From the time I was maybe 12 or 13, all the way through high school, I made some extra money in the summers shooting gophers in the horse pasture. Mom would pay me $1 a head for killing the squeaky little menaces, and never asked to see the corpses. One lovely, sunny morning, I was out in the eastern half of the pasture, near the road, when I spotted a gopher to the west of me. I fired. My aim was a bit low, and the bullet skipped off the hard-packed ground and ricocheted through the double pane of plate glass in the bow-fronted window of the house.

I didn’t realize it had happened until I came in and my father offered me the bullet. It was only a .22, so it hadn’t gotten far after punching through both panes of glass. He’d found it on the window seat. “Lucky for you that didn’t keep going and hit your mother’s china cabinet,” he said. “And that you hit the house, instead of one of your mother’s yearling foals.”

“Dad,” I said. “I would never aim toward the horses.”

Guess I shouldn’t have aimed toward the house, either…

I still have that bullet somewhere. Someday, I’m going to make a navel jewel out of it, like the dancer in The Man with the Golden Gun.

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