by C. J. Box
"Fine."
Trey lifted the receiver, slowly sweeping it in front of him until he found where the signal was strongest. Joe looked up, following Trey's arm. A dense pocket of aspen stood alone on a saddle slope of low gray sagebrush. The bear was too big to hide in the brush, so it had to be in the aspen grove. As if reading his thoughts, Trey gestured toward the trees.
Joe jacked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun and quickly loaded a replacement into the magazine. He put his thumb on the safety as he walked, ready to flip it off and shoot.
They approached the pocket of aspen. Joe could hear a slight cold wind ripple through the crown of branches, sending a few yellow leaves skittering down. He could also hear the signal from the receiver. Before plunging into the grove, he looked over at Trey. Trey mouthed, "Ready?" and Joe tipped his hat brim.
The smell of the bear was strong in the grove, hanging like smoke about three feet above the ground. It was dusk. Joe wished they had entered the aspen at least a half hour before, when there was more light. He promised himself that if they didn't find the bear within ten minutes he would call to Trey and they would pull out and wait for morning.
Even though Trey had been twenty yards away when they entered the aspen, Joe couldn't see or hear him now in the dense trees.
Joe noticed a nuance in the smell of the bear-the metallic odor of blood. He walked slowly, breathed deeply and as quietly as possible. He didn't want the sound of his own exertion to fill his ears and make him miss something.
He felt it before he saw it, and spun to his left, his boot heel digging into the soft black ground beneath the fallen leaves.
The grizzly sat on his haunches, looking at him from ten feet away. Joe saw the silver-tipped brown fur, some of it matted with black blood, saw the bear's chest heave painfully as he breathed. Joe stared into the eyes of the bear, and the bear didn't blink. The bear's eyes were black and hard, without malice.
Joe raised the shotgun and thumbed off the safety. He put the front bead of the muzzle on 304's chest, right on his heart. And he didn't fire.
Even when the bear false-charged and popped his teeth together in warning, Joe didn't pull the trigger.
But Trey Crump did, the explosion sounding like the whole aspen grove went up. 304 flinched as if stung by a bee, and roared, his mouth fully open so Joe could see the inch-long teeth and pink tongue. Trey fired again and the bear toppled forward, dead before he hit the ground.
As they rode toward their vehicles in the dark, dragging the carcass of the grizzly behind them, Trey asked, "Why didn't you shoot, Joe?"
Joe didn't want to answer, and didn't.
Because he was looking me straight in the eye, that's why. Because I found out I can't kill a bear when he is looking me straight in the eye.
That night, they ate big steaks and drank beer after beer at a guest lodge in the foothills of the mountains. Old-timers at the bar had heard the story and sent over rounds of drinks for the game wardens. They, like Trey, admired old 304. But the bear had to go. A fed bear was a dead bear.
Joe left Trey at the bar and found a pay phone outside. It was cold as he shoved quarters in, and he could see his breath as he said, "Hello, darling," to Marybeth.
"Where are you?" she asked. Even colder.
He leaned back and looked at the sign out near the highway. "Someplace called the T Bar."
"In Jackson?"
"No," he said. "By Cody."
"Cody. Joe, why are you there? Why aren't you in Jackson? Why didn't you call like you said you would?"
Joe said, "Didn't you get the second message from dispatch?"
"What message?"
He told her the whole story, but he could tell by her tone she was still furious with him. As he told her how scared he had been when he walked up on the grizzly, she said, "Sheridan has been an absolute beast. I can't even talk to that girl anymore."
Joe paused. "Marybeth, are you listening?"
"For three days I've been worried about you. Do you know what that's like?"
"No," Joe said, looking out at the highway. "I guess I don't."
He didn't know if he was angry, guilt-stricken, or both.
"I'll give you a call tomorrow," he said, and hung up the phone.
Trey was watching him as he reclaimed his stool at the bar. "Everything okay?"
"Marybeth didn't get the second dispatch message. She didn't know where I've been."
"Uh-oh." Trey shook his head. "I wonder if my missus got it?"
"You better call her," Joe said.
"So I can look as miserable as you?" Trey said. "I think I'll have another beer."
The next morning, as he crossed the Shoshone River out of Cody, Joe felt ashamed of himself. He had not slept well in his motel room, despite a few too many beers. He tried to reassess where he was in time and place in regard to his new assignment. He was four days behind schedule, and he had not yet had a chance to really talk everything over with Marybeth, without distractions. He had frozen when he should have fired. He convinced himself that if the bear had gone after Trey, he would have reacted well and started blasting. Of course he would have, he thought. He had pulled his weapon and fired in anger before. Once, he had hit a man from a long distance, but he hadn't known it at the time. But he had never faced someone, or something like a bear, looking him straight in the eye.
Later, he felt the shroud lifting. The guilt he had felt earlier about leaving Marybeth and the girls was still there, but the challenge of what he was about to face surged hot and steady. He already missed his family, but the residue of the telephone call with Marybeth remained. It had not been a good conversation.
Sure, she had a right to be worried and angry. But he had wanted to talk with her, tell her how tough it had been to go face-to-face with that bear, and what he had done. Instead, it had all been about her. She made him feel guilty. She always made him feel guilty. He knew the last five years had been tough on her. She'd gone through more than anyone deserved. But would there ever be a time when he didn't have to walk around on eggshells? When she didn't seem to blame him for what their life had become?
He was being unfair. Despite everything, he loved her. Without her he would spin off the planet. He needed her to ground him.
But he looked forward to the change. He looked forward to his new district.
Had the pressures in Saddlestring, and in the house, really gotten to him to this degree, he wondered, that the prospect of riding up alone on armed men in a hunting camp seemed like a boy's holiday? He tried to shake that thought out of his head. He tried to make an argument that it was good to have a mission, good to have a tough assignment. It was good to be trusted by Trey, to have been chosen out of the other fifty-five game wardens for the hottest, most high-profile district.
As he drove up the canyon, he watched the signal on his cell phone recede to nothing, followed by a digital NO SERVICE prompt.
Here we go, he thought. Here we go.
SEVEN
Even though he should have been prepared for them, even though he had seen them dozens of times in photos, paintings, movies, on postage stamps, and in person, Joe still felt his heart skip a beat when the timber opened up on the road south of Yellowstone Park and the Tetons filled up the late afternoon vista. Mount Moran in particular, with its comma-shaped glacier of snow, burned bright in the cloudless sky. The dark, rounded shoulders of the Bighorns, his mountains, had been replaced by the glittering silver-white Tetons, which thrust upward like razor-edged sabers trying to slice open the sky. He felt like he was switching his comfortable horizon with a new, dazzling, high-tech model.
He wondered if he would ever get used to seeing those mountains without feeling a flutter in his stomach each time he looked. It was hard, Joe thought, not to be intimidated by the Tetons. There were no other mountains like them in the world; so new, sharp, and lethal that foothills hadn't yet had the courage to approach them. He wondered if Will Jensen had ever gotten used to them. How could som
ething that dramatic ever really provide the comfort of familiar scenery?
Traffic south to Jackson through Grand Teton National Park was heavy, and Joe became part of a long parade of vehicles. The highway was choked with huge recreational vehicles helmed by older drivers who apparently thought the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit was a challenge they wouldn't dare confront. He settled in, unable to pass because the exodus of tourist traffic in the oncoming lane was just as dense. Driving cautiously, he knew that the sighting of a moose, elk, or bear from the highway would instantly cause visitors to hit their brakes and, without pulling over to the shoulder, pour out of their vehicles with cameras and camcorders. On his left the ground rose in a gentle swell toward the Gros Ventre Mountains. On the raised flats, barely visible from the road, were old dude ranches. The movie Shane had been filmed on one of them, Joe remembered. It was the only movie he and his father had ever agreed on, maybe the only thing they had ever agreed on. Then he realized something that both scared and exhilarated him: This was his new district. As far as he could see in every direction, from the Tetons to the west, Gros Ventres to the east, Yellowstone Park to the north, to the town of Jackson ahead of him to the south, was his new responsibility.
Jackson was just a couple of hundred miles from Saddlestring, Joe thought, but it was a world apart.
The big new two-story state building had a parking lot in front for visitors and a private lot in back for employees of various agencies. Joe cruised through the staff lot, looking for a parking space, but they all appeared to be designated. The only open one he saw was marked for W. JENSEN. Even though there wasn't anywhere else available behind the building, he chose not to use it. Not yet. Instead, he wheeled around the front, parked between two RVs, and entered the building through the double doors.
In the lobby, tourists stood and rifled through a rack of brochures offering horseback rides, an aerial tram ride to the top of the Tetons, chuck wagon cookouts, white-water rafting, and other excursions, as well as accommodations.
A dark-skinned, wizened woman with coal-black hair peered over her gold-framed glasses at him as he approached her counter carrying his battered briefcase and day-pack. He nodded his hat brim to her, and she nodded back.
"Joe Pickett," he said.
She stood. She was not much taller standing than she had been sitting down. "Mary Seels. We expected you five days ago."
"Hello, Mary. I was helping my supervisor with a bear. You should have gotten word from dispatch that I'd be late."
She assessed him. He thought he saw a slight smile on her mouth, as if she were hiding her amusement. "I've heard about you."
He nodded again, not taking the bait, not saying, What have you heard? But he thought he already had her figured out, simply by the way she looked at him, with the same dispassionate sharpness of one of Nate's falcons, and by the way she projected her innate territoriality. Mary was the one who ran the place, he thought. She appraised him as if he had walked into the building hat in hand looking for the last bed in town, and she had the power to give it to him or turn him away.
"Will said you were a good guy," she said.
"I'm glad to hear that. I thought quite a bit of Will."
"If Will says you're a good guy, you're a good guy," she said, more to herself than to Joe. "I suppose you want to use his office?"
Inwardly, Joe cringed. He had not parked in Will's space because he felt he was encroaching.
"How many offices are in this building?" he asked.
She ticked her head from side to side like a metronome as she silently counted. "Twenty-some. We've got biologists, habitat specialists, fisheries guys, and communications people. Plus a library and a conference room. There's a corral out back. Will's four horses are kept there."
"Twenty offices," Joe repeated. "In my district I work out of my house. In a space about as big as your counter here."
"That's interesting," she said, her tone dismissive. "I hope you don't get lost here."
"Me too," he said.
There were a few beats of silence as Joe and Mary looked at each other.
"Are you going to move in or not?" she asked finally.
"Any empty rooms?"
"A couple. But they have the lousiest furniture, if they have furniture at all. People raid the empty offices for what they want all the time. You'll need a desk, won't you? A computer that works?" She was still testing him. "You know you want Will's office, so just take it."
He started to protest, but thought better of it. "Okay, ma'am."
"You can call me Mary," she said, again with that ghost of a smile, "but if you call me ma'am you'll get a hell of a lot better service around here."
He smiled at her.
"The office is upstairs," she said, and sat down to answer a ringing phone. "All of his files and records are up there. I'm sure you'll want to look at them."
"Yup."
Joe gathered his briefcase and pack from her counter and began to climb the wide stairs to the second floor. Mounted elk, deer, and bighorn sheep heads watched his progress with glass-eyed indifference, as if they'd seen the likes of him before.
"Hey, Joe Pickett," Mary called out from her desk.
He stopped on the top step and turned to her.
She lowered the phone and cupped her hand over the receiver. "You might have a call here in a minute. Someone is saying there are some people pitching a tent out in the middle of the elk refuge. You might have to go check that out and kick them off."
He hesitated. "Okay …"
"And you have several messages from your wife. She didn't sound very happy." Mary smiled for the first time. It was a smile of pity.
"She didn't get the dispatch message either," he said.
"Welcome to Jackson Hole," she said.
Will Jensen's nameplate was still in a fake brass slider next to the third door on the left. Joe hesitated, looking up and down the hallway, then cautiously opened the unlocked door and let it swing slowly inward. The mini-blinds covering the window were closed but bled laddered light. He waited a few beats before stepping inside. He couldn't help feeling voyeuristic, and a little ghoulish. Joe didn't want to be seen entering, didn't want anyone saying later that he had just barged into Will's old office like he owned the place. He reached inside the doorway, found the switch, and turned on the lights.
Joe's first impression was that Will had left the office planning to return to it. Papers fanned across the desk. An open can of Mountain Dew was on a coaster. A ballpoint pen, cap off and to the side, sat on the top of a large, thin spiral notebook. The fan on Will's computer hummed, indicating that it was sleeping and not turned off.
Joe stepped inside, leaving the door open, and dumped his briefcase and day-pack in the chair opposite the desk.
Overall, the room was spartan, the office of someone who rarely used it or couldn't get away from it fast enough. That fit with what Joe knew of Will and most of the other game wardens. Their actual workplace was outside, not inside. They used their desks with hesitation and profound regret, spending only as much time there as absolutely necessary between bouts in the field.
A cheap bookcase was a quarter filled with departmental memo binders and statute books. A retro Winchester Ammunition calendar was pushpinned into the wall. There were no personal photos, no drawings from his children. The only adornment was a framed, faded photo hanging on the wall, cocked slightly to the left, of the elk refuge in winter. Joe instinctively knew that Mary, or maybe Will's wife-but not Will-had put it there.
The left wall was dominated by a large-scale Forest Service map of the North Jackson district. Pins with tiny paper flags numbered 1 through 37 indicated where the licensed outfitter camps were located. The camps followed river drainages in a march toward Yellowstone.
Joe sat in Will's chair, still reluctant to settle in. The chair was uncomfortable, and was much older than the building itself. Joe wondered if one of the other employees had swapped out a chair at the news of Will's
demise. He brushed the pen aside and looked at the spiral notebook. The red cover had a large "#10" written on the outside in black marker. Inside were entries scribbled in a tiny, cribbed block print.
10/02-0600. Rosie's / Box Creek / front country.
MI 567B Blk GMC / Rosie's / Call / Okay per Disp.
PA 983 Silver Ford 3/4 / HT / Rosie's / Call / Okay
per Disp.
WY 2-4BX Green Yukon / Rosie's / Call / Antlerless.
Citation issued.
1700-Turpin. 6b, 2s, 2 Wtbucks. Okay …
Joe quickly figured out Will's shorthand code. It was similar to the notes he kept in his own field notebooks. In translation, the notes said that on October 2 at 6 A.M., Will was patrolling Rosie's Ridge and the Box Creek front country in his pickup, checking on elk hunters. While he didn't see the hunters themselves, who had most likely left their vehicles and set up somewhere in the vast country to look for elk, Will noted their parked vehicles-a black GMC from Michigan, a silver Ford three-quarter-ton pickup with Pennsylvania plates, and a green Yukon with Wyoming plates. Will had called in each of the plates to dispatch and requested a cross-reference computer check to determine the name of the hunter and whether or not that hunter had obtained a permit from the department to hunt elk in the area. While the out-of-state hunters checked out ("Okay per Dispatch"), the Wyoming hunter had a license that only allowed him to hunt antlerless elk, which meant his particular season didn't open up for two more weeks. Will had located the Wyoming hunter, confirmed that he had violated regulations, and issued a citation.
Later in the afternoon, at 5 P.M., Will had patrolled through the Turpin Meadow campground at about the time that the first backcountry hunters were returning to their camps. The hunters had harvested six bull elk, two spike elk (yearling bulls), and two whitetail buck deer. All the kills had been clean and legal by properly licensed hunters, because no warnings or citations were noted.
Joe closed the notebook and sat back. The notes, once deciphered, presented a detailed account of his movements and actions. Using the notebook, citation book, and call-in record, a determined investigator could easily document what he did all day. Joe found that reassuring in his circumstances, since nearly everyone he encountered in the field was armed. The only game wardens who did mind, Joe knew, were the few with extracurricular activities like drinking while on duty or visiting lonely wives.