Chapter 3

I admit that the first time I shot at a coyote I got off my horse to do it. Jill had made me practice shooting on horseback, and on the tractor too. I had carried the rifle on my back so often that it no longer seemed odd to do it. But when I saw the brown flash of movement off in the distance, I just wasn't willing to explore it from up on the horse.

After I got down and spent five fruitless minutes trying to spot the critter again, I almost gave up. Then he trotted out from behind a bush I'd examined a dozen times, and just looked around. He didn't suspect a thing, despite all the gunfire that had gone on around the place in the last few weeks. I'd hoped that just the noise of me learning how to shoot would convince them to go live somewhere else. No such luck, though.

The kick surprised me completely. I hadn't even 'decided' to pull the trigger. The first thing I thought of was that I hadn't evaluated what was likely to be down range if I missed. That was a bad thing and I felt stupid. As I felt a stab of shame though, the brown body in the field of my sight did an almost magical backwards somersault and landed flat on the ground. Then it didn't move any more.

I was astonished.

It took me a few minutes to get to the body. I was so out of it that I didn't pay any attention to how far it had been or any of that. I just went to the body with the dreadful curiosity of someone who thinks he has just killed something for the first time in his life. Hunting is a complicated endeavor. Aiming is easy, and squeezing the trigger is simple too. It's what happens after that that makes things complicated.

I stood, looking down at a shaggy, dusty, multi-colored coyote. It's mouth was partly open and I could see its teeth ... perhaps the very teeth that had savaged that colt's leg. At the same time I knew that up until a few minutes ago this had been a living creature. I had assumed the role of God, deciding what would live and what would die, and I didn't like that role. I knew the poor thing lying at my feet had to die, because of the priorities that existed in my world. But that didn't mean I was proud of having killed it. It occurred to me that I had learned this killing skill very well, considering that I was successful on my very first shot off the practice range. That made me feel good, except that my success had been the doom of another living creature, which robbed me of that good feeling. And the whole time all this was going on in my brain I was hopped up on adrenaline and hyperventilating.

I thought about what to do with the body. Jill had told me not to leave anything for the others to eat unless I wanted to use it as bait and wait for them to come feed. I'd thought that was cold then, and it felt even more distasteful now. I picked up the carcass by the tail and tried to figure out how to put it on my horse. The horse wasn't impressed. He had taken the rifle shot calmly, but didn't like a coyote to be that close to him, even if it was dead. In the end I put the body in a tree until I could get on the horse, and just carried it by the tail.

Based on some strange urge that I still don't understand, I rode through the apple orchard to show Jill what I'd done. She was delighted, of course, and took the body from me, asking me if I wanted to learn how to skin it. I declined, feeling sick at my stomach. I said I had something to do and left her leaning over the still warm body of my first kill, a knife in her right hand.

The next day I found the stiff skin of the coyote nailed to the side of my barn. To be honest, I didn't quite know how to feel about that.

It only took me six months to resolve the coyote problem. By then I had fourteen hides nailed up on the side of the barn and I no longer felt guilty about killing them. There was a farm two miles down the road where I got fresh eggs and I saw what coyotes had done to some of her hens. It wasn't like they had nothing else to eat. There was plenty of game around. They just went for the easy stuff, which usually mean they went for what humans owned.

While I played great white hunter, Lynne and Jill put a lot of work into the orchard, taking it much more seriously than they ever had before. Lynne studied the common problems, like apple scab and aphids and such, and the ways that organic farmers dealt with them. In the past there had been plenty of apples for all the critters to share in. That changed when she got serious about making a profit on them.

Jill put a lot of time into developing further markets and by the time we started picking, instead of driving a pickup load of apples to the farmer's market (something Jill had been dreaming of doing for years) she had to settle for being ogled by the men who showed up in an eighteen wheeler to pick up the six hundred crates of apples it had almost killed us to pick and pack in a one-week period.

And those six hundred crates had come from only four acres of orchard. Three of her customers called and said they'd want even more apples next year. That was when she started talking about hiring high school kids to help pick, and estimating we could ship three truckloads if all went well.

In the off season, meaning when we weren't actually picking apples, Jill and I still spent hours and hours together. I had gotten good enough at shooting that we could have competitions. I loved shooting in the summer time, because Jill usually wore halter tops, or tank tops, and even sometimes a T shirt that was cut off short so her stomach showed. I'd glue my eyes to her breasts, waiting for that special jiggle they'd display when her rifle went off. Shooting excited her too, and her nipples would get hard. There were a number of times I suspected she wasn't wearing a bra, but her breasts were so firm that it was hard to tell unless a nipple popped up.

I had given up feeling guilty about lusting after her. She paid no attention to me at all in the sense she was completely comfortable around me. If she caught me staring at her she might say "What?!" but always shrugged it off if I said "Nothing," or something like "I was just LOOKING at you! Can't I even LOOK at you?"

And I had finally come to peace with the thought that Vicky would probably have scolded me up one side and down the other for simply arresting my social life, as far as women went. Still, it was one thing to gaze fondly at this girl, or her mother, for that matter, and have distinctly naughty thoughts about them. It was another completely to translate those thoughts into actions. Besides, I liked them both too much to screw things up if I did something that made either of them uncomfortable around me.

In the years I had known her Jill had taught me things like welding, most of what I knew about fixing the tractor, all about gardening and things like that, while I had taught her woodcarving, and sketching. They didn't have a suitable tree on their property, so I had let her help me build her a tree house in an elm out behind my house. In all the years I'd known her I'd never known her to take any interest in boys. She never talked about them to me, and never seemed frustrated about them or any of that. And several times Lynne bemoaned the fact that her daughter didn't have a boyfriend. She was around boys at school. They just didn't impress her or something.

Of course I loved that part of things, in one sense, because I firmly believed she was a virgin and that made my fantasies so much the sweeter.

I'm not rambling here. I tell you all this because you really need to understand where my mind was, at this time of my life, because shortly before Jill's eighteenth birthday everything kind of went crazy. It was a Saturday, and it was late July. There was an air of anticipation in the air, but only part of that had to do with the apple harvest. The trees were heavy with fruit, but it still needed some time to get to the picking point. The other part of it was that in the fall Jill would be going off to college. It seemed like somehow that would change everything.

On this particular day I knew that Lynne was in town doing the weekly shopping, and was looking for just the right birthday present for Jill. She had asked me to distract Jill so that she wouldn't want to go with her, and had assigned us the task of inspecting the tops of the trees for signs of pests. We were concentrating on the trees that had been the best producers the year before. I used a ladder. Jill still just climbed like a monkey.

I finished a tree and went looking for Jill. She had the list of which trees were done and which still needed to be inspected. I was walking under a tree when an apple whizzed by my shoulder, missing me by inches. It hit the ground by my foot with a thump. I looked up to see a grinning Jill standing in the branches.

I only noticed the grin for a few seconds though, and the "HEY! Watch it!" that came out of my mouth was purely reflexive. That's because I was distracted rather quickly by things I could see other than her grin. She was wearing one of those T shirts that had been cut off above her belly button. Her breasts ... her braless breasts by the way ... were pushing that shirt out so that I had a clear view of the undersides of creamy looking swells. She was also, for some obtuse reason, wearing a faded jeans skirt that day, instead of the shorts she usually wore in the summer. Looking up her tanned legs I saw white panties clinging lovingly to a bubble butt and a pronounced mound of Venus.

I know. Panties don't cling lovingly to anything. But if I were those panties I'd be clinging to her soft skin, and it would be VERY lovingly!

"What are YOU looking at?" she popped off. I had to lick my lips before I could speak. "Nothing."

"Liar!" she taunted. "You were looking up my skirt, you dirty old man."

"I was not!" I lied weakly and tried to go on the offensive. "And you should be wearing a bra too, young lady!"

I had blown it, exposing myself as being, in fact, a dirty old man. "Mom never wears them," she said lightly. "And now I know you were looking up my shirt too." She put the back of one hand to her forehead in a theatrical way and looked up. "I feel so violated!" she moaned.

"Sorry," I mumbled automatically. I finally looked away. I worked on my muscles, which had kind of frozen up when I gazed on all that loveliness, and started to walk away.

"Wait!" she said. "I was kidding!"

That made me look up again. This was a new Jill, one I had never met. She was climbing down a few branches, and making no effort to avoid letting me look at whatever I wanted to look at.

"I know you look at me," she said, when her bare feet were on a branch that was even with my head. "I've seen you looking at me for years."

"Oh," I said, feeling foolish. All these years I'd thought she was unaware of my oafish behavior.

"Don't look so guilty," she said, squatting down. Her skirt lay on her thighs in the front, and hung down in the back. With her knees spread like that the front of her panties were on display right in front of my face. I almost thought she was aware of what she was doing. "I like it."

"What?" My eyes popped up to her face. She had amber eyes, brown, but with flecks of yellow in them.

"It makes me feel good when you look at me like that."

"Like what?" I have no idea why I asked the question. I was off balance and just making noises, I think.

"Like I'm a woman and you're a man who is interested."

Well that little revelation about unhinged me, but years of self control sought to make another appearance.

"I'm way too old to be interested in a girl like you," I said. "I shouldn't look, but I appreciate you cutting me some slack."

"Why shouldn't you look? I like it. Mom likes it when you look at her too."

"What?" I think my eyes might have bugged out a bit.

"We talk about you sometimes." She said it as if she'd said something like "Apples get red when they ripen, you know."

"You do?"

"Of course. You're the only man in our life, for all intents and purposes. Why wouldn't we talk about you? And you make us both feel good ... like we're pretty, maybe."