Sample Pages: Vogel and the White Bull (page 1 of 3)
Chapter 1
On the day that Egon Krause died from a bullet to the brain in a hotel room in the Tyrol, Manfred Vogel walked the perimeter of his farm in Arp, Texas, carrying a Remington .30-caliber rifle loosely in the crook of his arm. Manfred Vogel was walking his fence to determine where the men who had field butchered his prize Charolais bull the night before had entered his property. If he had discovered them killing his bull, he would have killed them.
Manfred Vogel believed in good and evil and in taking matters into his own hands. In 1992, he was seventy-one years old. Except for a shock of white hair, he appeared 60. He was fit and thin and he worked every day on his 250-acre farm.
The November breeze was crisp. The leaves in the woods that surrounded his farm were turning. This time of the year reminded Vogel of his Heimat, his home in Bavaria, near Munich, in the forest where he camped with his friends before the war. It also reminded him of their Blutbrudershaft, an ineffable feeling he experienced when he was with his friends and colleagues. He sometimes feared that if his American friends knew he harbored these thoughts, fondly remembering the years before the war in Germany, they would be outraged, and label him a Nazi. They were already suspicious of his strong German accent and his oldest son who lived and worked in Europe.
He reached the northern borderline of his property, examined the stretched barbed wire and the trampled earth where the rustlers had entered his property, and found several bloody patches on the bushes. Ants now covered the stained vegetation. The trees were alive with crows, drawn to the site by the smell of death. He heard the flapping wings of vultures reminding him to return to the south pasture and cover the remnants of the bull