"Get up, Henry!" he gasped. "Oh, come quick! You've got to see this! Christ on a crutch, you've just got to come see!"

Haversham knew better than to press his brother for details. Lionel was only borderline coherent at the best of times and, when excited like he was now, you'd have had a better chance of getting sense out of a cow. But, whatever it was, it was obviously important, so Haversham wasted no time. He tumbled out of bed and dragged on some clothes, then followed Lionel downstairs and out into the early morning sun. The whole way his brother kept up a constant stream of breathless pleas. "You're not going to believe it, Henry. Not unless you see it for yourself. I hardly believed it myself!"

With Lionel a good distance out in front, Haversham followed his wildly gesturing brother, out through the back gate, then across the grassy field, then over the farther fence, and then across another field. Finally Lionel stopped, having reached his destination and, a few seconds later, Haversham came up with him. A single glance told him what all the excitement was about.

One of their sheep lay dead in the grass.

Crows were already at work on the carcass, clustered thickly, and they scattered reluctantly as the two men approached. But it wasn't the mere death of the sheep that had obviously upset Lionel. Rather it was the way that sheep had died.

"Christ," Haversham muttered, rubbing his cheek in disbelief. "What the hell did that, do you suppose?"

There could be no doubt. There wasn't a drop of blood to be found in the surrounding grass. There were no claw marks nor teeth marks. Instead, the animal had been crushed, literally crushed to death, its spine shattered hideously.

"More to the point, how did they do it?" Lionel asked, staring in horror. "I mean, just look at that thing. Look at it, Henry. Its spine has been snapped in two, its whole back is broken. No animal around here could do something like that. It looks like it was hit by a truck!"

Haversham had had the same thought. But they were a long way from the concession road and, though the ground here was hard, car tracks would have shown up. There were none. Still, thinking along those lines, thinking maybe someone had hit the sheep out on the road then carried the carcass here, Haversham started looking around for footprints. Apart from Lionel's tracks, though, he couldn't find a single one.

He returned to the grisly corpse. He studied the sheep with its broken spine and crushed ribs, his eyes burning slits, chewing pensively on his bottom lip. A person had done this, he had no doubt on that score. Lionel was right about that. There was no animal that could do that to a sheep except maybe a bear, and there were certainly no bears in this part of Ontario.

Then, abruptly, his eyes shifted, fixing on something beside the sheep, something nearly hidden in the grass. His brows furrowed in a puzzled scowl and he grunted. Then he stepped around the corpse and bent, carefully plucking something from the ground.

"Hey, what's that you found?" Lionel asked, peering curiously. "A clue? What is it?" At that moment, Haversham raised his eyes from the thing in his hand. To Lionel it seemed his brother's face had gotten suddenly very pale and, for a heartbeat, he noticed Henry's gaze shot to the copse of trees way over there on the back-forty. Then, just a suddenly, Henry flicked his look back to the thing in his hand. He laughed and tossed it away.

"Nothing," he told Lionel, beating his hand on his pants. "Just an acorn, that's all."

"An acorn?" Lionel's brows arched in mild surprise. "Strange to find an acorn way over here, isn't it? The only oak trees we've got are those ones on the back-forty. How do you suppose it got here?"

"I was cutting wood back there yesterday. On my way to the house, I came this way. I must have tracked it on my boots."

"Oh, yeah, that must be it." Lionel seemed satisfied by the explanation and left it at that. Haversham knew it was a good answer and could even have been the case except for one slight problem.

He hadn't come this way yesterday. He hadn't even come close.

"We're worried about old Don Baker," the constable explained, cap in hand like a confessor in a church. "It's probably nothing, but he usually picks up his mail on Friday and yesterday he didn't show up. I stopped by his place, but there was nobody home. He may have just gone to visit with relatives or something, but..." He shrugged apologetically. "...he's not a young man, you know. I just wondered if you'd heard anything."

Heard anything? Haversham thought. Oh, yeah, Constable. I heard something. Something like chunk!

Suppressing a shiver, he said, "Well, I don't recall him saying anything about going away, but, you know, we weren't the closest of neighbours. Have you tried his sister? I think she lives over in Kingston. She teaches at the university."

"Yeah," Constable Pullman nodded. "I've got a call in to her. I guess we'll see what that turns up -- before we call out the dogs, I mean." He laughed at this last part, but the laugh was thin and strained. It wore itself out a little too quickly and, for a moment, he fidgeted, obviously wanting to say something, but not knowing quite how to start.

"Something else on your mind, Constable?"

The constable looked up, surprised that he should be so transparent. "Nothing important," he shrugged, scratching his neck. "Just that...well, I understand Baker's dog died a couple days ago. Bill Wilkes, the vet, said the dog was poisoned. Later, Baker was drinking pretty good at the Widow's Walk and he started telling folks how he thought you'd done it, killed his dog, I mean."

For a moment, Haversham didn't say a word. He just eyed the constable and chewed pensively on his bottom lip. Finally, in a careful tone, he asked, "Did Baker put in a complaint with you boys at the O.P.P.?"

"Well, no. Not exactly."

"So this is -- what? Just a friendly enquiry?"

"You might say that."

Haversham let out his breath and chuckled. "Well, I'll tell you this, Constable. That dog kept getting into my sheep, so I told Baker, if it ever happened again, I'd do something. But it was just words. I didn't mean it. So, no, I didn't kill his dumb dog."

Now it was the constable's turn to exhale, blowing out in relief as he slapped his cap back on his head. "No, I didn't think you would have. Still, I felt I had to ask." He turned to go, then had another thought, pausing in the open doorway. "Listen, I heard you lost one of your sheep last night."

Haversham stiffened, the smile frozen on his face. "That's right. We think it must have been hit by a car. What about it?"

"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking what a coincidence that should be." To Haversham's questioning look, he explained: "It seems, when Baker was drinking and telling everyone you had killed his dog, he also did quite a bit of cursing those sheep of yours. He said maybe he'd kill them himself, just to let you know how it felt." Suddenly his voice took on a sombre tone and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "You don't suppose..."

Haversham laughed and shook his head. "That old man Baker did in my sheep? I don't think so, Constable. Whoever did it, must have dragged the sheep a good ways onto my property after hitting it on the road. I don't think Baker could have done that, do you?"

"No," the constable conceded. "Suppose not."

A moment later, Haversham watched the constable slide into his cruiser and drift on down the driveway to the concession road. As the cruiser vanished in a coil of dust, Haversham found himself thinking back upon Pullman's last words. So, he thought, Baker said he was going to kill my sheep, did he? Guess I put the tin lid on that little notion.

Guess I did, at that.

Sure enough, when he hurried out the back door, he found Lionel standing over by the fence. When Lionel saw his brother, he gestured once, a wide beckoning sweep of his arm, then spun and started off across the grassy field. Sober-eyed, Haversham followed and, a few minutes later, came upon the sheep, dead like the other one, and in the same grisly manner, too. Its bones had been shattered, its spine crushed. Nothing but a car or truck could have done that much damage, Haversham told himself as he grimly appraised the carcass. But there were no tracks and no footprints either. So how had it got here?

"And that's not the only thing," Lionel informed him breathlessly. "Not by a long chalk." When Haversham looked up, Lionel jerked a thumb over his own shoulder. "Look back there. What do you suppose did that?"

Haversham's eyes travelled in the direction indicated by his brother -- and his breath caught. A short distance away, another fence cut across the property. It was a wooden fence, just put in last year. Now there was a massive hole in it. The wooden boards had just been blasted clean apart leaving a gaping breach, a good six feet from ragged end to ragged end. The cracked and broken boards lay scattered about in the grass, and, to Haversham, it looked almost as if a hurricane had taken that fence apart.

For a long space, he studied the hole in the fence. He didn't say a word. Lionel was quiet too, for a time, but, finally, there was a limit to how long he could go without speaking.

"Well?" he asked, and his voice was uncharacteristically muted. "What do you thing, Henry? I've never heard of anything like this, have you? I mean, look at the way that wood is strewn about. It's all on this side of the fence. It looks like a truck just plowed through there and hit the sheep, doesn't it? But there aren't any tire tracks, I've looked."

Still Haversham didn't respond. Instead, he dropped his eyes and began scanning the grassy ground around the carcass of the sheep. He tried to tell himself it was a silly thing to do, that he wouldn't find anything and that it was pretty dumb to even think of that.

But then he saw it. And, dumb or not, silly or not, he gulped.

There was another acorn in the grass. And, a second later, he turned up three more. Four acorns where there shouldn't even be one. Four acorns. How had they gotten here?

Slowly, Haversham raised his eyes again, fixing on the blasted hole in the fence, a hole that looked for all the world like a truck had crashed through. Then, he focused on what lay in the distance beyond that hole. He felt a chill ripple up his back.