Shiloh Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

tree in his front yard. At first I figure this shows just how drunk he is, mistaking a tree for a deer or something, but I raise my head in time to see two squirrels chasing each other around and around that tree trunk.
    Judd lifts his gun and aims. Bang!
    One squirrel goes skittering on up the tree half crazy, and the other falls straight down and goes floppin' about the yard.
    I can't watch. Put my head down on my arms and pray for that squirrel to die quick. But now all Judd's dogs are going nuts, yelping and barking, and above it all comes Judd's laugh.
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    "Gotcha!" he yells, and I can hear the slap of his hand on his knee again. He don't even stand up to go get the squirrel, or shoot it to put it out of its misery. I look up quick to see the squirrel still squirming, but then it lays still, only its tail twitching.
    How can he do that way? I'm asking myself. To watch a living thing die slow like that, shot for no good reason at all? Wasn't as though Judd needed it for food-squirrel stew or something-because he don't even get off the step. Just spits again out the side of his mouth.
    The other squirrel's comin' back now, probably to see what's happened to his pal, and just as Judd raises his gun again, I yell, "No, don't!" Can't help myself.
    David pushes my head down. Judd jerks around. "Who'zat?" he yells, but his words sound slurred. "Who said that?"
    We hear him get up off the steps, and I think my heart's going to pound right through the skin on my chest. I'm about as frightened as I ever been in my life, because David and me weren't just walking down a country road where we've every right to be. We're lyin' belly down on Judd's property, and Judd could put some lead in us quicker than he could spit-say we were trespassing and he thought we'd come to rob him or something.
    "Sound like Marty Preston to me," says Judd, and from where I'm lying, my chin on the ground, eyes turned up about as high as I can get 'em, I see Judd looking every which way, trying to figure out where that voice came from. "What you doing over here?" he yells again. "Your dad won't let me hunt on your land, so what you doing on mine?11
    I press the side of my head to the ground, my whole
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    body as flat as it can get. All I can think of is Ma hearing that David and me were found with buckshot in our brains. This has got to be one of the stupidest things I ever did. I can hear Judd's big old boots comin' down the boards stretched across his yard.
    Should I say something? I wonder. Call out and tell him we were just goin' by? And then I think how it will look, us just going by Judd's place flat on our bellies. I swallow.
    The footsteps stop, don't come any closer. I tip my head so I can look up with one eye, and I see that Judd's so unsteady he's only gone as far as the end of the trailer. Got one hand against it, holding himself up, the other one's got the gun.
    "I catch you foolin' around my truck, Marty Preston, I'll blast you to kingdom come!" he yells.
    Finally, after the longest two minutes in the world, Judd goes back to the steps of the trailer again and then he goes inside.
    David and I lie in the grass not saying a word-not breathing, hardly. Then slowly we inch backward out of those weeds the same way we came in, wondering all the while if Judd's got his shotgun aimed out a window, just watching for the weeds to wiggle.
    When we're out of sight at last behind a lilac bush, we make a run for the little cemetery with all the Donaldsons in it, and from there, we cut on back out to the road.
    We're breathing too hard to talk, almost.". . . could of been us...."
    "Close as spit...."
    "... squirrel hadn't done anything...."
    "Shouldn't have come...."
    "... He knows it was you, Marty...."
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    Both David and me feel sick inside. But there's one big thought taking up the whole of my mind, now that I seen Judd shoot the squirrel: squirrel season don't start till next month, so Judd's a little early; duck season starts in October; deer season