Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch

by Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

  ing to start buying lottery tickets and pooling our winnings. When we

  get enough money, we’re going to bid on some property.”

  “Bid on what property?” Sadie asked.

  “Cory’s boyfriend works in the county treasurer’s office. He told her

  that when people get behind on their property taxes, the county seizes

  the property and sells it to get their money for the delinquent taxes. If the taxes aren’t that much, we could bid on the property and then turn

  around and sell it to make money. He calls it ‘flipping.’”

  “Flipping?” Sadie tried to hide her amusement. “I think it might be

  a little more complicated than that.”

  “We’re going to call us the Three S Group— you know, for the Three

  Sisters.”

  Sadie laughed. “That’s perfect.”

  Beanie held up a pink lottery ticket. “This is a winner. I just know

  it will give us enough money to bid at least on something. But we’ve got

  several months before anything goes up for sale.”

  Sadie laughed. “Well, good luck, Beanie. In the meantime, could

  you call Mr. Winton? He wants to book a trip to O‘ahu for his family.

  The number’s on that yellow sticky note on your phone.”

  “Of course.” Beanie stored her purse and went to work.

  Sadie returned to her search for information on the man who had

  been inconveniently murdered so near her home. She scrolled down

  the list of sites and clicked on the next one that looked promising. Up

  popped a website for a winery in California. The next link returned in-

  formation on a high school track star in Georgia.

  After a while, she decided to refine her search. When she entered

  the name together with Sweetwater Creek, Texas, the browser returned

  no hits at all, so she went back to her original search criteria.

  Growing weary of her lack of success, on a whim, she entered

  Angus Clyborn. Once again, nothing. She backspaced out the name

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  and went back to her original search for Sanders. This time she got a completely different list of sites. Then she realized she had only erased Angus, not Clyborn, and had ended up with a search for Clyborn and

  Sanders.

  The first site pointed to an article about a court record in Denton

  County, Texas. She clicked on the article and began to read. After a few

  seconds, she picked up the phone and dialed Lance’s familiar cell phone

  number. The call went straight to his voice mail.

  “I found some information on the dead guy,” she said, feeling ex-

  cited. “Call me.”

  She hung up, hit the print command on her computer, and then

  returned to her screen to continue her search. She was finally getting

  somewhere. By closing time, she had a stack of papers to take home to

  show Lance. She placed them in a folder and gathered her things.

  “What in the world are you working on?” Beanie asked. “You’re

  taking work home?”

  “That’s a good description.” Sadie grinned. “Let’s call it homework.”

  “Okay, boss. See you tomorrow.”

  ★

  Lance drove toward Eucha after a call came into the sheriff ’s office

  about a group of people blocking the entrance to Angus Clyborn’s

  ranch. Lance couldn’t imagine what the ruckus was all about, but when

  he turned off Highway 20 onto Eucha Road, he found himself following

  two vans, both with attached satellites and identifying call letters from Tulsa television stations.

  He followed the vans past Sadie’s place to the entrance to Angus

  Clyborn’s ranch, where he found a similar van already parked, a camera

  man, and a woman in high heels walking around with a wireless micro-

  phone in her hand.

  “What the . . . ?” Lance let the rest of the sentence fall away as he

  parked in the middle of the road, turned on his flashing red lights, and

  got out of his truck.

  A group of ten to twelve protestors stood in front of the entrance

  into the Buffalo Ranch. As soon as the cameras began to fire up, the

  protestors held their signs high and marched in a small circle, chanting.

  35

  Lance walked into the middle of the circle and spoke in a loud voice.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  A woman who appeared to be in her early sixties pulled down her

  sign. “We’re on a public right- of- way,” she said, “and we have a right to assemble here.”

  Lance motioned for one of the reporters to kill the cameras. “What ex-

  actly are you protesting?” he asked, returning his attention to the woman.

  “The senseless killing of innocent wild animals,” she explained, with

  what Lance thought was an excess of animation. “Deer. Elk. Buffalo. They

  don’t have any chance to escape these savage hunters.” She motioned to-

  ward the high fence. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, but it’s on private land, ma’am.”

  “I don’t care. Someone needs to speak up, and that’s what we’re

  here for.”

  “Who exactly is ‘we?’” he asked.

  “The Tulsa office of COWA,” she said, pronouncing the acronym

  as if it were a common word.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Caring for Our Wild Animals,” she explained. “COWA.”

  Lance stuck out his lower lip and nodded slowly. “Okay, you’ve got

  fifteen minutes to make your point,” he said, “and then I expect you to

  leave Delaware County and hotfoot it back to Tulsa. Got it?”

  The woman motioned to one of the reporters. “I can make my state-

  ment here,” she said.

  The reporters with their microphones and cameras moved in and

  the circle began to move again. Lance stepped back, shaking his head,

  and surveyed the small crowd. One sign read “Stop the Slaughter” and

  another read “Animals Have Rights, Too.”

  He looked at his watch and climbed back into his car. Protesters

  were few and far between in this part of the state, and he didn’t have

  much tolerance for these. Most people in Delaware County let their

  neighbors be, and as a lawman, he liked it that way. He doubted these

  city slickers knew much about animals, wild or otherwise, but at the mo-

  ment, he had to agree that “shooting fish in a barrel” didn’t sound too

  pleasing to him, either.

  Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, he noticed he’d missed a

  call from Sadie. He dialed her number, but the signal strength was too

  36

  weak to carry the call. He closed his phone, put it back in his pocket, and looked at his watch, again. They had twelve minutes left.

  37

  Chapter 6

  Grover Chuculate climbed down the steps of his mobile home and used

  his walking stick to steady himself as he ambled down a well- worn

  path, about five hundred feet, to a narrow spring- fed stream. He knelt at the water’s edge and scooped a handful of water onto his face and the

  back of his neck. He looked into the sky and splashed water on his face

  again. Then he began to sing the chorus of one of his favorite hymns in

  Cherokee— “Heavenly Home.”

  Di gwe nv sv, wi ji ga ti

  Ta li ne yv, ga ji yo u

  Hna gwu a se, wi ji ga ti

  Ta le ne yv, ga ji yo u />
  When he had finished singing, he prayed, and then meditated for

  several minutes to the sound of the rushing water. Then he used his

  stick to steady his aching body as he rose to his feet. He took his time, relishing the early morning sunshine, always amazed at how the sunlight

  struck the trees, the rocks, and the grass, and how the shadows fled as the sun crept into the sky, continually transforming the landscape throughout the day. He heard the distinct call of a cardinal before he spotted the crimson bird take flight from a nearby tree. Grasshoppers sang to each

  other, hopping out of the way with each step Grover took.

  Eventually, Grover returned to his trailer and settled into a wooden

  folding chair sitting outside the front door. He laid his walking stick on the ground next to his chair and reflected on the helpful piece of wood.

  He’d carved it by hand from the branch of an oak tree that had fallen one night during a storm. He considered it a gift from the Creator— a gift for which he was thankful.

  38

  He pulled a worn handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

  He was getting soft, he thought, preferring the shade of red oaks and the green- and- white striped awning attached to the side of his little home

  instead of the intense heat of the Oklahoma sun. Something that came

  with getting older, he guessed. Grover’s thoughts shifted to his daughter, Becky. She would be arriving soon from California. It seemed like an

  awfully long drive to make alone, but that’s what she had decided to do.

  It would be good to see her.

  Grover wished he’d had the opportunity to be a bigger presence

  in his daughter’s life before she’d left Delaware County for the big city lights in California. He’d thought her move was just a stage she was going through when she married a cop named Silver, moved to Bakersfield,

  and started using the more formal version of her name— Rebecca. She

  was still Becky to him.

  As Grover considered Becky and her choices so far in life, he blamed

  himself for her marrying a lawman. He, himself, had spent thirty years

  working as a police officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He liked

  the job, even though it had taken him all over the country, leaving little time to spend with his family. He traveled from one Indian reservation to another, supervising the resolution of continual conflicts, relishing each and every battle, addicted to the adrenaline. When he finally got too old to keep up, he retired and came back home, only to find he’d missed the

  little blessings of family that most people cherished daily.

  He discovered that his wife, Marie, had learned how to entertain

  herself in his absence. She had become a drinker and a smoker, and

  gorged on bags of cookies and potato chips until she became not only

  obese, but diabetic as well. Unfortunately, her careless lifestyle would

  be her demise. Grover came home one night to find the house ablaze.

  Marie had gotten drunk and set her bed on fire with a cigarette. Grover

  managed to pull her out of the burning house alive, but she never recov-

  ered from the burns.

  After Marie died, Grover found himself alone, but he was okay with

  that. He bought a mobile home, dragged it down Eucha Road and set it

  up beside the concrete slab where the other house had stood, and called

  it home. Grover didn’t have much to begin with, so starting over wasn’t

  that hard. He decided to focus on himself for a change— balancing his

  39

  mental, spiritual, and physical health. However, with the distraction of the deadly disease of leukemia, he’d had minimal success.

  Grover’s time on earth had grown short, and there were many things

  to talk about. He hoped he had the right words to share and, more im-

  portantly, that Becky would want to hear them. His thoughts shifted to

  his only son, who had been gone for more years than he could count.

  His name was George, having been named after his grandfather George

  Washington Chuculate. Everyone called him Gee for short.

  Gee had been a good- looking kid, with intense brown eyes, strong

  facial features, and coarse black hair that he wore pulled tight at the nape of his neck— a spitting image of himself, Grover thought, when he was

  young, before time and disease had turned his black hair gray, clouded

  his brown eyes, and streaked his tanned face with wrinkles, stealing his

  good looks.

  Grover had raised Gee at a time when imparting wisdom simply

  wasn’t in his grasp. Gee had been rebellious, always getting into trouble. It was that kind of trouble that had landed him in front of a judge who had

  given him two choices— jail or the military. Grover suggested the army,

  so Gee flew to Fort Hood, Texas, and became part of the 1st Cavalry

  Division.

  Gee liked the structure of the army, and Grover began to think

  maybe it had been a good choice for the boy. That is, until Gee de-

  ployed to the Gulf War in 1991 for Operation Desert Storm to protect

  the U.S. interest in the Kuwaiti oil fields from invading Iraqi troops. By the time the “100 Hour War” had ended, it had taken Gee Chuculate’s

  life with it.

  Grover never forgave himself. Having spent almost a year crawling

  through the jungles of Vietnam in the late sixties, he knew firsthand

  what it was like to dodge bullets and roadside bombs, and he wouldn’t

  have wished it on anyone, especially his son. If he’d been a better father, he thought, maybe he could have kept Gee out of trouble and he’d never

  have had to go to war. Maybe he’d still be alive. But maybes were just

  that— fleeting thoughts of what could have been. He could see no point

  in dwelling on them now.

  Grover had his horses, four of them, to tend to. They made his life

  complete. He could throw his cane to one side, climb onto a group of

  precisely placed rocks, and hoist himself up on one of their backs. It was 40

  then that life eased into focus. He’d made a lot of decisions on the back of a horse, and every one of them had been good.

  He sat in the shade and sipped iced tea, hoping he could spend what

  time he had left with his daughter. Maybe he could convince her to stay

  in Oklahoma for a while. Osda, he thought. Good. After all, other than his horses, she was all he had left.

  41

  Chapter 7

  While she waited for Lance to return her call, Sadie pulled out the pa-

  pers she’d printed at her office earlier and arranged them on the kitchen table. She had three stacks— one for Kenny Wayne Sanders, one for

  Angus Clyborn, and one for both. Then she sat down and organized the

  papers in chronological order, trying to sort the events in her own mind

  so she could explain it to Lance so he wouldn’t have to read everything

  she’d brought home.

  Sadie startled when Sonny jumped up and ran to the door. Lance had

  turned off the road onto the lane that led to her house. When she saw his truck, she unlocked the door and walked into the yard to greet him.

  “Come inside and see what I’ve learned about the dead guy,” she

  said, after giving him a welcoming kiss. She walked toward the back

  door, stopped, and turned. “Can we say his name yet?”

  “Just to yourself,” he said. “We haven’t found his next of kin.”

  They entered Sadie’s house through the back door into the kitchen.

  Sadie kicked off her shoes by the door and nodded toward the table.


  “Wait until you see this stuff.” She grabbed two cans of Pepsi from the

  refrigerator and handed one to Lance. “Have a seat.”

  Together they thumbed through the sheets of paper that covered

  Sadie’s table. Finally, Lance looked at Sadie. “What does all this mean,

  Sadie?”

  Sadie took a deep breath and then exhaled. “Well, the way I see it,

  Kenny Wayne Sanders, if that really is who died up on the hill, is con-

  nected to Angus Clyborn from way back. In one of these documents,

  he’s referred to as ‘Anton Clyborn,’ but I’m pretty sure it’s the same

  person. The fence that Sanders was installing— or, I guess it was him

  that was doing that— matches the fence that appeared recently around

  Clyborn’s ranch.”

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  Sadie thumbed through the papers, pulled out several pages, and handed them to Lance. “According to these depositions, which were

  taken over ten years ago, Kenny Wayne Sanders and Angus Clyborn

  both used to work at a hunting ranch near Brownsville, Texas. When

  that ranch went under, they both moved to Sweetwater Creek, Texas,

  and went to work at another hunting ranch specializing in pay- to- hunt

  big game such as elk, white- tailed deer, and bison.”

  Lance took a swig of Pepsi and continued to listen attentively.

  “Look at this newspaper article,” she said, pulling a page from the

  stack on the table. “The two got crosswise with one another,” she con-

  tinued, “over one of the bison kills. When two paying customers fired

  simultaneously at a buffalo, Clyborn said his client made the kill, and

  Sanders said his customer made the fatal shot. The argument turned into

  a scuffle that escalated into a full- blown fistfight. Evidently, the hunters don’t have to pay if they don’t make a kill, and the fight was basically

  over who would collect money from which hunter. It appears the hunt-

  ers were arguing over who got to cart home the buffalo head.” Sadie

  shook her head. “Sanders came away with a broken nose and Clyborn

  suffered two broken fingers. They settled that case out of court.”

  She picked up another sheet of paper and handed it to Lance. “The

  second set of court case documents came from Denton County, Texas.

  Sanders was arrested for drunk driving and leaving the scene of an acci-