The stranger decided to give the merry-makers another chance; besides, he wanted to make music, and hear music and see Red. So he whistled Bannock back from the gopherhole he had found behind the tent, picked up his Dreadnought case, and strolled down the hill in the lengthening shadows. Halfway down he scanned the purple horizon, and noticed a pair of pircing, bouncing headlight beams wending through the trees over by the approach road. From the way they danced he could tell it a big, springy car -- maybe a '79 Buick, he thought -- and he could tell something else, too. It was being driven by someone from the city, who had no concept of how to hande a muddy, rutted back-country road in a car. He smiled and scanned the view in toward the clearing. At the edge of the space around the main lodge, he spotted the faint image of the madcap traveler who had zigzagged through his campsite earlier. The turquoise blue of his short hiking shorts reflected palely in the shadows of early evening, and as the stranger's eyes adjusted to the night he could see the man was waving his arms emphatically, facing into the woods. There was no-one visible. The stranger assumed the madcap wanderer was just having himself a spirited mumble with his Higher Self or some such thing.

The twilight was split in half by the sound of single shot, and the demented traveler at the edge of the woods threw his hands to his throat and keeled over into the pine needles.

The stranger broke into a run.