by C. J. Box
There was a single message on his satellite phone from Marybeth Pickett and it was less than an hour old. He dialed her cell phone number in Saddlestring.
“Nate?” she answered.
“You sound agitated. Is everything all right?”
A short pause. Then: “You know I’ve never called you before.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I’m worried about Joe. I think something’s happened to him.”
“Down in Baggs? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. He went on a horseback patrol Monday and I haven’t heard from him in four days. He left a message saying everything was okay Tuesday night, and then nothing. I haven’t heard from him since.”
Nate said, “Maybe his phone went out or something. You know things like that happen.”
“Yes, I know. But I just have a feeling something’s terribly wrong. I can’t shake it. I’m really worried about him. We’ve been married a long time and sometimes you just know things. I can’t explain it.”
Nate said, “Where did you hear from him last?”
“Some lake in the Sierra Madre. He left a message. It’s killing me I didn’t talk to him personally. I keep listening to that message over and over again. He says everything’s fine, but I get a bad vibe. Like he didn’t even know things were going to go bad for him. He’s got Buddy and Blue Roanie with him, but I’ve got a really bad feeling.”
Nate scrunched his face although he knew she couldn’t see it. This was unusual. She was a tough, attractive woman, pragmatic and not prone to panic. He had a soft spot for her.
He said, “Have you talked to anyone else?”
“Everyone I can think of. I called Game and Fish dispatch in Cheyenne and they hadn’t heard from him either. I talked to the director of the agency, and he didn’t even know Joe was gone. And I left a message for Governor Rulon, who is at some national conference in Washington, I guess.”
“You did?”
“I’m desperate,” she said. “He expects Joe to be on call for him whenever he needs something. I told him he needs to be on call for us.”
“So Joe’s by himself as far as you know?”
“Yes, damn it. He told me before he went there was some kind of incident down there. Some hunters said they shot an elk and somebody butchered it before they could tag it. He was going up into the mountains to find whoever might have done it.”
“No backup?” Nate said.
Marybeth groaned. “He never has backup. That’s the way game wardens work, Nate. It drives me crazy.”
“What else have you done?”
“I called the sheriff down in Baggs. He didn’t help my state of mind, because he said there were all sorts of rumors about weird things happening in the mountains down there. He said ranchers had pulled their cattle from leases in the mountains because they thought there was something strange going on. And there’d been break-ins at cabins and trailheads.”
“The Sierra Madre,” Nate said. “Isn’t that where that runner vanished a while back?”
“Yes!”
“So the sheriff didn’t give you any help?”
“It’s not that he refused,” she said. “He just wasn’t sure what to do. Joe didn’t exactly file a flight plan, which sounds like Joe. The sheriff called me today and said he’d talked to some ranch hand who’d shuttled Joe’s pickup and horse trailer around the mountains. The truck is sitting there, I guess. But Joe hasn’t shown up. Nobody knows where he is.”
Nate said, “Fly, damn you. Kill something.”
“What?”
“I was talking to a bird. Never mind.” Then: “When is he supposed to be down?”
“Today. This morning. He said before he left that he’d call as soon as he got to his truck.”
Nate said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but shouldn’t you give him the chance to call before you conclude something’s wrong? Maybe his phone went bad up in the mountains and he just hasn’t been able to reach you.”
Silence.
Nate said, “Marybeth, are you there?”
She said, “Yes. Are you suggesting I’m hysterical? That I’d call you with no good reason?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“I told you, I have a bad feeling. Something’s happened.”
“Okay,” he said. “Call me again if you hear anything at all.”
“I will. And there’s something else. I know the situation you’re in. I’d never compromise you unless I thought we needed help. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got to go now.”
He punched Disconnect.
Alisha Whiteplume, the reason he’d climbed out of the canyon, arrived within the hour, as planned. He saw her pickup a mile away through heat waves. He stood and walked down the two-track to meet her.
The truck stopped, and she leaped out. She was luminescent, he thought. Long dark hair with highlights that shined blue in the sun, smooth cappuccino complexion, sparkling dark eyes, rosebud mouth. She wore a starched white sleeveless shirt, tight Lady Wranglers, Ariat lace-up boots, her prized Idaho Falls Rodeo barrel-racing championship buckle. God, he loved her.
Alisha worked as a teacher on the Wind River Indian Reservation near Saddlestring. She’d traded her corporate career to come home.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He kissed her back.
He said, “Where’s Megan Yellowcalf?”
“With my mom,” she said. Her two-year-old daughter was adopted from Alisha’s best friend, who’d died. “We’ve got the entire weekend before school starts.”
Nate said, “There’s been a development.”
She stepped back, eyeing him.
“We need to go to Saddlestring. And I may need to be gone.”
“Joe?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Not Marybeth?”
“Her, too. Joe may be in trouble.”
“Your thing,” she said.
“My thing.”
She put her hands on her hips and stepped back. “I’ll never understand this hold he has over you.”
Nate shrugged.
She noted the eagle that waddled toward Nate and stood a foot behind him. “What about the bird?” she asked.
“It’s not going anywhere,” he said.
“Kind of like our relationship.” She laughed. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Her,” he corrected. “She won’t fly. Her spirit is broken. I can’t get into her head and figure out what it is.”
“Maybe,” she said, “you have trouble with the female mind.”
Nate said, “Maybe.”
10
“Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ” Joe muttered in a kind of hypnotic cadence as he walked, saying the names over and over again like a mantra, saying the names with his breath when his voice seemed too loud, “Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ”
The mantra gave him comfort and strength and a reason to keep going.
It was approaching dusk. He’d walked through the night and for the entire day, scared to stop and rest for more than a few minutes. Although it seemed vague and faraway now, he recalled dropping to his knees the night before alongside the creek to drink. After filling his belly with icy cold mountain water that tasted of pine needles, he’d rolled to his side and closed his eyes, thinking he could take a short nap, that he needed some sleep. But as his eyes closed-oh, it felt so good to close his eyes-a voice deep inside his brain shouted an alarm, saying, If you close your eyes, you’ll never open them again in this world. The voice was loud enough to resonate and stir him, and he’d painfully rolled over to his knees, gasped at the pain in his thigh, shoulder, and scalp, and rose again to his feet. He hadn’t stopped since because he’d become convinced that to stop was to die.
As he walked and chanted, he’d turn periodical
ly, searching behind him for followers who weren’t there or so stealthy he couldn’t see them. He doubted he’d been followed because the Grim Brothers didn’t know he’d survived the shotgun blast. Still, though, he couldn’t be certain.
Tube, Joe’s dog, bounded through the buckbrush on the other side of the creek, just out of clear view. Tube was a strange dog, a Lab-corgi mix, with the head and stout body of a bird dog and the stunted drumstick legs of a corgi. That it was able to move so fluidly through the shadows of the brush seemed curious to Joe, and he was getting angry that his dog wouldn’t come closer even when he called to him. More curious was that Tube seemed to have picked up several friends, maybe half a dozen other dogs, and they paralleled Joe’s advance down the mountain but kept out of plain sight.
“Tube, darn you,” Joe shouted, his voice cracking. “Get over here.”
But Tube stayed with his friends in the shadows. Joe could hear them panting from time to time, as well as an occasional growl, snarl, or yip as one of them warned off another for some transgression. The dogs had been with him for at least an hour, maybe more. Joe vowed to sell Tube when he could find someone who wanted to buy an odd-looking dog who wouldn’t behave.
He tried not to pay attention to his injuries or to dwell on them. Despite his intention, he found his wounds strangely fascinating as well as alarming. He had no idea how much blood he’d lost, but he knew it was too much. He was light-headed and weak. His body was broken yet still functional, as if his muscles had a will of their own, and his skin was perforated in four places. That he might be able to heal from his wounds seemed like a miracle of the highest order. In the meantime, he kept his eyes on the game trail ahead of him and repeated his mantra.
Because the creek was the only source of fresh water in the area, animals congregated near it. That morning, he’d spooked a huge four-point mule deer buck who’d been drinking in the creek. At midmorning, a beaver slapped its tail on the surface of a pond in warning and scared him nearly to death. The beaver dived with a ploop sound, leaving ringlets on the surface of the pond he’d created by damming the stream. Joe had seen badgers, porcupines, rabbits, and a flock of mallards that, for a while, kept rising and flying a few hundred feet ahead of him to land again and again. They seemed put out that Joe kept coming. He felt sorry for ducks in Wyoming since there was so little water to be had.
But he was getting pretty fed up with that pack of dogs. Especially Tube.
As he trudged and chanted in a pain-dulled daze, he thought of the legend of Hugh Glass for inspiration.
Hugh Glass was a mountain man in these same Rocky Mountains who, in 1823, was looking for berries to eat when he encountered a grizzly bear. The bear mauled Glass almost beyond recognition, chewing most of Glass’s scalp and face off, creating massive wounds all over him with its teeth and three-inch claws, including an exposed rib cage, and leaving him for dead. So did Glass’s companions, who, after five days of waiting in the middle of hostile Arikara Indian country for the comatose man to finally die, took his rifle and knife and left him.
But Hugh Glass didn’t die. And when he woke up and realized he’d been abandoned without food, water, or weapons, he had the determination to roll over and start to crawl south toward Fort Kiowa, nearly two hundred miles away. What kept him going was his will to live and his fantasies of bloody revenge on the men who’d left him to perish.
He couldn’t walk for weeks, and he lived off roots, grubs, and berries he found along the way. He managed to set his broken leg, and when his open wounds began to rot from gangrene, he opened a decomposing downed log and scooped the maggots he found inside into his wound to eat away the infected flesh.
The berries and roots kept him going until he happened on a freshly killed buffalo calf and the wolves who took it down. Using a heavy stick to scare the wolves away, he fell upon the calf and ate raw meat by the handfuls for days until the carcass began to purple and rot. But the meat strengthened him, his broken bones knitted, and he was finally able to stand. And he began his six-month trek to Fort Kiowa.
Compared to what Hugh Glass had gone through, Joe thought, this was a happy little picnic in the woods.
“Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ”
“Wolves,” Joe said aloud, startled by the realization that had come to him because of his recounting of the Hugh Glass story. “Those are wolves following me.”
Not Tube. Not dogs. Not his fevered imagination. Wolves. Six to eight of them, keeping just out of his vision on the other side of the creek but staying abreast of him.
But there weren’t supposed to be wolves in the Sierra Madre. The wolf packs were in the northwest section of the state, centered around Yellowstone where, years before, the federal government had introduced Canadian gray wolves into a region they may not have ever roamed. Joe had agreed with the idea initially, even though it was a controversial program much loved by most observers but despised by ranchers and hunters. The unintended consequences, though, were significant. Although the wolves were supposed to cull the expanding elk herds, domestic cattle were killed and moose numbers had been decimated. The wolf population had exploded into Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, although measures were in place-supposedly-to keep the numbers down and the wolf packs localized. Sure, there had been reports of wolves in the area in the past and even alleged sightings south into Colorado. But the federal wildlife agencies discounted the reports, insisting that citizens had seen coyotes, or large domestic dogs gone feral.
In a break in the buckbrush, he saw two of them. They saw him as well and stopped as if frozen in mid-stride. A large silver-and-white wolf, shadowed by a bigger one that was jet black. The silver wolf weighed maybe eighty pounds, and the black wolf was easily a hundred and twenty. Their round piercing amoral eyes cut holes through him.
“Go away,” he croaked, raising his left arm and waving it.
The sound startled them, and they flinched. The silver wolf backpedaled, turned on her haunches, and vanished into the brush. But the black wolf stood his ground, lowered his head, and arched his shoulders. For a terrifying moment, Joe braced for an attack.
“Get out of here!” he bellowed, and flung a pair of handcuffs from his belt. The cuffs arced through the air and landed with a jangle five feet in front of the wolf, and the animal turned with a lazy shrug and followed the silver wolf back into the shadows.
Joe stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to hear where they’d gone, if anywhere. It was extremely rare for a wolf to attack a human in the wild. There were very few instances of its happening. But they’d certainly shadowed him for a mile or so, and he thought how appealing he must look to them: obviously wounded, caked with dried and fresh blood, without a serious weapon. He could imagine one of them darting across the creek and hamstringing him like wolves hamstrung elk and moose. Once their prey was incapacitated, the rest of the pack could move in.
He found a stout branch that was still heavy and green, that looked like it had been blasted from a tree by a lightning strike. The branch was nearly three feet long, bulbous on the butt end, and tapered like a baseball bat. His right shoulder was worthless, but he took a few practice swings with his left and the branch whistled cleanly through the air. He smacked the trunk of a pine tree with a reassuring thunk, which sent a shower of pine needles to the forest floor.
“Hear that?” he shouted into the air, hoping the wolves were listening. “That’ll be your head if you try to take a bite out of me!”
He could neither see nor hear where the wolves had gone, but despite his shouts and his club he didn’t think they’d gone far.
“Wolves this far south,” he thought, as he continued down the creek. “Wait until they hear about this in Cheyenne.”
Farther down the creek, Joe stumbled on a massive five-point elk antler that had been shed earlier that summer. He tossed the branch aside and picked up the antler, turning it and admiring the thick beam. One tine was sixteen inch
es long and an inch thick at the base. Forked tines on the end were six inches each and sharp as spear points. The antler was heavy but a hell of a weapon, he thought. Much better than a club.
If the wolves attacked he could really do some damage, he thought.
His mantra evolved from a country-and-western rhythm into reggae and then into blues. Joe kept thinking about what had happened, what he’d seen, what he didn’t know.
Why was Terri Wade in an isolated cabin? What was her relationship with the Grim Brothers? What was with the store-bought picture frames containing promotional shots? And could that have possibly been who he thought it was with them? The girl? He shook his head, not able to wrap his mind around the prospect. Again, he thought he’d seen her visage too many times on fliers and in the newspapers. He’d imagined her, he was sure. But there had been four faces. That, he was convinced of.
And what about the brothers themselves? Why were they up there and what were they doing? What caused them to hide in one of the roughest and most remote sections of the least populated state in the union?
It was almost imperceptible how the terrain changed, how cottonwoods took over from the pine trees, how bunches of cheater grass replaced the pine needle floor. Without actually realizing it, Joe knew he’d descended from the mountains into a valley. He veered right away from the creek and the trees, and as the sun set he was on the edge of a hay meadow. Instead of the smell of pine and the dank vegetation of the creek, he smelled the sweet smell of cut hay and thought he caught a whiff of gasoline.
Joe turned and looked behind him. The mountains went up and back, peak after peak, until the range melded with the sky countless miles away. He was struck by how big the mountains were, how hulking, imposing, and still. And he was awed by the fact that he’d actually walked out of them.
At the edge of the timber, in the shadows, he saw the lone black wolf. He stood broadside, big and dark, his eyes seeing Joe much more clearly than Joe could see him. The wolf stood as if he were prevented from coming any closer, as if he’d hit his boundary line and could proceed no farther.