by C. J. Box
Joe fired five shots in rapid succession, squeezing the double action until it clicked twice on empty chambers. The concussions seemed especially loud, and they echoed back and forth against the canyon walls until they dissipated and all Joe heard was a ringing in his ears.
He rolled onto his back, ejected the spent cartridges, and reloaded, keeping one cylinder empty for the firing pin to rest.
“Did you hit him?” Stewie asked.
“I doubt it,” Joe said. “But at least he knows we’ll fight back.”
“You bet we fucking will,” Stewie said.
They lay in the root pan depression for what seemed like an hour waiting for more rifle shots that never came. To Joe, the images and sensations of the last two days played back in his mind. He could not believe what he had seen and been through. His entire life had been reduced to one thing: getting away.
The first few raindrops smacked into pine boughs above their heads, sounding like gravel on a tarp. Thunder boomed. The sky was close and dark, the bank of thunderheads pushing out what little blue remained. Any possibility of a rescue by air was now remote.
Joe lay on his back with his.357 Magnum on his chest. The first drops on his face made him flinch. He closed his eyes.
The rain came.
35
You know, Joe, I learned a lot during that thirty days I spent crawling across the country after I got blown up by that cow,” Stewie said as they walked. “This is bringing it all back-the hunger, the elements, the cloud of absolute terror hanging over us.”
They were walking through the night in a steady but thin rain. Joe was soaked through, and rivulets of water streamed down from his hat when he cocked his head. The heavy clouds obscured the moon and stars, but there was enough ambient light for them to see by. Both Stewie and Joe lost their footing from time to time on rain-slick pine needles, and they had tripped over branches hidden in dark low cover. But they kept going; they kept bearing south. They stayed close together, within reach, so they wouldn’t run the risk of losing each other in the darkness. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Joe thought, they were descending the mountain toward the river valley. The terrain on this side of the mountains was easier to cover.
“So what does it bring back? one might ask if one were interested in the question posed,” Stewie said sarcastically, since Joe hadn’t spoken. “Well, I’ll tell you. What it brings back are feelings and theories I got when I was huddled up under a tree for the night or crawling beside a road hoping to find a particular residence I knew about. You see, Joe, I knew where a certain gentleman-one of the biggest contributors to environmental causes in the country-had a second home. I had been there once for a meeting. It had a helipad so the gentleman could get back and forth from San Francisco when he needed to. Anyway, this gentleman owns thousands of acres and a multimillion-dollar gated palace on an old ranch homestead. And I crawled all the way to his land.”
Stewie had conducted a series of monologues through the night as they walked. Joe didn’t mind, because they kept his mind off of his hunger and exhaustion. He likened it to listening to talk radio while he drove down the highway.
“But you know what happened when I got to his land, Joe?”
“What?”
“The son-of-a-bitch had put up a ten-foot buffalo fence and electrified it. I made the mistake of touching the fence and it just about cooked my ass off. I crawled around it for a day and couldn’t find a way in.”
Stewie spat angrily. “Here is a guy who gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like One Globe so we can fight the bastards who are ruining the earth, but he buys a huge old ranch in the mountains and puts up an electrified buffalo fence to keep everyone out.”
“Isn’t that his right?” Joe asked.
“It’s his right, but there’s nothing right about it,” Stewie argued angrily. “It’s so fucking elitist and hypocritical. Think about it: He builds a castle where a little ranch house once was, he closes roads that had been open to the local public for years, he puts up ‘No Trespassing’ signs, he builds a helipad, and he shuts the world out. Tell me how this guy is any better than an oil company that moves into an area and sinks wells? Or a lumber company that comes in and cuts the trees? And he’s one of us!”
“That is something I’ve always wondered about,” Joe said.
“I can see why,” Stewie agreed. “Some of our own behave worse than the ranchers they bought out and, in many cases, the companies who lease and exploit the land. They fight development because they’ve already got theirs. This kind of selfishness destroys the credibility of the movement.”
Joe realized he was now operating under the assumption that Charlie Tibbs was no longer following them. Joe no longer cared about the sloppiness of the trail they cut, and no longer felt it was necessary to do anything other than head straight south. He couldn’t envision Tibbs attempting to cross the canyon the way they had. Leaving his horse and the bulk of his equipment would lessen Tibbs’s advantage, and it was inconceivable that he would expose himself against the canyon walls the way Joe, Stewie, and Britney had done.
This assumption caused a lessening of immediate pressure, and Joe realized how hungry he was. His last meal had been breakfast on Saturday. It was now-what day was it? — Monday morning.
Joe wondered if it had been possible that one of his shots had actually hit Tibbs. He doubted it. At the range he was firing, the slugs would not have traveled in a true arc. They would have fluttered and tumbled end-over-end. But if Tibbs had been hit, Joe thought, the damage would have been devastating. Tumbling.357 Magnum slugs would make a big hole.
No, Joe decided, Tibbs wouldn’t attempt to follow them. He would have turned back. On horseback, it was possible that Tibbs could make it back to his truck before Joe and Stewie hiked down the mountain. Racing around the mountain range to meet Joe and Stewie would be difficult, given the time, but possible. Considering what they’d already seen of Charlie Tibbs-his ruthlessness, his tracking abilities-Joe opted to push through the night.
Joe, tell me about Marybeth,” Stewie said after nearly an hour of silence. “Is she still a babe?”
Joe stopped, and Stewie nearly walked into him.
“I thought we agreed that Marybeth was not a topic of discussion,” Joe stated.
“We did, but I was just thinking about how it was that you came to the cabin in the first place,” Stewie said in a reasonable tone.
“Think all you want,” Joe said, turning to walk again. “Just try to resist the urge to let everything you think about come out of your mouth.”
A long roll of thunder rattled across the sky.
“Yup,” Joe said, after a long pause. “She’s still a babe.”
The rain stopped and the sky opened up to reveal brilliant swirls of stars that lit the ground and gave shape to the dripping trees and brush. The fluttering sound of wings shedding rain in the shadows ahead signaled to Joe that they had come upon a flock of spruce grouse. The birds were nested in for the night, perched on low branches and downed logs, backlit in romantic blue by the stars and moon.
Spruce grouse were not intelligent birds-they were known as “fool hens” by local hunters. Joe and Stewie exchanged glances and came to an immediate understanding:
Get those birds!
Picking up a stout branch, Joe bounded into the flock and stepped into his swing like a hitter pulling a fastball, lopping the head off a grouse perched on a log. He stepped back and swung again, connecting with another grouse as it started to rise. Stewie killed one with a well-thrown stone. The rest of the flock, finally realizing the threat, rose clumsily through the trees. The three downed birds flopped and danced in the dark grass.
They found dry pinecones under brush to use for kindling, and started a fire with a plastic butane lighter Stewie had found in his trouser pocket. As the fire grew, they added short lengths of wood. Stewie built the fire up while Joe cleaned and skinned the birds. Their flesh was warm to the touch and their blood smelled musky.
> Roasting the grouse on green sapling sticks, Joe found himself trembling. He could not remember ever being as hungry as he was now. The hardest part was waiting for the grouse to be cooked through.
“Are they done yet?” Stewie asked repeatedly. “Jesus, that smells good.”
Eventually, Joe pricked one of the grouse breasts with his knife and the juice ran clear. It dripped into the fire and there was a sizzling flare-up.
“Okay,” Joe said, his mouth watering so badly that he had trouble speaking. He lifted the stick to Stewie, who hungrily grabbed the first bird.
The grouse breasts were tender white meat and they tasted faintly of pine nuts. Joe ate one grouse with his hands and split the remaining down the middle, giving half to Stewie. In the firelight, Joe could see Stewie’s lips, fingers, and chin shine with grease. Joe sat back and finished off a drumstick.
“This,” Stewie declared loudly, each word rising in volume, “is the best fucking meal I’ve ever had!”
Joe Pickett and Stewie Woods sat across from each other on the damp earth, the fire between them, and grinned goofily at each other like schoolboys who had just pulled off the greatest practical joke in the history of fifth grade.
Joe looked at his watch. It was three-thirty in the morning.
“Let’s go,” Joe said, scrambling to his feet. “We can’t afford any more breaks.”
“Even if we find more of those birds?” Stewie asked.
If I had known then what I know now, I never would have structured One Globe the way I did,” Stewie was saying. “I formed the organization the traditional way, with me as the president and a board of directors, with bylaws, newsletters, the whole works. I was told I needed to do it that way for effective fund-raising, and we did raise some good money. But I fucked up when I let the board talk me into moving our headquarters to Washington, D.C. I was best at monkey wrenching and public relations, as we all know. But the fund-raisers started taking over. That was the beginning of the end for me and they booted me out.
“One thing that discourages me about One Globe and most of the other environmental groups is that we need crises to raise funds. There’ve always got to be new demons and new bad guys in order to raise awareness. That means we can never be happy. Even when we win, which is often, we’re never really happy about it. I’m inherently a happy guy, so this started to be a drag.
“And when we do win, we’re out of business. Headlines are only headlines for a day, and then they’re old news. So we constantly need new headlines. That gets pretty old, and it’s hard not to get cynical when we start thinking of our cause as a fund-raising business.
“If I had it to do over again, and I still might, I’d organize differently. I’d do it like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, with no centralized hierarchy. They can operate cheaply without all the fund-raising crap. They’re effective, too. Where do you think the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, got his Eco-Fucker Hit List? The future of our movement is in small, mobile, hard-to-find groups like Minnesota’s Bolt Weevils, Hawaii’s Menehune, Wisconsin’s Seeds of Resistance, or Genetix Alert. If we were set up that way it would be harder for a group of bastards like the Stockman’s Trust to find us.”
“What do you think about that, Joe?” Stewie asked.
“About what?” Joe answered, although he had heard every word.
Deep into the night, Stewie declared that much of his life had been wasted. He turned morose, blaming his own egomania for the death of his wife of three days, Britney, and the others.
“When I was crawling across these mountains I had a thought that haunts me still,” Stewie said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I wondered if I would have done more good if I had spent all my time and energy raising money to buy land, then planting trees on it, and turning the whole shiteree over to the Nature Conservancy or some other white-bread outfit. At least then I’d have something to show for my life. What I’ve got now, is this. ” He gestured toward the sky and the treetops, but what he meant was nothing. “That thought just won’t go away.”
He told Joe that his new mission in life, though, was to be an avenger. An ugly avenger.
“It’s a bummer looking like a monster,” Stewie lamented.
It was an hour before dawn, the coldest time of the day. The ground was spongy from the rain and the long grass was bent double as raindrops still clung to the blade tips. Mist began to rise from the meadows.
Joe pushed through a thick stand of aspen and emerged in an opening. He stopped suddenly and Stewie walked into him.
“Sorry,” Stewie apologized.
“Do you see it?” Joe asked, his attention focused on the sight before them. Fifteen miles away, on the dark flats below, a tiny yellow light crossed slowly from right to left.
“It’s the highway,” Joe said.
36
The irrigated hayfield had recently undergone its first cutting of the season and it still smelled sharply of alfalfa. Mist rose from the still-wet ground and blunted the outline of the cottonwood trees in the dawn horizon. Joe and Stewie slogged through the wet field, their boots making slurping sounds in the mud.
Joe felt giddy with happiness. The barbed-wire fence they had crossed a half hour before was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Stewie had reluctantly agreed. Struggling across the cut, flat hayfield seemed easy compared to the rugged country they had been through. Cottonwoods were a welcome sight, because cottonwoods grew where there was water. Therefore ranch houses and buildings were more likely located near groves of cottonwood. In the rural west of the Northern Rockies, cottonwood trees meant that people would be somewhere nearby. Stewie picked up a crumpled Coors beer can in the stubby grass and held it aloft.
“This,” he declared, “is a sure sign of civilization.”
Joe marveled at Stewie’s strength, and wondered how it was possible that Stewie seemed stronger now than when they had begun their trek. Stewie also seemed strangely wistful, and content. He was no longer thundering on about environmental politics or revenge. Stewie Woods was certainly a puzzle, Joe thought.
They crossed another barbed-wire fence and entered a herd of black baldy cattle. The cows shuffled, then mindlessly parted so Joe and Stewie could walk through the herd. Joe noticed the brand on the cows-it was the Vee Bar U.
“Damn!” Joe spat. “Of all of the places to end up. This is Jim Finotta’s ranch.”
“Jim Finotta?”
“Long story,” Joe said.
As they approached the thick cottonwoods in the mist, the sharp angles of the gabled roof of the magnificent stone ranch house emerged, as well as the sprawling outbuildings. Between where they were in the mud and the ranch buildings were a series of corrals filled with milling cattle, separated by age and weight. They heard heifers bawling, splitting the silence of the early morning. They climbed over several wood-slat fences, which reminded Joe of how sore and bruised he was. The cattle let them pass. The smell of fresh manure was ripe in the air and hung low in the mist.
After the last fence, Joe walked across the gravel ranch yard toward Finotta’s house. He skirted a massive steel barn building on his left. As they passed the windows of the building, Joe glanced in and saw a parked vehicle. He had already taken several steps past the window before what he had seen connected: it was a new model black Ford pickup.
Joe grabbed Stewie, pulling him against the building and out of sight of the ranch house. Silently, Joe pointed at the pickup through the window.
“That looks like the pickup Charlie Tibbs was driving,” he whispered. Stewie’s eyes widened and he mouthed the words, “Holy fuck!”
They backtracked along the building, going from door to door, finding each one locked. Around the corner was the big garage door. A set of muddy tire tracks crossed the cement threshold pad into the building. Joe leaned against the garage door and tried it. It raised a few inches.
“It’s unlocked,” Joe whispered to Stewie.
Stewie arched hi
s eyebrows in a let’s see what’s inside expression.
Joe paused, and looked back at Stewie, who was inches away.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Joe confessed.
“You mean, do we go in?”
Joe nodded yes.
“Or do we leave things be and go to the ranch house and ask to use the phone?”
Joe nodded again. This didn’t make sense to him. Could this possibly be Charlie Tibbs’s pickup truck?
He decided that he had to find out. Opening the door slowly to make the least possible noise, Joe raised it two feet. If Charlie Tibbs was in the truck or somewhere in the garage, Joe didn’t want to startle him. He dropped to his belly and crawled inside the garage and Stewie followed.
Inside, the floor was cold, polished concrete. The room was large. They shut the garage door and stood up. A muddy tractor and the four-wheeler Joe had seen Finotta’s ranch hand, Buster, drive were parked under a high ceiling. There was enough room in the building for several more vehicles. The corners of the big room were dark, and the only light came from three small, dirty windows along the outer wall. The black Ford was parked and partially hidden behind the tractor, its muddy tracks still moist on the floor. There was a dull glow in the dark coming from where the black Ford was.
Stewie tapped Joe’s shoulder, and Joe turned. Stewie had located a light switch. Joe withdrew his revolver and nodded to Stewie, who flipped on the overhead lights.
To their left, along the wall, was ranch equipment: welding machines, drill presses, benches scattered with hand tools, rolls of fencing, and stacks of posts. There was also a set of wooden steps that led to a second level in the building and a closed door.
They approached the pickup from the back. It no longer had a horse trailer attached. A large metal toolbox was in the bed of the pickup. Joe noticed the mounts inside the bed for a telescope-or a mounted sniper’s rifle. It was parked at an awkward angle and the front door was open, the dome light on. That was what had made the glow.