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slope like an armored personnel carrier. He was ten years older than me, but I suspected that in a footrace up the hill, he’d be waiting for me on top with his impact instrument.
    I sat tight and watched, shooting glances around my tree. He moved cautiously through the undergrowth, playing the flashlight on the shadows. To my relief, he was looking at man height, not tree height. Slowly, I forced the wounded knee to bend, wondering if I would ever straighten it out again.
    Oliver stopped. He aimed his light at something on the ground. He studied it, picked it up, and pocketed it. I couldn’t see what he had found. Then, with one last pass through the brush, he started back to the house.
    Something yowled in the treetops, crashed through the leaf canopy, and landed, thrashing and crying on the end of the limb I was sitting on. When it caught its balance and turned toward me, I saw in the moonlight the masked face of a raccoon. Oliver came pounding up the slope.
    I am not unaware of the comic nature of the preceding events, but I wasn’t laughing. Raccoons don’t fall out of trees unless something is wrong with them, and we were in the thick of a rabies epidemic. Rabies turns them lethally unpredictable—frightened in one instance, aggressive in another. When he saw Oliver’s halogen beam darting between the tree trunks, he backed away, closer to me. Finally, he sensed me and growled. I pointed the camera at him. He retreated back from where he came only to get hit square in the face by the light.
    He was a horrible sight; he had clawed his own stomach open in his agony. He bared his teeth and growled down at the state trooper, who had come to a halt a few feet below.
    â€œOh, you poor son of a bitch,” said Oliver. “Now you just sit still. In a minute everything’s going to be fine.”
    From the house, Mrs. Long called, “Are you all right, Officer?”
    â€œFound your prowler,” Oliver called over his shoulder. “Rabid raccoon. Go get a plastic garbage bag and stay inside until I call you.”
    I pressed like bark against the tree, praying he wouldn’t see me and hoping he wouldn’t splatter rabid raccoon all over me with the cannon he wore at his waist. Then Oliver, who was, for a mean, simple bully, one surprise after another, gave up another one. He glanced back, making sure Mrs. Long couldn’t see him, and reached down and pulled a little Beretta .22 from an ankle holster concealed under his pants. In all the years I had known him, I never knew, and no one ever said, that he carried a backup weapon. You learn something every day.
    It was the right gun for the raccoon. Holding his light in one hand and the gun in his other, Oliver caught the animal’s attention by talking to it, telling it everything would work out fine, and shot him neatly through the head. It fell at his feet.
    â€œBring the bag,” Oliver called.
    Mrs. Long ran up her grassy slope; Oliver met her at the edge of the woods. Taking care not to touch the animal with his bare hands, he worked the bag around it and tied it shut. Then he sauntered down to the house, trailing the bag.
    â€œWhat are you going to do with it?” asked Mrs. Long.
    â€œLandfill.” He walked around the house, slammed the Fury’s door and drove off, as the burglar-alarm company’s van raced up with a funny little blinking light on the roof.
    ***
    There were lights in Town Hall, burning late as usual in the first selectman’s office. As I drove past on deserted Main Street, the clock bonged eleven—amazingly early, considering my night so far.
    My answering machine was blinking.
    I went straight to the bourbon. Then I put the tape in the VCR and ran it on RECORD to erase it. I remembered Nixon and his missing eighteen minutes and wondered whether erased video recordings could be restored by computer enhancement. I played the tape on the TV: blizzards of snow. But what if Rose