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grinning. Russell had popped the top of the can the moment they slid the dead buck onto the scale.
    Hundred and eighty pounds, I say, his brother said. Maybe two hundred.
    Oh, please, Terry said, and he resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He's healthy, all right, but you're acting like you just brought down Big Foot. He wondered if that was a muffler clamp the store was using to link the scale to the brace above it. It was the only new metal anywhere on the device, the only alloy that still had a trace of sparkle.
    His brother shook his head and snickered. I should have entered the buck pool, he said. Just so I could take my loving older brother out to dinner and watch him squirm.
    You can take me out to dinner anytime, Terry said.
    But it would be so much better if it was with money I'd won in a buck pool.
    Cast out those little demons you got with being young and green?
    Squash 'em like grapes.
    The deer had ten points, and a hole right behind the shoulder where the bullet had penetrated the animal's body. Near them two local dogs watched, hoping there would be some blood on the ground or on the scale when the two men put the buck back in Terry's red pickup.
    Hundred and fifty pounds, the woman said finally, and she wrote down the number on a piece of paper on a brown clipboard.
    Terry couldn't help himself, and he started to laugh.
    That scale can't be right, Russell said, and then he turned to Terry. 'Cause if it is, we have gotten very lame in our old age. Hundred and fifty? Really?
    The woman--thirty, maybe, with creosote-colored hair that fell to her shoulders, and a moist cherry lipstick that Terry thought was more than a little provocative--shrugged. It's still big, she said, her voice cheerful and light. Biggest I've seen today.
    Well, thank you, Terry told her. That's the first time a woman's ever said anything like that to my kid brother. Do you have any idea how happy you just made him?
    The woman stood up a little straighter and smiled. You want me to take a picture for the wall? she asked. Beginning along the trim beside the inside of the front door and continuing into the store were columns of Polaroids of hunters and their kills, with the name of each hunter written in black Magic Marker on the white strip below the image. By the time hunting season was over, the pictures would have taken over a good stretch of that wall.
    You bet, Russell said.
    By the scale, or the truck?
    If you do the scale, Terry said, be sure to focus in on the weight.
    His brother glared at him. The truck will be just fine, thank you very much, he said.
    Terry helped his brother pull the buck from the rear of the scale, and they dropped it with a small thud into the back of the truck. The head bounced just a bit on the metal. The younger man then sat beside the animal, shifting the carcass slightly so that none of it would be hidden behind his orange vest, and held up the deer's head for the camera. The woman reached for the boxy Polaroid on a rock by the outbuilding, took the picture, and then started back toward the store. She was waving the print in her hands, drying it despite the chill in the air. Both men followed her.
    Inside, Russell watched her tack the image to the wall and mumbled, Hundred and fifty. Yeah, right. Terry saw that his brother had left his beer in the back of the truck, and he was relieved. He certainly didn't want him walking around the shop with an open beer in his hands.
    Maybe there is something wrong with my scale, the woman said. Maybe a hundred and ninety will win this year.
    His brother studied each picture on the wall, and Terry figured he was trying to guess the weight of each animal. He came up here a lot more often than Terry did, and so he probably knew more of the faces in the Polaroids.
    The woman strolled back behind the counter and helped a friend of hers, another woman somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties but nowhere near as attractive, bag a small collection of groceries. A box of