The next morning, knife in hand, Andy knelt beside his big buck and
expertly skinned out both hindquarters. Frosty, entirely at ease as long
as no rifles or shotguns were about, sat contentedly near and watched
the proceedings with interest. Slitting the tendons, Andy tied a rope
through each, slung the other ends of the ropes over a porch beam and
made ready to hoist the carcass aloft and finish skinning.
Frosty slipped into his favorite hiding place under the porch and did
not come out again. Andy slackened the taut ropes and eased the buck
down onto the floor. Frosty was not precisely a watch dog, but the boy
had learned to tell from the big cat's actions when something was
coming.
A little while later, Jud Casman appeared around a corner of the house.
He was dressed for hunting, but not precisely in the costume which
fashion magazines say the well-dressed hunter should wear. He wore wool
trousers whose legs had been slit so that they might fit over
knee-length rubber boots. It was a good, practical arrangement; snow
and water would run down the trouser legs, rather than inside the boots.
His upper torso was encased in a jacket over which he wore the cut-off
upper half of some red woolen underwear. That, according to Jud, both
enabled other hunters to see him and made the jacket snug enough so that
some loose end wasn't forever catching in the brush. His hat might have
descended to Jud from the first person ever to see the swamp. His rifle
matched the costume.
It was a muzzle-loader of a type generally associated with frontiersmen
and Indian fighters, and it was almost as long as Jud was tall. A single
shot, it had been handed down by Jud's father, who in turn had obtained
it from his father. The bore had been re-reamed and re-rifled so many
times that now it cast a slug approximately the size of a small cannon
ball. A lot of people had laughed at Jud and his rifle, but on his side,
Jud snickered at those who needed a whole handful of cartridges when, as
any child should know, one ball was plenty, if you put it in the right
place. Andy, who had seen Jud pick the heads off squirrels and grouse
and shoot flying geese, knew that Jud killed whatever he shot at. He
left no wounded creature to die in agony.