by C. J. Box
In the back of his mind, Joe thought that if there really were men hiding out in these mountains stealing elk and vandalizing cabins and cars, they would likely be refugees of the man camps. Over the past few years, as natural-gas fields were drilled north of town, the energy companies had established man camps—clumps of adjoining temporary mobile housing in the middle of sagebrush flats for their employees. The men—and it was only men—lived practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Obviously, it took a certain kind of person to stay there. Most of the temporary residents had traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to the most remote part of the least-populated state to work in the natural-gas fields and live in a man camp. The men were rough, independent, well armed, and flush with cash when they came to town. And when they did, it was the New Wild West. For months at a time, Joe had been called just about every Saturday night to assist the local police and sheriff’s deputies with breaking up fights.
When the price of natural gas plummeted and drilling was no longer encouraged, the employees were let go. A half-dozen man camps sat deserted in the sagebrush desert. No one knew where the men went any more than they knew where they’d come from in the first place. That a few of the unemployed refugees of the man camps had stuck around in the game-rich mountains seemed plausible—even likely—to Joe.
He secured his animals and walked the floor of the basin looking for remains of the elk. Although predators would have quickly moved in on the carcass and stripped it of its meat and scattered the bones, there should be unmistakable evidence of hide, hair, and antlers. The bow hunters said the wounded bull had seven-point antlers on each beam, so the antlers should be nearby as well.
As he surveyed the ground for sign, something in his peripheral vision struck him as discordant. He paused and carefully looked from side to side, visually backtracking. In nature, he thought, nothing is perfect. And something he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—was too vertical or horizontal or straight or unblemished to belong here.
“What was it?” he asked aloud. Through the trees, his horses raised their heads and stared at him, uncomprehending.
After turning back around and retracing his steps, Joe saw it. At first glance, he reprimanded himself. It was just a stick jutting out from a tree trunk twenty feet off his path. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t a stick at all, but an arrow stuck in the trunk of a tree. The shaft of the arrow was handcrafted, not from a factory, but it was straight, smooth, shorn of bark, with feather fletching on the end. The only place he’d ever seen a primitive arrow like this was in a museum. He photographed the arrow with his digital camera, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and grasped it by the shaft and pushed hard up and down while pulling on it. After a moment, the arrow popped free and Joe studied it. The point was obsidian and delicately flaked and attached to the shaft with animal sinew. The fletching was made of wild turkey feathers.
It made no sense. The bow hunters he’d interviewed were serious sportsmen, even if they’d hunted prior to the season opener. But even they didn’t make their own arrows from natural materials. No one did. Who had lost this arrow?
He felt a chill roll through him. Slowly, he rotated and looked behind him in the trees. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Cheyenne or Sioux warriors approaching.
HE FOUND THE REMAINS of the seven-point bull elk ten minutes later. Even though coyotes and ravens had been feeding on the carcass, it was obvious this was the elk the bow hunters had wounded and pursued. The hindquarters were gone and the backstraps had been sliced away. Exactly like the hunters described.
So who had taken the meat?
Joe photographed the carcass from multiple angles.
JOE WALKED back to his horses with the arrow he’d found. He wrapped the point of it in a spare sock and the shaft in a T-shirt and put it in a pannier. He caught Buddy staring at him.
“Evidence,” he said. “Something strange is going on up here. We might get some fingerprints off this arrow.”
Buddy snorted. Joe was sure it was a coincidence.
AS HE RODE out of the basin, he frequently glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t shake a feeling that he was being watched. Once he reached the rim and was back on top, the air was thin and the sun was relentless. Rivulets of sweat snaked down his spine beneath his uniform shirt.
Miles to the southeast, a mottled gray pillow cloud and rain column of a thunderstorm connected the horizon with the sky. It seemed to be coming his way. He welcomed rain that would cool down the afternoon and settle the dust from his horses.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about the carcass he’d found. Or the arrow.
THAT NIGHT, he camped on the shoreline of a half-moon-shaped alpine lake and picketed the horses within sight of his tent in lush ankle-high grass. As the sun went down and the temperature dropped into the forties, he caught five trout with his 4-weight fly rod, kept one, and ate it with fried potatoes over a small fire. After dinner he cleaned his dishes by the light of a headlamp and uncased his satellite phone from a pannier. Because of the trouble he’d had communicating several years before while temporarily stationed in Jackson Hole, he’d vowed to call home every night no matter what. Even if there was no news from either side, it was the mundane that mattered, that kept him in touch with his family and Marybeth with him.
The satellite phone was bulky compared to a mobile, and he had to remove his hat to use it because the antenna bumped into the brim. The signal was good, though, and the call went through. Straight to voice mail. He sighed and was slightly annoyed before he remembered Marybeth said she was taking the girls to the last summer concert in the town park. He’d hoped to hear her voice.
When the message prompt beeped, he said, “Hello, ladies. I hope you had a good time tonight. I wish I could have gone with you, even though I don’t like concerts. Right now, I’m high in the mountains, and it’s a beautiful and lonely place. The moon’s so bright I can see fish rising in the lake. A half hour ago, a bull moose walked from the trees into the lake and stood there knee-deep in the water for a while. It’s the only animal I’ve seen, which I find remarkably strange. I watched him take a drink.”
He paused, and felt a little silly for the long message. He rarely talked that much to them in person. He said, “Well, I’m just checking in. Your horses are doing fine and so am I. I miss you all.”
HE UNDRESSED AND SLIPPED into his sleeping bag in the tent. He read a few pages of A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, which had turned into his camping book, then extinguished his headlamp. He lay awake with his hands beneath his head and stared at the inside of the dark tent fabric. His service weapon was rolled up in the holster in a ball near his head. After an hour, he got up and pulled the bag and the Therm-a-Rest pad out through the tent flap. There were still no clouds and the stars and moon were bright and hard. Out in the lake, the moose had returned and stood in silhouette bordered by blue moon splash.
God, he thought, I love this. I love it so.
And he felt guilty for loving it so much.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26
2
THE RHAPSODY ENDED AT NOON THE NEXT DAY. THERE WAS a lone fisherman down there in the small kidney-shaped mountain lake and something about him was wrong.
Joe reined to a stop on the summit and let Buddy and Blue Roanie catch their breath from clambering up the mountainside. The late-summer sun was straight up in the sky, and insects hummed in the wildflowers. He shifted in the saddle to get his bearings and searched the sky for more clouds. The sun had been relentless on the top of Battle Pass. There was little shade because he was on the top of the world, with nothing higher. He longed for an afternoon thunderstorm to cool things down, but the thunderhead had slowed its sky march and the rain column now looked like an afterthought. He hoped for a more serious cloud, and to the south he could see a bank of thunderheads forming at what looked from his elevation like eye level.
But first, he’d need to check out the fisherman.
Joe raised his binoculars and fo
cused in, trying to figure out what there was about the man that had struck him as discordant. Several things popped up. The first was that although the hundreds of small mountain lakes in Sierra Madre had fish, the high-country cirques weren’t noted for great angling. Big fish were to be had in the low country, in the legendary blue-ribbon trout waters of the Encampment and North Platte rivers of the eastern slope or the Little Snake on the western slope. Up here, with its long violent winters and achingly short summers, the trout were stunted because the ice-off time was brief. Although today it was a beautiful day, the weather could turn within minutes. Snow was likely any month of the summer. While hikers might catch a small trout or two for dinner along the trail, as he had, the area was not a destination fishing location worth two or three days of hard hike to access.
Second, the fisherman wasn’t dressed or equipped like a modern angler. The man—who at the distance looked very tall and rangy—was wading in filthy denim jeans, an oversized red plaid shirt with big checks, and a white slouch hat pulled low over his eyes. No waders, no fishing vest, no net. And no horse, tent, or camp, from what Joe could see. In these days of high-tech gear and clothing that wicked away moisture and weighed practically nothing, it was extremely unusual to see such a throwback outfit.
He put away the glasses, clicked his tongue, and started down toward the lake. Leather creaked from his saddles, and horseshoes struck stones. Blue Roanie snorted. He was making plenty of noise, but the fisherman appeared not to have seen or heard him. In a place as big and empty and lonely as this, the fisherman’s lack of acknowledgment was all wrong and made a statement in itself.
As he walked his animals down to the lake, Joe untied the leather thong that secured his shotgun in his saddle scabbard.
Joe had often considered the fact that, for Western game wardens, unlike even for urban cops in America’s toughest inner cities, nearly every human being he encountered was armed. To make matters even dicier, it was rare when he could call for backup. This appeared to be one of those encounters where he’d be completely on his own, the only things on his side being his wits, his weapons, and the game and fish regulations of the State of Wyoming.
Fat-bodied marmots scattered across the rubble in front of him as he descended toward the lake. They took cover and peeked at him from the gray scree. What do they know that I don’t? Joe wondered.
“HELLO,” JOE CALLED OUT as he approached the cirque lake from the other side of the fisherman. “How’s the fishing?”
His voice echoed around in the small basin until it was swallowed up.
“Excuse me, sir. I need to talk to you for a minute and check your fishing license and habitat stamp.”
No response.
The fisherman cast, waited a moment for his lure to settle under the surface of the water, then reeled in. The man was a spin-fishing artist, and his lure flicked out like a snake’s tongue. Cast. Pause. Reel. Cast. Pause. Reel.
Joe thought, Either he’s deaf and blind, or has an inhuman power of concentration, or he’s ignoring me, pretending I’ll just get spooked and give up and go away.
As a courtesy and for his own protection, Joe never came at a hunter or fisherman head-on. He had learned to skirt them, to approach from an angle. Which he did now, walking his horses around the shore, keeping the fisherman firmly in his peripheral vision. Out of sight from the fisherman, Joe let his right hand slip down along his thigh until it was inches from his shotgun.
Cast. Pause. Reel. Cast. Pause. Reel.
Interaction with others was different in the mountains than it was in town. Where two people may simply pass each other on the street with no more than a glance and a nod, in the wilderness people drew to each other the same way animals of the same species instinctively sought each other out. Information was exchanged—weather, trail conditions, hazards ahead. In Joe’s experience, when a man didn’t want to talk, something was up and it was rarely good. Joe was obviously a game warden, but the fisherman didn’t acknowledge the fact, which was disconcerting. It was as if the man thought Joe had no right to be there. And Joe knew that with each passing minute the fisherman chose not to acknowledge him, he was delving further and further into unknown and dangerous territory.
As Joe rode closer, he could see the fisherman was armed, as he’d suspected. Tucked into the man’s belt was a long-barreled Ruger Mark III .22 semiautomatic pistol. Joe knew it to be an excellent gun, and he’d seen hundreds owned by hunters and ranchers over the years. It was rugged and simple, and it was often used to administer a kill shot to a wounded animal.
The tip of the fisherman’s pole jerked down and the man deftly set the hook and reeled in a feisty twelve-inch rainbow trout. The sun danced off the colors of the trout’s belly and back as the fisherman raised it from the water, worked the treble-hook lure out of its mouth, and studied it carefully, turning it over in his hands. Then he bent over and released the fish. He cast again, hooked up just as quickly, and reeled in a trout of the same size and color. After inspecting it, he bit it savagely behind its head to kill it. He spat the mouthful of meat into the water near his feet and slipped the fish into the bulging wet fanny pack behind him. Joe looked at the pack—there were a lot of dead fish in it.
“Why did you release the first one and keep the second?” Joe asked. “They looked like the same fish.”
The man grunted as if insulted, “Not up close, they didn’t. The one I kept had a nick on its tailfin. The one I threw back was perfect. The perfect ones go free.” He spoke in a hard, flat, nasal tone. The accent was upper Midwest, Joe thought. Maybe even Canadian.
Joe was puzzled. “How many imperfect fish do you have there?” Joe asked. He was now around the lake and behind and to the side of the fisherman. “The legal limit is six. Too many to my mind, but that’s the law. It looks like you may have more than that in your possession.”
The fisherman paused silently in the lake, his wide back to Joe. He seemed to be thinking, planning a move or a response. Joe felt the now-familiar shiver roll through him despite the heat. It was as if they were the only two humans on earth and something of significance was bound to happen.
Finally, the man said, “I lost count. Maybe ten.”
“That’s a violation. Tell me, are you a bow hunter?” Joe asked. “I’m wondering about an arrow I found stuck in a tree earlier today.”
The fisherman shrugged. Not a yes, not a no. More like, I’m not sure I want to answer.
“Do you know anything about an elk that was butchered up in a basin a few miles from here? A seven-point bull? It happened a week ago. The hunters who wounded it tracked it down but someone had harvested all the meat by the time they found the carcass. Would you know anything about that?”
“Why you asking me?”
“Because you’re the only living human being I’ve seen in two days.”
The man coughed up phlegm and spat a ball of it over his shoulder. It floated and bobbed on the surface of the water. “I don’t know nothing about no elk.”
“The elk was imperfect,” Joe said. “It was bleeding out and probably limping.”
“For the life of me, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“I need to see your license,” Joe said.
“Ain’t got it on me,” the man said, finally, still not turning around. “Might be in my bag.”
Joe turned in the saddle and saw a weathered canvas daypack hung from a broken branch on the side of a pine tree. He’d missed it earlier. He looked for a bow and quiver of homemade arrows. Nope.
“Mind if I look in it?”
The fisherman shrugged again.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes. But while you look, I’m gonna keep fishing.”
“Suit yourself,” Joe said.
The fisherman mumbled something low and incomprehensible.
Joe said, “Come again?”
The man said, “I’m willing to let this go if you’ll just turn your horses around and ride back the
way you came. ’Cause if you start messing with me, well . . .”
“What?”
“Well, it may not turn out too good.”
Joe said, “Are you threatening me?”
“Nope. Just statin’ a fact. Like sayin’ the sky is blue. You got a choice, is what I’m sayin’.”
Joe said, “I’m choosing to check your license. It’s my job.”
The fisherman shook his head slowly, as if to say, What happens now is on you.
The rod flicked out again, but the lure shot out to the side toward Joe, who saw it flashing through the air. He flinched and closed his eyes and felt the lure smack hard into his shoulder. The treble hooks bit into the loose fabric of his sleeve but somehow missed the skin.
“Damn,” the fisherman said.
“Damn is right,” Joe said, shaken. “You hooked me.”
“I fouled the cast, I guess,” the man said.
“Seemed deliberate to me,” Joe said, reaching across his body and trying to work the lure free. The barbs were pulled through the fabric and he ended up tearing his sleeve getting the lure out.
“Maybe if you’d stay clear of my casting lane,” the fisherman said flatly, reeling in. Not a hint of apology or remorse.
Joe dismounted but never took his eyes off the fisherman in the water. He fought an impulse to charge out into the lake and take the man down. He doubted the miscast was an accident, but there was no way he could prove it, and he swallowed his anger. He led his horse over to the tree, tied him up, and took the bag down. There were very few items in it, and Joe rooted through them looking for a license. In the bag was a knife in a sheath, some string, matches, a box of crackers, a battered journal, a pink elastic iPod holder designed to be worn on an arm but no iPod, an empty water bottle, and half a Bible—Old Testament only. It looked as if the New Testament had been torn away.