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and many nights, Ranger was unable to bring him to a tree. Oftener and oftener we ran him, as if he delighted in the chase as much as we—an old buck coon that had become our equal or more than our equal and who was using us as much as we were using him, laughing at us all the while, playing games with us. I admired him, of course. You are compelled to admire a worthy opponent who plays the game as skillfully, or perhaps more skillfully, than you do. But I became a bit angry at him, as well. He was just too good; he was making fools of us. So, finally, not by any conscious decision, but by degrees, I found myself ready, in regard to this particular coon, to abandon my rule to never kill another coon. If Ranger could tree and hold him and I could find him in the tree, I’d kill him and prove, once and for all, which was the better, he or us. You understand that coon hunting is done only in the fall, but that was not true with this particular coon. Many times, in other months of the year, Ranger ran him alone, and there were nights when I’d go out as well. It became a never-ending game between Ranger and the coon, and occasionally I joined in, no matter what the season.”
    â€œHow are you sure it was a coon?” asked Rila. “Ranger might have been running something else—a fox, a wolf.”
    Ezra said stiffly, “Ranger would never have hunted anything but a coon. He’s a coon hunter; he comes of a long line of coon dogs.”
    I said to Rila, “Ezra’s right. A coon dog is a coon dog. If he runs a rabbit or a fox, he’s worthless as a coon dog.”
    â€œSo you never saw this coon,” Rila said to Ezra, “and you never killed him.”
    â€œBut I did. See him, I mean. It was one night, several years ago. Ranger put him up near morning, four o’clock or so, and I finally spotted him, a shape against the sky, crouched on a limb near the top of the tree, making himself flat against the limb, hoping he’d not be seen. I raised the gun, but I was breathing so hard from my run that I couldn’t take good aim. The muzzle just kept going around and around in little circles. So I lowered the gun and waited until I was breathing easier and he stayed there, crouched on his limb. He must have known that I was there, but he never stirred. Then, finally, I raised the gun again and the aim was steady. I had my finger on the trigger, but I never pulled it. It must have been a minute that I had him in the sights and my finger on the trigger, ready to pull, but I didn’t pull. I don’t know what happened. Looking back on it, I imagine I thought of all the nights of running and how it would be all gone if I pulled the trigger. How, instead of a respected opponent, I’d have no more than a furry body, and how neither one of us again could have the fun of hunting or of being hunted. I don’t remember thinking this, but it must have been what I thought, and when I was at the end of thinking, I brought the gun down. When I put the gun down, the coon up in the tree turned his head and looked at me.
    â€œNow, here’s a funny thing. The tree was tall and the coon was well up in its top. The night was not exactly dark—the sky was brightening with the coming dawn—but the coon was still too far away and the night still too dark to see distinctly the face of any coon. And yet, when he turned his head, I saw his face and it was not a coon’s face. It was more like a cat’s face, although it was not a cat’s face, either. It had whiskers like a cat and even from the distance where I stood, I could see the whiskers. Its face was fat and round and still—this is awful hard to tell and make it sound reasonable—and still it was a sort of bony face, like a skull that was fleshed out. Its eyes were big and round, unblinking, like an owl’s eyes. I should have been scared out of my britches. But I wasn’t. I just stood there,