They began behind the barn, where the land fell away to a dry wash and a bullet could spend itself in sand and shame no one.
Elias set four tin cans on a fallen log at twenty paces, then thought better of the distance and moved them to fifteen. "Pride makes poor teaching," he said. "We'll walk them out when they earn it."
Maren came with her father's rifle carried correctly already β muzzle up, finger off the trigger, a habit Thomas Ellery had plainly drilled into her before she was full grown. Willa came with her sleeves rolled and an expression of great seriousness that kept threatening to break into a grin.
"That rifle first," Elias said. "It's the gun that will be in this house when any man's gone down the road. Mine second, and careful."
He showed them stance as if he were showing them how to stand against a wind: feet planted, weight forward a fraction, the body not fighting the gun but braced behind it like a fence post set deep. Breathing out slow. Letting the shot happen at the bottom of the breath, where the body went still of its own accord.
"You're not aiming at the can," he told Willa, who was squinting fiercely. "You're aiming through it, at the sand beyond. The can just happens to be in the way of where you're looking true."
Her first shot threw dirt a foot left of the log. Her second took bark off its end. She lowered the rifle with her mouth open.
"I hit the log!"
"You hit near the parish of the log," Elias said, and she laughed, and the laugh loosened something in her shoulders that fear had knotted. Her third shot rang a can clean off into the grass.
Maren watched without comment, her arms folded, memorizing. When her turn came she settled the rifle into her shoulder as if it had grown there. Elias corrected one thing only β her grip, too tight, white-knuckled.
"You're holding it like it might leave," he said quietly. "It won't. Ease off and let it sit."
She breathed. The shot took the first can dead center and sent it spinning. The second can fell. The third. At the fourth she paused, adjusted for a puff of wind neither sister had felt, and knocked it backward off the log into the wash.
Willa stared. "Maren."
"I've shot rabbits," Maren said, with an attempt at indifference that fooled nobody. But color had risen in her face, not embarrassment β the plain, surprised pleasure of a person discovering a strength in herself that matched the need of her life. "Father let me, when the gardenβ"
"He taught you well," Elias said. "I'm just tuning what's there. You're a natural, Maren. I won't flatter you β I haven't the habit. It's true."
She looked away quickly, toward the pines, and nodded once, accepting it as she would accept a fact about weather.
The Colt was different, and he treated it so. He unloaded it on the log where both could see, counted the cartridges aloud, loaded one chamber only, and kept his own hand near without hovering. "A pistol is a close and ugly tool," he said. "It asks more judgment than a rifle, not less. You learn it so it's never strange in your hand at a bad moment. That's all."
Willa went first, because Maren, to Elias's quiet surprise, hung back. The Colt bucked harder than the girl expected and her shot went high, but she did not flinch from the sound, did not drop it, did not step back. She set her feet again without being told.
"Again?"
"Again," he said, "and slower. Slow is smooth. Smooth gets fast on its own, in time."
By the fifth shot she was putting lead into the log itself, grouped low and honest, and her hands had steadied into a calm that belied her seventeen years. Maren did better still, though the rifle remained her true language.
They shot until the light went amber and their shoulders ached, until the cans were dented moons of tin. Elias gathered the brass from old camp habit, and only when Willa began teasing Maren β "General Ellery" β and Maren, astonishingly, teased back, did he understand what else the afternoon had done.
He had spent ten years believing a gun was a thing a man kept between himself and a memory. This afternoon it had been a thing passed hand to hand, with laughter in it, and correction, and pride β what people did who intended to be alive together next month. They showed each other how.
"Tomorrow," Maren said, shouldering her father's rifle for the walk back, "you'll show us again. So it sticks."
"Tomorrow," he agreed. "Sign and snares. The pines have a different kind of shooting to teach."
Willa fell into step beside him, smelling of powder smoke and sun. "Were we truly good?"
"You were truly beginning," he said, "which is better than good. Good stops learning."
She considered that with the seriousness it deserved, then grinned up at him, and they walked home through the new fence's long shadow.
Chapter 13
Lessons: Sign and Snares