Rattlesnake Crossing

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High on a cliff, the shooter panned the nightscope back and forth across the San Pedro Valley. It took a while for him to locate his chosen target across almost a mile of intervening desert. At last, though, he found it. After first putting on his ear protection, he pulled the trigger. In his hands the fifty-caliber sniper rifle roared to life. He felt certain he had nailed the pump, but there was no way to tell for sure. The pump didn't collapse. It just stood there, hit perhaps and with its interior guts shattered, but outwardly the machinery remained unfazed.

Frustrated, the shooter looked around for some other possibility. That was when he saw the cattle. Taking a bead on a dozing cow, he pulled the trigger again and was gratified to see her legs collapse under her. The shooter smiled in satisfaction. There was something god-like in being able to kill from that far away, to be able to strike without warning, like a thunderbolt. The other cattle, alarmed and frightened, milled about, trying to escape from this unseen threat. Laughing in the face of their stupidity and panic, he dropped another one, just to prove he could.

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