the driver to kill his motor, which burbled loudly like a Harley-Davidson wannabe.
The driver reached down and turned the key, and suddenly the forest was still, except for the distant sound of branches snapping and breaking as the elk thundered farther and farther away down the hillside.
He could hear the shooter growl a colorful stream of curses.
“How’s it going, guys?” Joe asked.
“Just great,” the driver sighed, “until you showed up. We’ve been up here busting our ass looking for elk for seven days without seeing a goddamn one, and then last night it snows and we ride right into them.”
“Yup, I saw ’em,” Joe said, indicating the churned-up path in the snow where the elk bolted into the timber.
“Then you showed up and fucked it up,” the shooter said, sitting back and propping the rifle on his thigh, the barrel in the air.
Joe nodded. He’d found over the years that his silence often produced confessions and was more effective than talking.
After a few beats of Joe simply looking at them, the driver said, “I guess we were acting kind of stupid chasing them like that.”
Joe nodded.
“And I guess my son here shouldn’t be trying to pop them from the back of a four-wheeler.”
“Nope.”
“And I think we’re still in our hunting area,” the driver said, raising his palms in an exaggerated way. “At least I hope so. It’s harder than hell to tell sometimes. I mean, it ain’t like you guys mark where one area ends and the other one starts.”
The shooter got quiet when he finally realized they might be in trouble.
Joe said, “Chasing wildlife is a violation; so is hunting them from a moving vehicle. And if you think you’re still in Area Thirty-four, well, you left it about a mile back.”
The driver took a deep breath as if to challenge Joe, then thought better of it and said, “Well, we’re damned sorry if we fucked up.” He thought better of his language and said, “I mean, screwed up.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
The father sighed. “You gonna write us up?”
Joe didn’t answer directly. He asked, “How far did you two go up the road this morning?”
The father looked worried, as if he was trying to figure out if they’d committed additional violations that morning. Finally, he said, “Just a couple miles. That’s where we jumped the elk. They took off running down this road and we followed their tracks.”
Joe nodded. “You didn’t go up far enough to get to the top? To see over into the river valley on the other side of the mountain? Where the outfitter camps are located?”
“Not today,” the shooter said quickly.
Joe thought he said it in a way that implied there was more to the story. “But you’ve been up that far this week?”
The father and son exchanged glances.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Joe asked amiably.
After a beat, the father turned back around and said, “Up until yesterday, we was hunting with my brother- in-law Richie. He said he had to go back last night to do some stuff at home. Richie is kind of a pain in the ass, but he knows this country up here like nobody else.”
“Anyway…” Joe prompted.
“Richie likes to hunt alone,” the father said. “He knows of some old miner cabin up there, and he likes to go up there by it and sit and glass the meadows with binoculars to see elk. He sits for hours up there, just looking around. He usually gets a nice bull that way. But something happened the last time he went up there. When he came back down, he looked fucking spooked. We asked him what happened or what he saw, but he just made up some bullshit about having to get home. He just packed up his gear and left us up here. We never could get him to tell us what happened.”
Joe felt a twinge in his scalp. “When was this?” he asked.
“Yesterday afternoon,” the father said. “He left last night before it started to snow. I’d normally say he’ll be back up soon because of this snow, but the way he left, I kind of wonder. It was just weird. Richie’s an elk-hunting fool, and I’ve never seen him just want to up and leave like that.”
Joe withdrew the notebook from his breast pocket and asked the father for Richie’s full name, address, and contact numbers. Neither the father nor the son knew much more than Richie’s last name and the part of Powell, Wyoming, he lived in, but the driver said his wife had those details. Joe closed the notebook. He knew that, if necessary, it was enough information to find Richie in a state with as few people in it as Wyoming.
“You gonna call him?” the son asked Joe.
“Maybe.”
“Tell him he still owes me for that case and a half of Coors he drank up here.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Joe said, sliding the notebook back into his uniform shirt.
He left the father and son wondering what was going to happen next and went back to his pickup. No cell signal. No radio reception. Joe dug a card out of the holder in his glove box and walked back to the hunters and handed it to the father.
He said, “If you’ll promise me something, you can consider this your lucky day, because I don’t have time to write you up right now and you’re both in clear violation. Tonight, if you haven’t seen me come back down the mountain, call nine-one-one. Tell the dispatcher we met and which road we’re on. Let her take it from there.”
The father asked, “That’s it? Just that we met you?”
“Yup.”
Joe said, “Get your vehicle out of the road and take it back into your designated hunting area and make that call tonight, and for now I’ll look the other way.”
After thanking him profusely and reversing the ATV into the brush so Joe could get by, the driver looked at the card and said, “So you’re Joe Pickett?”
Joe nodded.
“I’ve always heard you wouldn’t give a guy a break.”
“Like I said, it’s your lucky day.”
As he left them, he glanced into his rearview mirror to see them talking excitedly to each other and gesturing toward where the elk had run. He had an inkling that once he was gone they’d ignore him and go after the elk and probably get stuck somewhere in pursuit.
He shook his head, vowed to look out for them and give them a ticket if he ran into them again, and ground up the road until they were out of view.
He hated not doing his job properly, even given the circumstances. But if they made the call to dispatch as they’d agreed, at least someone would know where he was last seen.
And he thought about something Nate had said.
Recruit local tribesmen.
Although he’d been to the top of this road only once many years ago, he thought he remembered where he could find the old miner’s cabin. What he didn’t know was what was up there that might spook a dedicated elk hunter off the mountain hours before the tracking snow had arrived.
32
“God, the mountains are beautiful,” Haley said as Nate drove the white Tahoe toward the Bighorns, which were lit up with a full blast of morning sun that contrasted the fresh snow on the meadows and peaks against miles of dark timber. She said it as she reloaded the magazine, one by one, with 6.8-millimeter cartridges for the Mini- 14.
Nate grunted. He noted that now that the mask was off, she showed a confident proficiency with weapons
