. She was a gold digger, an evil pretended. A grifter.

His whole world shifted in an instant.

Pete was physically an average man—in looks, in coloring, in weight and height. Neither a superstud, nor a loner or nerd, Pete was, on the other hand smart, hardworking, loyal, and, in most things he ever tried, successful.

Pete Pearson had grown up in a middle-class home, his father an aerospace engineer, his mother stayed at home. Not truly rural, they lived in what one might call a ‘sparse suburban’ area, made up of two- and three-acre plots with houses, which would allow some limited farm animals. Most of the neighborhood was filled to people devoted to horses, well enough off, as it were, not to be worried about raising more practical livestock such as cattle or pigs. His father accepted the hour-long commute to work every day as a reasonable price to pay for the life experience that it allowed his family.

Pete’s father, sensing that his son and only child was not interested in the equestrian arts, as the neighbor’s daughters were, encouraged Pete as he raised a series of steers, chickens, pigs, and even the stray sheep or goat—although the goats were kept for a program that took them to Latin American countries to help build up the fortunes of small farmers on desperately small plots, in terribly impoverished circumstances. The consequence was that even though Pete had no desire to become a farmer as an adult, he understood and appreciated the realities of livestock, and earning a living, if need be, from animals. He suffered from none of the anthropomorphic fantasies that Disney movies sought to engender, of skunks and rabbits playing together, or of noble deer befriending the birds and squirrels of the forest.

It was as a young man that Pete, accompanying his father, learned to hunt.

A chemist by training, Pete had for a short period of time contemplated the notion of pursuing a Ph.D. in the subject. He had no desire to teach, or even to do the kind of highly esoteric research that dominated the academic world. Pete Pearson wanted to use chemistry to create useful products — following in the footsteps of those chemists who had introduced aniline dyes, or the polymer plastics whose long chains of repeating chemical structures shaped so much of the modern world.

Pete had gone to work for a small company, manufacturing generic pharmaceuticals, directly after receiving his master’s degree in chemistry. There he learned about manufacturing drugs, dealing with the FDA to get products approved, and most importantly, how to screw up a company by not knowing enough about business. Having seen his boss run the company into the ground with bad business decisions, Pete went back to school and completed an MBA.

During his last semester of the MBA program, Pete put together a business plan for his Strategic Planning class, a so-called ‘capstone’ class, to set up a generic drug manufacturing business that he felt would avoid the pitfalls that had plagued his former employer. His paper got an ‘A’ in the class, but even more important to Pete, it formed the basis for a more extensive plan that he took out to potential investors, people who he had met while working in the industry.

A month before finishing his MBA program, he had enough investors to start the business.

In retrospect, Pete would look back and shake his head thinking about those early days. Yes, he had ultimately made the company successful, but if he were to do it again, he would have raised twice the initial capital before plunging into the very competitive and cut-throat generic drug business.

The business did succeed, although it took longer, and was ten-times harder that Pete had anticipated. Fortunately for him, his investors never flagged, and by sticking with his plan he did avoid the major mistakes that he’d observed in his first job. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t make plenty of mistakes on his own—he did—but they were never quite so bad as to be fatal to the firm.

He met his wife Angela while he was getting his MBA.

Angela was another grad student in the business department, although she was getting a master’s in accounting degree. Her plan was to go to work for one of the big accounting firms when she finished her degree and do the audit work necessary to qualify for her CPA. She never planned on trying to stay and make partner; she figured she would eventually get a job with one of the companies that she was auditing, or alternately setting up her own small CPA office, providing accounting and tax services, ‘soup to nuts’ as it were, for smaller businesses that couldn’t afford a Price-Waterhouse, DeLoitte, or Ernest.

Pete more or less messed up Angela’s plan big time.

Oh, she finished her M.A. in Accounting as planned, but the day after graduation, she walked down the aisle to become Mrs. Peter Pearson, and a week later, after returning from an abbreviated ‘the-most-we-could-afford’ honeymoon—much of it spent in glorious days and nights, camping in tents in National Parks—returned to become the chief financial officer of Pete’s new start-up generic drug company. If she would have preferred her honeymoon to have been in Paris, London or Hawaii, Angela never let on. Wherever she and Pete could be together was the best spot in the world.

The early years were more work than play. They were tough on Pete, and tough on Angela. Through it all, they learned to love each other more every day. Pete could never tire of finding the dark-haired, blue-eyed, slip of a girl waking up next to him each morning; Angela’s love for her husband, lover, protector and friend, who she found handsome, charming, and irresistible, grew apace. They were truly soulmates; a pair of people who cared more for the other’s happiness than their own.

Their major disappointment was that despite repeated attempts, Angela didn’t become pregnant. Worse, there didn’t seem to be any specific reason that the fertility gurus could point to and say, “Here, this is the cause.” Pete’s sperm count wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that bad either; the motility and other factors seemed fine. Angela didn’t have any of the obvious issues—endometriosis, scarring from STD’s (she’d never had any, thank you!), problems with her ova. But they still weren’t making babies.

They took it in stride, and kept trying, but not so hard that sex became a chore, or to the point where adding a third member of the family came between the two original members of their small club.

Before they knew it, Pete and Angela Pearson, as well as Pearson Generic’s, had been going concerns for twenty years. The Pearsons were respected, successful members of their community, their business was one of the larger employers in the county, and they lived a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle of the small business owner. Indeed, soon, if trends continued, Pearson Generics would outgrow the ‘small business’ moniker. Things were going well for Pete and Angela.

She was only in her mid-forties when she was first diagnosed with cancer.

Angela and Pete fought her illness together, she, suffering through the radiation and chemo treatments that could kill the rogue cells trying to infiltrate and dominate her bodily systems; Pete, who suffered the mental anguish with his beloved, did everything else. He took time away from his business to care for her; to feed her, to wash her, to be her strength and succor when her own will ebbed, and her spirit sagged. He was her cheerleader, her confessor, her lover and friend.

And in the end, it appeared to have paid off: Angela was finally declared to be in complete remission, a clean bill of health. From this point onward, the medical inquisitors would be vigilant, always watching for any reoccurrence, but as confident as could be that they had defeated the enemy.

Not long after they had gotten the good news about Angela’s illness, Pete and she made long, slow love to each other. During her illness, they had continued to have ‘sex’ when Angela had felt well enough, but they were hard pressed to be able to relax, let go of their fears, and just enjoy that life affirming act. Now, they could return to being together looking at their future together.

“Pete,” she spoke, looking with satiated eyes at her husband laying next to her, “that was simply wonderful. I’m such a lucky woman to have a husband like you.”

“Oh sweetheart, it’s me who’s the lucky one. You make me happy every waking moment. And I love you even more today than on I did on our wedding day,” he told her, drawing her closer and hugging her thin and still fragile body tightly to his under the covers.

“I guess that we’re both been blessed. You know that after the first time that you took me out, all of those years ago, I was completely smitten. I thought you were the most brilliant, handsome man I’d ever known, but you weren’t egotistical or condescending to anyone. And, of course, best of all, you adored me,” she said with a laugh.

“I did, you know. Even after our first conversation I thought that you were the kindest and gentlest woman that I’d ever met, and to this day, I think that I was right. It didn’t hurt that you were beautiful as well. I adored you then, and I adore you now, you sexy vixen.”

Angela allowed Pete to compliment her, but her own self-assessment told her that her illness had taken a severe toll on her looks.

Pete lay there silently looking at his wife for a minute before he spoke again.

“Do you mind if we change topics?” he asked.

Angela looked at him with a curious look, before replying. She pulled her pillow up further on the headboard so that she was in a sitting position.

“No, not at all. You know how quickly I get bored by listening to you tell me how you adore me,” came her teasing reply.

Pete grinned back at her, before putting his pillow up and raising himself in the bed as well.

“I think that we ought to ‘do’ something,” he asserted.

“I thought we just did!” Angela said, raising an eyebrow at her husband.

“Well, that’s true enough, but I was thinking of something else. For years while we were getting the company up and running, we skimped and scraped by; then you got sick. But I think that the time has come for us to live a little for ourselves.”

Pete didn’t say it out loud, but two factors had influenced his thinking, first that while Angela had been ill and his time and energy had been directed towards her, his upper management staff had functioned very well with minimal direction from him, and second Pete had gotten his first whiff of mortality—that Angela’s cancer could reappear, he could be killed in a car crash, whatever.

“I think that we ought to start taking some trips. You know, going places and doing the sorts of things that we always talked about. Make a second honeymoon of it; lord knows your first honeymoon was pretty Spartan.”

Angela smiled as she thought back to those first days of their marriage.

“You mean you don’t want to take a vacation where I cook your meals on a Coleman stove?” she laughed.

“No cooking for you! Unless you want to. I’m thinking London, Paris. Let’s cruise up the Nile and see the pyramids, Crete, the Greek islands. Alaska, Hawaii—you name it!” he pronounced.

“Hmmmm ... I’ve always wanted to spend the night in one of those ‘five-star’ hotels in Paris, overlooking the Champs Elysee, with a window view of the Eiffel Tower,” she mused, crossing her arms and putting her hand up to her chin.

“Sounds like a perfect, romantic, dream, to me,” Pete agreed.

“Of course, London has so many places I’ve wanted to see too—Westminster Cathedral, the Tower, Buckingham Palace, all of the shows; and they speak English there. My English is definitely better than my French.” Pete and Angela both laughed at that, since neither one of them spoke a word of French.

“Done,” Pete agreed. “Two weeks in London, and we’ll take the high-speed ‘Euro-Star’ train to Paris and spend two weeks there. Is that a suitable compromise, Princess?”

“You mean it?” Angela gasped, with a look of disbelief on her face. “Can you take that much time off?”

“Sure, honey. Things went pretty smoothly when you were sick, and unless we start work on any new products, they really don’t need me to keep things running like clockwork on a day-to-day basis. We aren’t planning on starting the approval process on any new drugs until October or November. We have plenty of time to sneak off to London and Paris for a month.”

“Oh my god,” Angela exclaimed with excitement, “When do we start? I’ll need a new wardrobe — I’ve lost so much weight. And they aren’t on the same electrical system there, are they? Will I be able to use my hair dryer? And I’ll need to get some books...”

“Hold on, love. You’re going too fast for me already.” Pete laughed again, his wife’s enthusiasm amusing him. “Tomorrow, we’ll sit down with our corporate travel agent and get our tickets and set the dates. I’m sure that she’ll be able to answer all your questions about what to take. And just consider for a minute before you go out and buy a new wardrobe. You’re going to be in Paris, the fashion capital of the world. You might want to bring a few things back with you.”

“Oh, Pete! Do you mean that? Do you know how expensive clothes like that are? Especially in Europe?” Angela gushed.

They spoke about their plans for another hour there in the bed. Then they hugged and kissed again.

“I’m not sure that I’ll be able to sleep tonight, I’m so excited,” Angela said, her eyes bright.

“That’s all right,” Pete interjected, the mood of the evening making him feel completely content. “I’ll sleep enough for the both of us.” He began shifting his pillows and blankets back around.

“I have to pee. I’ll be right back, sweetie,” Angela said, over her shoulder, already jumping out of bed and walking towards the bathroom.

Pete heard the delicate tinkle as she peed into the toilet, followed by the rumble of the toilet paper being rolled off, and finally by the flush of the toilet. A moment later, there was a kind of thump, and then nothing.

“Angela? Angela? Angela, are you alright?” Pete called as he scrambled from the bed, accelerating as he ran for the bathroom.

He found her there, a limp, lifeless body on the floor, the shell of the vibrant woman who had been his wife just five minutes before. He immediately began to perform CPR, taking only enough time to dial 911...

The EMT people who were the first on the scene, tried unsuccessfully for the next hour to revive her. They assured him that as far as they could tell, Angela had died almost instantaneously. No matter how effective his efforts or theirs, there was nothing to be done.

The pathologist agreed.

“The damn cancer treatment. It kills the cancer,” he explained to Pete, “but it’s also hard on the entire patient. Her heart was subject to too much stress, and it failed.” He then shrugged and walked away in that way that doctors learn to do, because they deal with death every day.

Needless to say, Pete didn’t get to London or Paris that year. In fact, he dealt with his grief by throwing himself into his work, continuing to build the business, adding new products. He would go home as seldom as possible, working until he would fall exhausted into the bed that he had shared with Angela, and find sweet oblivion, hoping to avoid dreaming of his wife, his love.

Pete sat in his old Bronco 4X4 as Randy drove them up deep into the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The first leg of their journey was on major freeway, but after about an hour, they exited that and started on local county roads. Still, these weren’t too bad—at least they were paved. At the last small town, they refilled the 4X4 with gas, including a couple of five-gallon fuel containers, just in case. Then it was off onto even rougher roads.

Fifty miles on county roads, which were gravel and graded a couple of times a years after the rains to smooth out the ‘washboard’ effect, and they started the final leg of their journey on unimproved dirt roads.

Their final destination was a log hunting cabin deep in the woods that Pete’s family had inherited from his great-grandfather, who had homesteaded the land in the late 1800’s. It was one of those dream situations for an outdoorsman—a cabin on a small pocket of private land, surrounded on three sides by national forest. Lacking in most of the modern amenities for generations, electrical power had been extended to the cabin only a couple of years prior, which had allowed Pete to add an electrical water pump for the well, a water heater, which in turn saw a new (albeit simple) indoor bathroom replace the old outhouse. Pete had been completely delighted the first time he was able to take a hot shower there.

It was a constant irritation to the local Forestry Service bureaucrats that there were still places like the Pearson land adjacent to the forest that were not under their control, but the issue had gone to court on several occasions, and the government had failed thus far to seize the old landholdings in this part of the west.

Pete was quiet during the drive as he contemplated his new world. Pete’s mind had been occupied with other thoughts, thoughts of a darker nature. He had been reflecting on what he’d seen before the trip started, his wife and Randy engaged in activities that Jean had to know would result in a divorce,

You don’t kill love in an instant, but Jean had done a good job of letting Pete know that she had never loved him the way he had loved her. It turned out that she was Delilah to his Samson, a Jezebel, and their marriage had been a “long con.” Worse, was finding that it wasn’t enough for her to divorce him, but to steal his wealth, she was willing to kill him. It shook him to the core, and he was not inclined to let it happen.

That Randy was on this trip at all was because of Jean. She had convinced him that Randy could come along and help with field dressing and carrying out any elk that Pete harvested. It made sense: the area in which he would be hunting was rugged, with narrow trails limited to hiking, steep slopes, and deep dangerous canyons. It was safer for two people to hunt together, and even with two people, if Pete took his cow elk, it might take multiple trips to haul the meat out to the cabin.

Pete’s outlook on the ‘why’ of Randy’s presence was changed by overhearing those few sentences between Jean (he could barely think of her as his wife, even now) and the skinny young man driving the 4X4.

That train of thought brought him back to Jean. Who was this person who had succeeded his loving Angela? Whoever she was, she certainly wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was at the time.

For the first couple of years after Angela’s death, Pete had simply existed. Not to say that there weren’t lots of women willing to keep him company. After all, how often would a catch like Pete Pearson be available?

Pete was a widower; during his marriage he never strayed on his wife, and he had loved her until the day she died; and even afterwards, he still loved her memory. Women—single, married or divorced—admired that kind of loyalty in a man. Many of them wished that the men in their lives were as loyal as Pete Pearson, but alas, most couldn’t say they were.

He was, by any standard, ‘moderately’ wealthy. Most folks figured that Pearson Generics was worth at least $50 million, and as the single largest shareholder in the company, Pete was well off. In fact, although not many people knew about it, Pete and his board of directors had actually turned down offers for more than twice that amount. When they did decide to sell the firm, Pete would be a rich man for the rest of his life.

Still in his late forties, Pete, the average guy who didn’t draw women’s attention in his twenties, got plenty of admiring looks. He had maintained his weight, so while he’d never been the bulked-up muscle-bound sort of fellow in college, as he’d aged, he looked trim and in good condition compared with most of his contemporaries. His hair, which had been a non-descript dirty blond, had some gray creeping in on his temples, which most people described as ‘distinguished.’ His eyes, blue gray in color, had always been hidden behind the thick-rimmed glasses that he had worn back then—they provided protection from lab accidents, and were, honestly, the cheapest variety of frames offered. After Angela had insisted that he have laser surgery that corrected his vision, and since he didn’t work ‘hand-on’ in a lab anymore, he stopped wearing glasses, except for the non-prescription sunglasses with the polarized lenses he wore when driving or fishing. Now women noticed his ‘sexy’ eyes.

In short, Pete had become an attractive package to numerous women, regardless of their marriage status. Pete, on the other hand had become quite deft a deflecting the amorous attentions of women, many of whom saw him as a solution to their problems — ladies who are known in polite parlance as ‘gold-diggers’.

Jean was in a different class for a variety of reasons.

Pete and Jean had met at one of the relatively rare parties that Pete attended, one that indeed he could hardly avoid. It was at his next-door neighbor’s massive faux log-cabin mansion and was an annual event that occurred when his neighbor arrived for the summer. His well-known neighbor was a wealthy New York financier, with enough money to make Pete look like mere upper-middle-class businessman (which was how Pete thought of himself), rather than a wealthy man in his own right. In truth, though, Pete and his neighbor were on friendly terms, in part because Pete and he shared a passion for the outdoors, and they often went hunting and fishing together.