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needed to sign a permission slip, would budge. Most of his buddies went off to war. Some of them even made it back home.
    Henry spent most of his summers upstate and became an avid hunter. He especially liked deer hunting. And like the character played by Robert De Niro in the film The Deer Hunter , Henry abided by a single commandment in the woods. One deer. One shot.
    He hunted with a single-shot 7 x 57 Ruger rifle. If he missed hitting the deer with his first shot, the animal was free to escape. He never reloaded. Amateurs reloaded. Henry also had another odd habit. Sometimes he would just chase a doe through the woods, screaming crazily, until he lost sight of the animal.
    The hunting ritual caused a rift between the Winter brothers and their father. Henry’s father would have liked to take both of them hunting, but Bruce preferred the ski lounges and the fireplaces.
    The Winters soon noticed that their sons didn’t seem to like each other much. Although they shared the same friends, the boys rarely shared each other’s company. They did occasionally meet by accident on the streets, where their disputes quickly became neighborhood legend.
    Living in a house with a one-car garage and three cars, the Winter brothers often raced each other home in order to get the only parking spot off the street. One day Henry, driving an Opel, arrived at one end of Washington Avenue just as Bruce, driving a Capri, rounded the corner at the opposite end of the block. The brothers zoomed down the block, each determined to reach the parking spot first. As neighbors watched, the cars smashed into each other head on, metal and glass flying. Henry and Bruce jumped from their steaming wrecks and proceeded to pummel each other in full view of their horrified parents.
    â€œMy father stuck up for the hunter,” Henry remembered. “My mother stuck up for the designer clothes.”
    Eventually the brothers decided that neither the house nor garage was big enough for both of them. After graduation, Henry began to spend more and more time in a small upstate New York town called Cochecton Center, staring across a table at a girl named Kathy Costello. A part-time waitress and maid in a boarding house where Henry worked chopping wood and clearing brush, Kathy served him heaping piles of pancakes in the morning and hearty stew at night. She changed his sheets and vacuumed his room. The couple took moonlight walks on country roads and attended her senior prom.
    Kathy was everything Henry ever wanted in a girl. Her family owned half a mountain. He began to dream about living in a world where a man could roll out of bed in the morning and hunt from dawn to dusk without ever stepping off his own property. The couple became engaged.
    â€œMy father was in favor of marriage,” Henry said. “He couldn’t imagine a more qualified bride. He sat there and said, ‘Tell me about the land again.’”
    Late in December 1969, Henry invited Kathy and her mother down to Valley Stream to do some weekend Christmas shopping in Manhattan. On the night they arrived, Henry was lounging in the remodeled basement watching television when the telephone suddenly rang.
    â€œHello, Henry Winter?” said a woman with a vaguely familiar voice. “This is the Dime Savings Bank in Valley Stream. We just wanted to notify you that your checking account is overdrawn.”
    â€œGood try,” Henry said, recognizing the caller as Betsy Bassett. “But I don’t even have a checking account at the Dime Savings Bank.”
    They spent the next half hour reminiscing. Betsy had left the sorority and taken a job as a bank teller. Henry was working on the back of a village garbage truck and thinking about taking the entrance examination for the New York City Police Department.
    â€œI hear something about you getting married,” Betsy said.
    â€œYou hear wrong.”
    The couple made a date to meet later that night on a deserted