Poe nearly shoots Harris

Billy Poe nearly shoots Bud Harris during a deer hunt, but stops before violence begins. The episode turns on a misreading sharpened by guilt: Poe sees Harris coming down the hill and assumes that the officer has come because of the dead man in the factory. His rifle offers a possible answer to the danger he imagines, then becomes an object he deliberately puts out of reach.

Setting and immediate context

Poe is waiting in a thicket near a stream, watching the field where deer might appear. He has settled into the slow patience of the hunt, trying to remain still while the woods resume their ordinary activity around him. A car arrives at the Poe family trailer, but he resists the temptation to investigate, reasoning that moving would waste the time he has spent waiting. The quiet gives way when a person appears at the top of the field.

That person is Harris, visible near the trailer and scanning the field. Poe recognizes that the route from the tree line toward the stream leads to his position; Harris begins walking down the hill in that direction. The setting matters to the decision: Poe is concealed, armed, and watching Harris approach through a space he knows is suitable for hunting. What began as an attempt to wait for a deer becomes a tense calculation about whether he himself is being hunted down.

Fear and the imagined confrontation

Poe first frames Harris’s arrival as a possible discovery of poaching. That explanation quickly seems inadequate. He concludes that Harris would not have come so far merely for the hunting violation, and his thoughts turn to the factory death and Isaac English. Poe believes that Isaac was right about Harris: the officer has been waiting for an opportunity to act. This is Poe’s fearful interpretation, not a confirmed account of what Harris intends when he approaches.

The possibility of getting Isaac into further trouble intensifies the encounter. Poe thinks about Lee, who would never forgive him if he caused her brother trouble, and recalls that Isaac had tried to kill himself in the river, as their mother had. The factory incident is already something Poe says Harris has taken care of, but that past intervention does not reassure him. Instead, it leaves him conscious both of his own part in the disaster and of his dependence on Harris’s handling of it.

As Harris draws closer, Poe fixes on the rifle and calculates the distance and the hold needed to aim. He imagines that this may be the only chance he will have, and thinks of Harris as formidable. At the same time, fear registers physically before it becomes a settled plan: Poe feels a strange sensation in his gut and wishes for the matter to be over quickly. When Harris is about seventy paces away, Poe recognizes the extremity of what he has been considering: shooting a law-enforcement officer he has known since childhood would not make his problems disappear. The thought interrupts the imagined solution, but does not erase the danger posed by having the rifle beside him.

Disarmament and the encounter

Rather than keep the weapon within reach, Poe slides the .30-30 under the brush pile and crawls behind the brush for a while. He arranges things so that, when Harris sees him emerge, he will not be standing near the gun. The movement is a small but decisive change in the scene: Poe does not disclose his thoughts, yet he takes practical steps to separate himself from the means of carrying them out.

Harris waits for Poe to stand and addresses him by name. Poe responds formally, calling him Chief Harris. Harris tells him to fetch the rifle and take it back to the house so it will not rust. The instruction acknowledges the weapon without openly accusing Poe of anything; nothing in the exchange shows that Harris knows how close Poe came to using it. Harris then adds that they have bigger things to worry about. His remark redirects the encounter away from poaching and toward an unnamed matter, while leaving Poe’s suspicions and Harris’s purpose unresolved in the scene.

Consequences and significance

No shot is fired, and the encounter stops short of an arrest or an open confrontation. Harris’s restrained instructions contrast with the violent scenario Poe has constructed in his mind. Poe’s choice to hide the rifle does not settle the underlying problem, but it prevents his fear from becoming another act of violence and keeps the weapon from being immediately at hand when Harris reaches him.

The episode also locates Poe’s loyalty to Isaac inside a wider burden of responsibility. Poe fears not only what Harris might do to him, but what renewed trouble could mean for Isaac and Lee. His response grows out of the factory death, his sense that Harris has already intervened, and his belief that the consequences could reach people he loves. That combination makes his near-attack less a calculated assault than a moment in which guilt and protective fear narrow his choices almost to a single, disastrous possibility.

Later events clarify the stakes surrounding Harris’s intervention without resolving what he intended on this particular visit. Harris thinks of protecting Billy Poe as a choice that costs him something, and Grace Poe recognizes that she has silently accepted the possibility that Harris will kill a witness to protect her son. Those later developments deepen the contrast between the quiet encounter in the field and the lethal acts that follow: here, Harris asks Poe to put the rifle away, while Poe manages, at the last moment, to keep his suspicion from becoming a shot.