Trophy Hunt

by C. J. Box

  Hailey laughed nervously. “Maybe now is a good time to ask about playing outside.”

  The three girls looked at each other, knowing Hailey was right. There was no better time to ask parents to do something than when guests distracted them.

  Lucy was the second down the stairs, after Jessica. There was a discussion going on between the Overstreet sisters and Jessica’s parents.

  Jessica’s dad said, “Yes, I heard about those cows today.”

  “And you know we’ve been losing stock that we can’t account for,” one of the sisters said.

  “What will this do to the sale?” the other sister asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jessica’s dad said. “But we may want to consider lowering the price to keep it attractive.”

  “I knew you would say that.”

  “We’re against that, you know.”

  “It’s just that . . .”

  “Cam, we have visitors,” Jessica’s mother said, interrupting him.

  Lucy watched as Mr. Logue and the Overstreet sisters paused and looked up toward the stairs.

  “My, my,” one of the sisters said. “Look at them.”

  Despite their dresses, the women looked hard, Lucy thought. There was no warmth in their stares. One of the sisters had blue eyes and the other green. Their eyes looked like old jewelry.

  “They look like little tarts,” the other sister said, and received a glare from Jessica’s mom.

  “What do you girls want?” Jessica’s dad asked.

  “Can we play outside?” Jessica asked. “In the back?”

  “Dressed like that?” the older Overstreet sister asked, smiling with her mouth only.

  “We can change,” Jessica said weakly.

  Jessica’s dad gestured toward Hailey. “Didn’t we agree to throw out those old clothes?” He looked upset, Lucy thought.

  “It’s okay, girls,” Jessica’s mom said, standing up, not addressing Mr. Logue’s question. “You can go out back.”

  Mr. Logue shot her a look, but didn’t intervene. The three girls fluttered down the stairs and across the foyer and out the back door.

  “That worked,” Hailey said as soon as the door slammed behind them.

  “Did you smell them?” Jessica asked.

  “I smelled something,” Lucy said. But even though they were outside and could play hide-and-seek, she wished she were home.

  7

  THE NEXT EVENING, after the dinner dishes were cleared, Joe entered his small office near the mudroom and shut the door. The office was cramped and poorly heated. It consisted of a metal government-surplus desk, two four-drawer filing cabinets, and bookshelves crammed with books of statutes, biology and range-management texts, the complete John McPhee collection, and spiral notebooks of department directives. A set of antlers from the first five-point buck he had ever shot hung from the wall behind him. Caps, hats, binoculars, and his gray, sweat-stained Stetson covered the tines. As he clicked on his desk lamp and booted up his computer, he glanced at the front page of the weekly Saddlestring Roundup that was delivered that morning.

  THEY’RE BAAAACK . . .

  MUTILATED CATTLE DISCOVERED IN COUNTY

  A BULL MOOSE ANOTHER VICTIM?

  The photo on the front page that accompanied the article showed the carcasses on the Hawkins Ranch, with Sheriff Barnum standing in the middle of them. The story contained quotes from Don Hawkins, the sheriff, Deputy McLanahan, and Joe. Although the story was accurate, Joe winced while he read it. He could imagine Barnum doing the same. There was a disagreeable sense of unreality about it, he thought. It was the kind of subject matter he ignored with contempt when he saw something similar on the front of a supermarket tabloid.

  At least a dozen cattle and a bull moose have been found recently in the county, bearing mutilations similar to those reported in the mid-1970s, according to Twelve Sleep County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum . . .

  The article summarized the scene at the ranch, describing the dead cattle as “gruesome and unearthly” and calling the mutilations “inexplicable” before jumping to inside pages.

  Joe read on:

  . . . In the mid-1970s, a rash of cattle mutilations were reported throughout the Mountain West, primarily in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.

  Cattle, as well as sheep and some domestic livestock, were reported dead, with genitals and other organs missing. In most of the documented incidents, skin had been removed from the faces of the victims as well as eyes, tongues, ears, and glands. Blood was reportedly drained from the bodies . . .

  . . . Speculation as to the cause of the deaths ranged from government experiments to cults, as well as extraterrestrial visitations. Despite local investigations, no definitive cause was ever determined, although an FBI report issued in 1978 seemed to conclude that the deaths were natural and that the “mutilations” were a result of predation and decomposition. A review of county records revealed that the cattle mutilations seemed to have ceased after the initial reports, and there is no record of additional incidents . . .

  The reporter had interviewed several area ranchers who had reported cattle mutilations thirty years earlier, as well as the long-retired county coroner who recalled the cases but couldn’t locate his files on them. Joe noted the similarities with a rising feeling of unease. The mutilations indeed sounded similar. The removal of genitals and skin, the bloating, no evidence of predation, the lack of a logical conclusion. Several cattle, it had been reported, were found in what looked like craters of four or five inches in depth, making it appear as though they had been dropped from the sky. One blatant similarity was the precision of the cuts, which seemed to have been made by an extremely sharp and very precise instrument.

  . . . “There is nothing to fear,” Sheriff Barnum cautioned. “There could be an easy explanation for this.”

  When pressed, Barnum declined further comment.

  “We don’t want the good citizens of this county gathering up their pets and searching the skies for aliens,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle McLanahan.

  Joe smiled despite himself. He bet Barnum just loved that quote.

  Launching his e-mail program, Joe scanned the incoming messages. Nothing yet from the laboratory in Laramie regarding the samples he had sent them.

  One e-mail was from his district supervisor, Trey Crump, in Cody. The subject line said “???” He opened it.

  “What in the hell is going on with these cows and a moose?” Crump asked. “And what is it with you and dead cows?”

  Joe paused before responding. He ignored Crump’s jibe about dead cows. Two years before, an environmental terrorist, his wife, and another man were killed by cows strapped wtih explosives. Joe had inadvertently been involved in the case. In regard to Crump’s initial question, Joe didn’t want to speculate.

  “It’s true,” he typed. “Tissue samples have been sent to Laramie for analysis. I’m keeping an eye on any future incidents, especially with the game population.”

  Joe opened his browser, went to the Web site for the Roundup, and copied the link for the mutilation story to his e-mail, so Trey could read it for himself.

  “There is probably an explanation,” Joe wrote. “I haven’t figured it out yet but I will try.”

  He wrote that he had found massive bear tracks near the moose. “Could this be our rogue grizzly?”

  Then he reread his e-mail, deleted the last line, and sent it.

  Just as Joe was about to exit his e-mail program, a large file appeared in his inbox, and he waited as it slowly loaded. He recognized the return address as Dave Avery’s. Since the time years before, when samples he had sent for analysis had been “lost” at headquarters, Joe had never regained complete trust in the agency bureaucracy. So sometimes he chose to seek two opinions, one from the lab in Laramie and the other from Dave Avery, an old college roommate, who was now chief wildlife biologist for the Montana Fish and Game Department in Helena. Joe had been best man at Avery’s first two weddings, but had begged off w
hen asked the third time last summer, claiming he might be bad luck.

  There was no subject line, and no text, only six JPEG photos attached to the e-mail. Joe leaned back and waited for them to open, annoyed as always at his low-speed connection.

  He scrolled down through the photos and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

  The photos were of mutilated cattle in a meadow. He recognized the wounds, the bloated bellies, the madly grinning skulls. Joe wondered how Dave could have gotten a hold of these photos so quickly, but then Joe noticed something.

  The sky in the top right corner of the second photo was dark and leaden. In the fourth photo, a skiff of snow could be seen in the foreground. The grass was yellowed, almost gray. These photos had been taken in winter. And they had been taken somewhere else.

  Breaking the online connection so he could use the telephone, Joe found Dave Avery’s contact details and punched the numbers. His friend answered on the third ring.

  “Avery.”

  “Dave, this is Joe Pickett.”

  “Joe! How in the hell are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “I thought you’d be calling.”

  “Yup,” Joe said, scrolling again through the photos on the screen. “I’m looking at these shots of mutilated cattle and wondering where they were taken.”

  “Gee, Joe, ever heard of small talk? Like how am I doing these days, or how is the weather in Helena?”

  Joe sighed. “So, Dave, how are you doing? What’s the weather like in Helena?”

  “They were all taken outside of Conrad, Montana,” Avery answered, “last January. Do you know where Conrad is?”

  “Nope.”

  “Conrad and Dupeyer. Pondera County. Northwestern part of the state. East of Great Falls.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Sixteen of ’em, from July through January of this year,” Avery said. “Maybe eight more, but we couldn’t be sure because the bodies were too old. So maybe two dozen cattle in all. They were found in groups of four to six, although there were a couple loners. No tracks, no reports of vehicles or lights in the area. Unfortunately, no one ever brought in a fresh one. All of the carcasses were bloated and old.”

  “Any predation?”

  There was a long pause, then “No.”

  “Was the blood drained out of them?”

  “No. It just looks like that. Natural coagulation makes it look like they’re bloodless. Once you run some tests you’ll find that out.”

  “Then you got the samples I sent you,” Joe said.

  “Got ’em at the lab.”

  Joe waited. He could hear a Chris LeDoux CD playing somewhere in the background, and somebody—he guessed Dave’s new wife—singing along.

  “And?” Joe finally asked.

  “I haven’t dug into them yet, Joe, but I know what I’ll find.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A whole lot of nothing,” Avery said. “Well, one thing, I guess, but I’m not sure it’s significant. Believe me, we’ve been analyzing tissue samples up here for nine months. My freezer’s full of cow heads and cored rectums in paper bags.”

  “I hadn’t heard a single thing about cattle mutilations up there,” Joe confessed.

  “I’m not that surprised,” Avery said. “Conrad’s pretty remote, even in Montana. Besides, they’re just cows.”

  Joe smiled at that. He remembered a paper Avery had written in college, proposing that ninety percent of the cattle in the West be removed and replaced with bison. The paper had not been very well received at the University of Wyoming, home of the Wyoming Cowboys.

  “Even so,” Avery continued, his voice rising with annoyance, “I got calls from kooks all over the place. The newspaper stories ran in the Great Falls Tribune, so of course they showed up on the Internet, and crazies from all over who are into this kind of thing took an interest. They’re like train buffs, Joe. You never know they’re even out there living among us normal people until some rare train comes through town and they rush the tracks.”

  “What about wildlife?” Joe asked. “I found a bull moose mutilated in the same way.”

  “Hmmm, no shit?”

  “The samples I sent were from the moose.”

  There was a pause. “I’ll take a look tomorrow,” Avery said in a serious tone.

  “So there weren’t any wildlife deaths reported?” Joe asked again. He sensed that Avery had something to say but was holding back.

  “Actually, there were a couple of reports, but they weren’t very credible.”

  “Who made them?” Joe asked.

  Avery sighed. “Joe, there was a guy up here, a self-described expert in the paranormal. He just showed up out of the blue with a kind of laboratory-on-wheels. It’s a retrofitted RV with all kinds of equipment and shit inside. He claimed to represent some foundation somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico that funds him to do research. His name is Cleve Garrett”—Avery spat the name out as if it were a curse word—“and he practically camped on top of me all last summer. He’s got all kinds of theories about how these are alien abductions and how I’m engaged in a governmental conspiracy to keep it all quiet. The fucking dweeb. The moron.”

  “So you don’t like him much?” Joe asked facetiously.

  “Hah!”

  “Is he the one who reported the wildlife deaths?”

  Joe heard Avery take a swallow of something before answering. “He claimed there were hundreds of cases of wildlife mutilations. He said they were all over the place—on the sides of highways, in the timber, all over. He said the reason we didn’t know about them was because we never thought to look. He said 25 percent of the deer killed on the highway were actually mutilated and dumped, but no one cared to notice. He loves talking to reporters and stirring this stuff up.”

  Joe thought about that, his mind racing. How many dead deer, elk, moose, fox, antelope bordered the highways? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Who would think to examine them? They were roadkill.

  “He brought in a mule deer carcass once,” Avery said. “And yes, it did look like it had been cut on. But the body was too old to determine anything conclusive. Plus, I didn’t trust the guy not to have done it himself.”

  “Is he still up there?” Joe asked.

  “You know, I don’t think so,” Avery said. “I haven’t seen him in quite a while. I heard he had a following of like-minded kooks and had taken up with some young girl. He probably took her back to wherever he came from so he could practice alien probes on her or something.”

  Joe didn’t know what to ask next. Then he recalled something Avery had said earlier.

  “Dave, you said there was something about the tissue samples you looked at?”

  “Oh, yeah. But like I said, don’t put too much significance in it.”

  “Yes?”

  “One thing we found in the cattle that were the freshest—I think they had been dead a week or so—was an above-normal level of a compound called oxindole. Ever heard of it?”

  “It sounds vaguely familiar,” Joe said, searching his memory.

  “Probably from biology class. Oxindole is a natural chemical that can have a sedative effect. Cattle release it within their own bodies under stress. We found excessive amounts in the tissue samples, especially in the brains and in the eyeballs that hadn’t been removed already.”

  “So it probably came from the cow itself?” Joe asked, confused.

  “Well, probably, yes,” Avery said. Unconvincingly, Joe thought.

  “The older cows, the ones that had been dead longer, did you find oxindole in them?”

  “Some. But we think it dissipates with age.”

  “So why even mention it?”

  “Because there was so damned much of it,” Avery sighed. “Maybe enough to literally sedate the cow, to knock it out. Much more than we know that a cow is capable of producing.”

  Joe was silent.

  “Look, you’ve got to keep it in perspective,” Avery cautioned. “We don�
��t know very much about the compound. We don’t know, for example, if maybe it doesn’t become concentrated, postmortem, in certain organs, and those were the organs we just happened to test. The compound may intensify due to a traumatic or stressful death, or it could be that the presence of it is triggered by a virus or something. We’re still researching it, but quite frankly we aren’t getting anywhere. We have real work to do up here, as you know. I’ve got a breakout of pinkeye in our mountain sheep population right now. So we can’t be spending too much time or energy on dead cows, especially since the mutilations seem to have stopped.”

  “They stopped in Montana, anyway,” Joe said.

  “Now you’ve got ’em,” Avery said, his voice heavy. “Maybe you’ll get my friend Cleve Garrett as well.”

  Joe grunted. “I’m still a little surprised that this is the first I’ve heard of it. I’d think those ranchers would be demanding some kind of action.”

  Avery laughed, which Joe thought was an odd response.

  “I don’t get it,” Joe said, annoyed.

  “At first, they wanted to call in the National Guard,” Avery said. “A couple of ’em were on the phone to the governor right away. Then they realized how it looked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cattle prices were at record lows at the time. Most of these ranchers barely scrape by as it is. They’re one bank payment away from losing their ranches. So they’re either trying to sell their spreads for big bucks to Hollywood celebrities, or selling their beef for a few pennies in profit. If word got out that the cattle are dying unnatural deaths, those landowners are shit out of luck. When they realized that, they pressured the governor not to do anything.”

  “So, Dave, can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “What do you think this is? Not a scientific explanation, or your professional opinion. What does your gut tell you?”

  Joe heard Avery take another sip of his drink. He heard another Chris LeDoux rodeo song.

  “Joe, I don’t know what the fuck it is,” Avery said, his voice dropping, “but for a while there I was scared as hell.”