“Quiet, Drake, it’s coming.”

“Captain, wait.”

“Shut up, Drake,” Witherspoon snarled, not dropping his eyes from the sights.

But then they heard the shouts too, and Dalton turned. “What is going on?”

The Burman said something. Edgar turned back to look at the bushes. They were shaking more strongly. He could hear the crash of feet in the underbrush.

The women were screaming.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Someone shut them up. They are going to scare it away.”

“Witherspoon, drop your rifle.”

“Don’t ruin this, Dalton.”

“Witherspoon, I told you, drop the rifle. Something is wrong.”

The women were closer. Their cries rose up above the men’s voices.

“Damn! Someone get them to shut up. Fogg, do something!”

Edgar could see Witherspoon stare down his rifle. Fogg, who had been silent until now, swung around on his horse and faced the women. “Halt!” he yelled. The women kept running, crying, lifting the edge of their hta mains as they came.

“Halt! Damn you!”

All was a blur, the running, the shouts, the incessant sun.

Edgar whirled to look back at the forest.

“There it is!” Fogg yelled.

“Captain! Drop your weapon!” Dalton shouted, and kicked his horse toward Witherspoon, who tightened his grip on his rifle and fired.

The rest remains frozen, a sun-washed memory, a slanting. There are cries and screams, but it is the slanting that will haunt Edgar Drake most, the impossible angle of grief, mother to child, the arms outstretched, reaching, pulling at those who try to restrain. A slanting he has never seen, but still recognizes, from pietas, Greek urns with tiny figures wailing oi moi.

He stands and watches for a long time, but it will be days before the horror of what happened comes to him, slamming into his chest, entering him as if he is suddenly possessed. It will happen at an officers’ function at the Administrator’s residence, when he will see a servant girl walk by, carrying her child on her hip. Then it will come, he will feel himself drowning, choking, mumbling half excuses to puzzled officers who ask him if he is feeling well, and he, Yes, don’t worry, I am just a little faint, that’s all, and now stumbling, outside and down the steps, into the garden, where he will fall vomiting into the roses, tears welling up behind his eyes, and he will begin to cry, sobbing, shaking, a grief beyond all proportion, so that later he will think back and wonder for what else he mourned.

But in that moment, in the stillness of the day, as he stands before the scene, he doesn’t move. The boy, the mother, the quiet hush of branches, swayed by a sweet wind that swept over the stillness and the screams. They stand, he and the other pale men. They watch the scene below them, the mother shaking the little body, kissing it, running her bloodied hands over his face, over her face, wailing in an unearthly tone which is both so foreign and so familiar. Until at his side there is a rustling, flashes of other women who rush in, falling by the mother, pulling her back from the boy. Her body tenses forward, against gravity, a canceling of forces. A man at his side, his face washed out in the sun, takes a step backward, staggers briefly, balancing himself against the ground with the butt of his rifle.

That night he awakes many times, disoriented. It will be two days before he collapses in the rose garden, but he feels already that a tear has begun, irreparable, like bits of paint lost as dust to the wind in the ripping of a canvas. It has changed everything, he thinks, This is not part of my plan, my contract, my commission. He remembers writing to Katherine when he first reached Burma that he couldn’t believe he had arrived, that he was really away. A letter that now probably sits on a mail train speeding toward home. And I alone in Rangoon.

8

Two days later, Edgar received a message from the War Office. They had secured an extra berth on a teak ship with the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. The boat would depart from the docks at Prome in two days. He would leave for Prome on the train; the trip to Mandalay would take seven days.

In his four days in Rangoon, he had hardly unpacked. Since the hunt, he had stayed in his room, leaving only when called upon by various officials, or occasionally to wander the streets. The bureaucracy of the colonial operation astounded him. Following the shooting, he had been subpoenaed to sign testimonies at the Departments of Civil and Criminal Justice, the Police Office, the Department for Village Administration, the Medical Department, even the Department of Forests (because, as the subpoena stated, “the accident occurred in the act of wild game control”). At first he was surprised that the event was even reported. He knew that if all the men had agreed, it could easily have been covered up; the villagers would never have found a way to complain, and even if they did, it was unlikely that they would have been believed, and even if they had been, it was unlikely that the officers would be disciplined.

Yet everyone, including Witherspoon, insisted on reporting the incident. Witherspoon accepted a minor fine, to be distributed to the victim’s family, along with army funds set aside for such compensation. It all seems remarkably civil, Edgar wrote to Katherine, Perhaps this is evidence of the positive influence of British institutions, despite the occasional aberrance of hasty British soldiers. Or perhaps, he wrote a day later, after signing his seventh testimony, this is all merely a salve, a tried and effective method of dealing with such terror, to absolve something deeper, The afternoon is already blurring behind the screen of bureaucracy.

Witherspoon and Fogg left for Pegu as soon as the paperwork was completed, arriving on time to relieve a pair of officers who were returning to Calcutta with their regiments. Edgar didn’t say goodbye. Although he had wanted to place the blame for the incident on Witherspoon, he couldn’t. For if Witherspoon had been hasty, he had only been two seconds hastier than the rest of them, all of whom shared the bloodlust of the hunt. Yet each time Edgar saw him after the accident, whether at meals or in government offices, he couldn’t suppress the memory of the rifle raised against the heavy jowl, the beads of sweat running down the back of the sunburnt neck.

As he had avoided Witherspoon, Edgar avoided Captain Dalton as well. On the night before his departure, a messenger brought an invitation from Dalton, once again inviting him to the Pegu Club. He declined politely, excusing himself as too tired. In truth, he wanted to see Dalton, to thank him for his hospitality, to tell him that he held no anger toward him. Yet the thought of reliving the incident terrified him, and he felt that all that he shared with the Captain now was that moment of horror, and to see him would be to relive it. So he refused the invitation, and the Captain didn’t call again, and although Edgar told himself that he could always visit the Captain when he came back through Rangoon, he knew that he wouldn’t.

On the morning of his departure, he was met at his door by a carriage, which took him to the railway station, where he boarded a train for Prome. While the train was being loaded, he stared out over the bustling of the platform. Down below he saw a group of small boys kicking a coconut husk. His fingers reflexively fingered a single coin that he held in his pocket, that he had kept since the hunt: a symbol of responsibility, of misplaced munificence, a reminder of mistakes, and so a talisman.

In the chaos of mourning, when all had left, carrying the boy, Edgar had seen the coin lying on the ground, tipped in the dusty imprint of the boy’s body. He had assumed that it had been overlooked, and he picked it up simply because it was the boy’s and it didn’t seem right for it to be lost at the edge of the forest. He didn’t know that this was a mistake, that it had been neither forgotten nor missed: in the sunlight it glinted like gold, and every child eyed it and wanted it. But what the children knew, and he didn’t understand, he could have learned from any porter who loaded crates onto the train below. The most powerful talismans, they would have told him, are those that are inherited, and with such talismans, the fortune is inherited as well.