Short and wiry, with muttonchop sideburns and a slack expression on his face, Farkus had opened with, “So you’re really goin’ up there?”
Joe said, “Yup.”
The fisherman said, “All I know for sure is I drink beer at the Dixon Club bar with about four old-timers who were here long before the energy workers got here and a hell of a lot longer than you. A couple of these guys are old enough they forgot more about these mountains than either of us will ever know. They ran cattle up there and they hunted up there for years. But you know what?”
Joe felt a clench in his belly the way Farkus had asked. He said, “What?”
“None of them old fellers will go up there anymore. Ever since that runner vanished, they say something just feels wrong.”
Joe said, “Feelings aren’t a lot to go on.”
“That ain’t all,” said Farkus. “What about all the break-ins at cabins in the area and parked cars getting their windows smashed in at the trailheads? There’s been a lot of that lately.”
“I heard,” Joe said. “Sheriff Baird is looking into that, I believe.”
Farkus snorted.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Joe had asked.
“No. But we all heard some of the rumors. You know, camps being looted. Tents getting slashed. I heard there were a couple of bow hunters who tried to poach an elk before the season opened. They hit one, followed the blood trail for miles to the top, but when they finally found the animal it had already been butchered and the meat all hauled away. Is that true?”
Like most hunters who had broken the law, the bow hunters had come to Joe’s office and turned themselves in. Joe had cited them for hunting elk out of season, but had been intrigued by their story. They seemed genuinely creeped out by what had happened. “That’s what they said.”
Farkus widened his eyes. “So it’s true after all. And that’s what you’re up to, isn’t it? You’re going up there to find whoever took their elk if you can. Well, I hope you do. Man, nobody likes the idea of somebody stealing another man’s meat. That’s beyond the pale. And this Wendigo crap—where did that come from? Bunch of Indian mumbo- jumbo. Evil spirits, flesh eaters, I ask you. This ain’t Canada, thank God. Wendigos are up there, not here, if they even exist.
It was not much of a laugh, Joe thought. More like a nervous tic. A way of saying he didn’t necessarily believe a word of what he’d just said—unless Joe did.
Joe said,
THEY BROKE THROUGH THE TREES and emerged onto a treeless meadow walled by dark timber, and he stopped to look and listen. Joe squinted, looking for whatever was spooking his horses and him, hoping reluctantly to see a bear, a mountain lion, a wolverine, even a snake. But what he saw were mountains that tumbled like frozen ocean waves all the way south into Colorado, wispy puffball clouds that scudded over him immodestly showing their vulnerable white bellies, and his own mark left behind in the ankle-deep grass: parallel horse tracks, steaming piles of manure. There were no human structures of any kind in view and hadn’t been for a full day. No power lines, microwave stations, or cell phone towers. The only proof that he was not riding across the same wilderness in the 1880s were the jet trails looking like snail tracks high in the sky.
THE RANGE RAN south to north. He planned to summit the Sierra Madre by Wednesday, day three, and cross the 10,000-foot Continental Divide near Battle Pass. This was where the bow hunters said their elk had been cut up. Then he would head down toward No Name Creek on the west side of the divide and arrive at his pickup and horse trailer by midday Friday. If all went well.
THE TERRAIN got rougher the higher he rode, wild and unfamiliar. What he knew of it he’d seen from a helicopter and from aerial survey photos. The mountain range was severe and spectacular, with canyon after canyon, toothy rimrock ridges, and dense old-growth forests that had never been timbered because cutting logging roads into them would have been too technical and expensive to be worth it. The vistas from the summit were like scenery overkill: mountains to the horizon in every direction, veins of aspen in the folds already turning gold, high alpine lakes and cirques like blue poker chips tossed on green felt, hundreds of miles of lodgepole pine trees, many of which were in the throes of dying due to bark beetles and had turned the color of advanced rust.
The cirques—semicircular hollows with steep walls filled with snowmelt and big enough to boat across—stair- stepped their way up the mountains. Those with outlets birthed tiny creeks and water sought water and melded into streams. Other cirques were self-contained: bathtubs that would fill, freeze during winter, and never drain out.
PRIOR TO THE FIVE-DAY TREK, Joe had been near the spine of the mountains only once, years before, when he was a participant in the massive search-and-rescue effort for the runner Farkus mentioned, Olympic hopeful Diane Shober, who’d parked her car at the trailhead and vanished on a long-distance run on the canyon trail. Her body had never been found. Her face was haunting and ubiquitous, though, because it peered out from hundreds of homemade handbills posted by her parents throughout Wyoming and Colorado. Joe kept her disappearance in mind as he rode, always alert for scraps of clothing, bones, or hair.
Since he’d been assigned districts all over the State of Wyoming as both a game warden and Governor Rulon’s point man, Joe ascribed certain personality traits to mountain ranges. He conceded his impressions were often unfair and partially based on his mood at the time or things he was going through. Rarely, though, had he changed his mind about a mountain range once he’d established its quirks and rhythms in his mind. The Tetons were flashy, cold, bloodless Eurotrash mountains—too spectacular for their own good. They were the mountain equivalent of supermodels. The Gros Ventres were a rich graveyard of human history—both American Indian and early white— that held their secrets close and refused to accommodate the modern era. The Wind River Mountains were what the Tetons wanted to be: towering, incredibly wealthy with scenery and wildlife, vast, and spiritual. The Bighorns, Joe’s mountains in northern Wyoming where his family still was waiting for him, were comfortable, rounded, and wry—a retired All-Pro linebacker who still had it.
But the Sierra Madre was still a mystery. He couldn’t yet warm to the mountains, and he fought against being intimidated by their danger, isolation, and heartless beauty. The fruitless search for Diane Shober had planted the seed in his mind. These mountains were like a glimpse of a beautiful and exotic woman in a passing car, a gun on her lap, who refused to make eye contact.
HE DISMOUNTED once he was on the floor of the basin to ease the pain in his knees and let his horses rest. As always, he wondered how horsemen and horsewomen of the past stayed mounted for hours on end and day after day. No wonder they drank so much whiskey, he thought.
Joe led his horses through a stand of widely spaced lodgepole pines that gradually melded into a pocket of rare and twisted knotty pine. Trunks and branches were bizarre in shape and direction, with softball-sized joints like swollen knees. The knotty pine stand covered less than a quarter mile of the forest, just as the elk hunters had described. As he stood on the perimeter of the stand he slowly turned and noted the horizon of the basin that rose
