"I guess this one's got a vacancy," Max said unnecessarily as he pulled into the motel's parking lot. It was a little after one in the morning, local time. They were a mile off the highway, in the middle of Colorado.

"I'll get the guns out of the trunk while you're getting a room," Henry offered. His uncle handed him the keyring before easing his tall frame out of the Impala. The engine was making soft ticking noises in the cool night air as Henry went to open the trunk.

Henry Bowman had their gun cases, range kits, and both traveling bags lined up on the concrete walk by the time his uncle returned from the office, where a sleepy clerk had taken his cash and handed him the key to a double room. Max picked up three of the pieces of luggage and led the way to their accommodations.

Driving enervated Max, particularly when it was at high speeds. Now that the car was parked and a mattress beckoned, he realized how tired he was. After using the toilet and making sure his travel alarm was wound, he got out of his clothes and stretched out on the bed nearest the door. It was a little too short, but that was nothing unusual for him. He closed his eyes, knowing sleep was about to overtake him.

"Seven o'clock too early for you, kid? Shower and grab some breakfast before we get rolling again?"

Henry grinned. He had dozed off and on in the car during the last few hours of the day's drive. "It's fine with me. I'm going to go get a soda from the machine out front." He felt in his pocket for a dime as he left the room. Soda machines at gas stations and motels often had flavors that his mother refused to buy at home, and the one by the registration office did not disappoint him.

The night was quiet, and the glow of neon was the brightest light nearby. Henry looked up at the sky as he sipped from the bottle, and he realized he could see several times as many stars as he could in Missouri. This phenomenon was the converse of the one Ray Johnson had observed fourteen years before, when he had moved from Pitkin County to Boston.

As Henry Bowman stared up at the heavens that night, he had no inkling of the effect that his talent and passion would have on the lives of others. One of the people whose life would be most affected was a man who currently lived on the other side of the world, but who had grown up near the spot where a fifteenyear-old boy from Missouri was now standing, happily drinking a grape soda at 1:00 in the morning. "Adams," the auctioneer announced. "Do I hear five hundred?" Silence. "Three hundred." Still no response. "One hundred dollars-minimum bid. Mister Adams, do you want to buy yourself for one hu-"

"One hundred!" yelled a bidder.

"Got one hundred, looking for one fifty, one fifty," the auctioneer declared as a hand went up. Jerry Adams eventually went for two hundred twenty-five dollars.

"Collins," said the announcer, when he reached the fifth name on the list. He looked up from his clipboard and recognized Max. "Do I hear five hundred?" There was a brief pause. Max was squinting, looking at the increased movement of the clouds in the sky. It looked like it might get very windy.

"Five hundred," Max said in a firm voice. "Then everybody can get on to the real shooters." He favored the group with a self-deprecating grin.

"Collins bids five hundred on himself. Any others?" As Max had suspected, there were no higher bids. If no one had agreed to meet the auctioneer's first suggestion, and the bidding had dropped, it might well have ended up higher. Max was well-known as an excellent live-bird shooter, but by his own admission he was not a full-time pro on the trap and pigeon circuit. Five hundred was a high starting bid for any amateur, and Max had gently reminded the bidders of who was coming up for auction in a few minutes.

"Sold," the auctioneer announced, and scribbled the number on his sheet. Henry Bowman was disappointed that no one else had wanted to bid on his uncle.

Max Collins smiled to himself.

"Devers!" the auctioneer almost shouted.

"Two thousand!" yelled a voice in the crowd before the auctioneer had time to suggest an opening bid. "Three." This came from several men, speaking at once.

"Thirty-five," came another voice, and the auctioneer's eyes switched to the newest speaker.

The auctioneer was present because the Reno shoot was being run as a Calcutta. It was this fact that had drawn both the best live-bird shooters in the nation and the huge number of spectators and professional gamblers to the Nevada event.

In a Calcutta, shooters paid an entry fee, which went to the sponsors of the competition. In this case it was $100 per shooter. Before the shoot started, an auction was held, and each competitor was auctioned off to the highest bidder. If any shooter failed to fetch the $100 minimum bid, he could either drop out and get his entry fee refunded, forfeit his chance at the prize but still shoot in competition, or purchase himself for $100. No shooter ever chose the first option, and only rarely did one opt for the second. It was a matter of pride.

The revenue raised by the auction became the winning purse. The shooter who won the competition got a percentage of the purse, and whoever had purchased him at auction got the rest of it. In the Reno shoot, the split was fifteen percent to the shooter and eighty-five to the bidder who had 'bought' him. If a shooter who had bought himself happened to win, he kept all the winnings. It was rare, but it happened once in a while.

First place paid half the purse. Second took 30%, and third paid 20%. From the standpoint of prize money, fourth place was no better than dead last. For this reason, there were myriad side bets going on entirely apart from the sponsors of the shoot. Some of these bets were larger than any of the amounts the shooters were bringing at auction.

"Six thousand-do I hear six thousand for Devers?" said the auctioneer. "Fifty-five hundred once, twice, SOLD to Mister Burke for fifty-five hundred." Modest applause went up from the crowd. Joe Devers was the odds-on favorite to win. With the purse expected to top forty thousand dollars, Burke was looking at close to a three-to-one return if his man ended up with the high score.

Other entrants in the Reno shoot came up for bid and were duly auctioned off. Heavy bidding centered on eight shooters. There was moderate activity on about a dozen serious amateurs, who were generally thought to be about the same ability as Henry's uncle. Most of the remaining competitors were bought for a hundred to a hundred fifty dollars either by themselves, or by personal friends hoping that a miracle would happen.

"That's the last of it. We start at ten o'clock sharp, gentlemen. See you then." The meeting broke up. "Pull!" At the command from Norm Frakes, who was the first shooter up on the third day of the shoot, the trap boy hit the button on the control in his hand and the trap just to the right of the center one snapped open. A jet of compressed air forced the disoriented bird a few yards into the air, and the pigeon immediately got its bearings and started flying with the wind. Frakes swung his Woodward-actioned Purdey to his left and fired once. His shot pattern was perfectly centered on the bird, and it crumpled in flight, dead. Its body arced through the air, rolling from the impact of the shot charge. The dead bird hit on its back in the dirt, landing less than two feet from the fence and bouncing into the wire. Murmurs went up from the crowd.

The Calcutta was a seventy-five bird event, with each participant shooting twenty-five birds each day. The first two days had been calm, and seven competitors were on the board with scores of either forty-eight or forty-nine. Max Collins, Joe Devers, and young Britt Robinson were the three leading scorers, with four others just one bird behind. Norm Frakes stood at forty-three.

"Norm's a good shot," Max whispered to his nephew, "but he takes too much time being careful. Don't be surprised if he loses six or eight birds he kills, in this wind. If that one had come out any of the traps on the left side, it would have been a lost bird." Henry nodded in understanding. He had realized this last fact the instant he had seen the dead pigeon hit the ground. As Henry considered Norman Frakes' lack of speed, a boy ran out into the ring carrying a pigeon and stowed it in the empty trap from which the first bird had been released.

Live pigeon competitions had originated in Mexico. There, human bird throwers used sleight-of-hand, feinting movements, and tremendous arm muscles to inject uncertainty into where the bird would go. In the U.S., the element of chance was provided by machines.

Norm Frakes stood at the shooter's station facing an oval-shaped dirt area which stretched from left to right in front of him. The oval was bounded by a wire fence 28 inches tall. Positioned in an arc 14 yards in front of the shooter were nine metal devices, each one about six feet from its neighbor. These were the traps, and each one of them held a pigeon. Henry thought they looked like large iron bananas. There were lead smears on some of them, and Henry wondered how often the human bird throwers down south ended up with pellet wounds.

The shooter held his shotgun aimed at the center trap, and called 'pull' when he was ready to have a bird released. When the trap operator pressed the button on his control box, the sides of one of the traps opened, releasing the bird. No one, including the operator, had any idea which one of the nine traps it would be. That was randomly determined by the electrics of the system.

As the 'iron banana' snapped open, a jet of compressed air from a fitting inside the device launched the bird out of the trap. This served two purposes: It got the bird moving much more quickly than if it were merely released, and it also disoriented the pigeon so that the bird's initial flight path was completely unpredictable. Sometimes the pigeon continued climbing, and sometimes it flew straight down to within a few feet of the ground before streaking left, right, away, or (rarely) straight at the man with the shotgun.

The shooter had to recognize which trap was releasing the pigeon, understand the bird's movement, swing on the bird, fire, kill it, and have it fall within the fenced area to have it count for score. Live pigeon shooting was the most challenging and unpredictable of all shotgun competitions, and the level of excitement was greater than Henry had ever seen before.

"Pull!"

This time the bird came out of the third trap from the left and started flying with the wind immediately. Frakes centered his shot, but it was too late. The dead bird landed a good ten feet outside the fence. The shooter swore under his breath. He and all the spectators realized this gusty weather was going to make for very difficult shooting indeed.

"In Mexico, like I told you," Max explained to Henry, "they don't have these nine metal traps. They've got one bird boy on a strip of concrete, kind of like a sidewalk. He can move however much he wants to, as long as he stays on the sidewalk. He'll dance around, fake throwing the bird one way and really just toss a feather out while whipping the bird in some other direction behind his back. The really good ones, they'll make some shooters a side bet that they won't score even one bird out of ten."

"Where does the shooter hold, before the thrower releases the bird?" Henry asked.

"Right on the thrower's head." Henry took a moment to think about that.

"Don't they ever get shot?"

"Yes, they do. Especially when you get a shooter using a release trigger, which most people use when money's involved because they're just a little bit faster. I've shot live pigeon matches down south, but I won't use a release trigger. Saw a boy get killed that way, once. He stopped on the concrete strip to grin at the shooter, a guy from Georgia who'd never used a release trigger before. The grin was part of the kid's routine to distract the guy before throwing the bird, I guess. Man relaxed his grip and took out the left half of the kid's neck. He bled out in about ten seconds."

"Did they stop the match?"

"Hell, no. Got his brother to replace him. Brother had an even better arm, in my opinion. Watching those throwers is really something, but I've never gotten used to aiming right on their heads, even using a standard trigger. I shoot a lot better when it's just those 'iron bananas' holding the birds." He smiled and wiggled his eyebrows as he used Henry's descriptive term for the pigeon traps. "I got to go get my gear, kid. I'm up pretty soon." The big man turned to walk towards the Impala, and Henry went back to watching the current shooter.

By the time Max's name was called, the desert wind had increased, and was gust-ing to thirty knots. High score so far that day was twenty-one out of a possible twenty-five, shot by Britt Robinson. The fourth- and fifth-seeded shooters were in second and third place. Joe Devers had not yet come to the line.

In an attempt to compensate for conditions, some of the shooters had taken to holding on the far left trap. With the wind blowing hard from the right, it was the left side traps that were yielding most of the missed birds. Max held on the center trap as he took a deep breath. He didn't want to alter the presentation of the birds from what he was used to, wind or no wind.

"Pull!"

The far left trap sprang open just as a powerful gust of wind blew several hats off some of the spectators. The bird's path started curving downwind even while it was still traveling upward from the compressed air. It had not even reached the apex of its launch when the bottom barrel of Max's Fabbri cracked and a cloud of feathers erupted from around the pigeon. They were carried away on the wind while the shapeless dead mass spun through the air and slammed into the base of the wire fence. Dead bird thought Henry, as he felt the hair on his arms stand up.

The crowd murmured its appreciation and several of the spectators who had not been paying much attention stopped what they were doing and waited to see what happened on Max's second bird. No shooter yet had gotten off a shot on the far left trap in so heavy a wind and still killed the bird inside the fence.

Max turned towards the center trap as the bird boy refilled the empty one on the end. His senses seemed even more keen than usual, and the good feeling he'd had when he stepped up to the line only intensified. He broke the gun open, ejected the spent case, switched the unfired shell from the top barrel into the lower one, and slid a new shell from his ammo pouch into the top barrel. Max raised the shotgun to his shoulder and put the front gold bead on the base of the center trap.

"Pull!"

What happened next caused a flurry of activity among the people who had been making heavy side bets as the competition continued. Max pulled the trigger the instant his brain realized that it was the middle trap that was opening. Collins' reflexes were at their absolute peak, and the center of the shot charge hit the pigeon when the bird was less than two feet off the ground. Several of the spectators thought the trap had been empty, for they had not even seen the bird.

"Jesus Christ!" Charlie Potts said to Ed Meers, who was standing next to him. "Did you see that?" Meers nodded without speaking.

"Shooting a standard trigger, too," another man added.

"Who is this man?" whispered a third. He was from Barcelona.

"Max Collins. Out of Missouri. Good guy, if you don't get him mad at you. See him at some of the big trapshoots, but he likes live pigeons the best. Saw him shoot in Mexico once, but he wasn't this fast." "I don't believe I have ever even seen him before," said the Spaniard. "You say he likes live birds best? Why is he not shooting a release trigger? Any serious live bird shoo-"

"Pull!"

This time the pigeon came out of the trap second from the far left. Max crumpled the bird about six feet off the ground and it fell in the dirt well short of the fence.

"Damn! What'd this guy bring in the auction, and who's got him?"

"Bought himself for five hundred. Opening bid. No one raised it."

"Damn, that's strong."

"He likes to bet, especially on himself. And the reason he doesn't use a release trigger," Charlie Potts said to the foreign visitor, "is that live birds are his favorite kind of shotgun shooting. He competes in rifle and pistol, too. Came in second at Wimbledon in thirty-eight or -nine." The Wimbledon Cup was the annual prone rifle match held on the thousand-yard range at Camp Perry, Ohio.

"Pull!"

The bird came out of the second trap from the far right. The pigeon was tumbling from the jet of compressed air, and when it started flying, it seemed to aim straight for the spot between Max's feet. Collins hit it with almost the entire shot column. The lead pellets arrested the bird's momentum entirely, and it fell like a stone a third of the way to the shooter.

"A rifle shooter. I never would have believed it had I not seen it myself."

"Max is hot today, all right."

Charlie's comment proved to be the understatement of the week.

The wind had abated slightly but was still very strong when Joe Devers stepped into position. Every shooter at the match had by now become aware of Max Collins' phenomenal score of twenty-four. It was universally accepted that Devers was the only shooter who had a chance of beating Max by going twentyfive straight without a miss.

"Pull!"