A/N: I don't own it. I am, however, an old school redneck. I am not from the Kentucky coal country, but I live very close to coal country in West Virginia. Any misrepresentation is my own fault. This is graphic, but so is life in that part of the world.

She was half awake, slurping coffee when she heard the .300 go off in the lower pasture. Kate began to cuss long and loud, which woke the dog. Monte raised his little blue head and looked guilty up at his mistress as she stomped down the hall to the gun safe.

"Too EARLY. Can't even finish th' COFFEE."

Cuss. Swear. Snarl. Guilty looks from the blue heeler pup. Kate Bellamy stomped off the front porch, let the screen door slam behind her and strode down the overgrown ruts that led to the lower end of her property. Monte yelped as the door slapped his nose. The little 20 gauge shotgun set easy in her hands. The dirt road ran a straight hundred yards down the holler from the house, keeping to the side of the hill instead of setting dead on top of it. The road itself was around eighty years old, worn smooth like the rocks down at the river, and grown over heavy with oak and shagbark hickory.

About fifty yards from the low-pasture gate, Kate paused and thumbed three shells into the little pump shotgun. She took stock. There was a battered Ford F-150 backed up to the gate, two tone blue. Somewhere around a '75. She couldn't see the license plate but there was an "I Support the NRA" sticker on the passenger-side window. She stepped up the bank on the right side of the road and eased across the barb-wire fence into the pasture.

She could hear them. They were young. They couldn't be more than fifteen.

"Aw shit, now what are we gonna do?"

"Well, I supposed we could cut the fence…" trailed off the taller of the two.

Kate took her time and walked up on them slow. The deer they'd shot was still alive, hung in the fence and bleating. The distress call of the American White-tailed Deer is a pitiful thing, and finally, after listening to them bicker back and forth, Kate sighed, walked between the stunned boys, and shoved her pocked knife blade through into the brain pan. The animal twitched once and went still. Kate turned toward the boys, angry, disgust rippling.

"You start," she wiped the blade of the pocket knife on her jeans, "by not poaching deer off of other people's property. And THEN," she approached the taller of the two, angling the shotgun in front of her, "you don't get CAUGHT." She poked him in the chest. "And when you hang one in the fence, you pop it in the back of the head with a HAMMER. Or do it with a pocketknife like I just did."

The boys were frozen, horrified.

"And THEN," she hissed, turning to the stocky one, "if you want to live to see breakfast, you get yourself and your fool of a friend back in that truck parked across my culvert and you leave out of here as fast as is sensible."

She watched them go, ramrod straight in the seats of the cab as the truck bounced. She was fairly sure the taller one had peed his pants and that neither of them would be able to look her in the eye two weeks later when the school term started and she picked up teaching Jimmy Abernathy's English courses down at Harlan.

Hell of a way to start the school year. She sighed quietly and propped the shotgun up on a fencepost. Slowly, she unwrapped the carcass from the barbed wire and rolled the dead animal down into the holler. The coyotes and the buzzards would have it clean in a couple of weeks.

She was going to have to put up a 'no trespassing' sign, she could tell right now.