Brockius turned to walk back to his trailer.
“I’d suggest you look a little closer to home, Mr. Pickett,” Brockius said over his shoulder.
The opportunity to look closer to home came almost immediately, as Joe descended from the snowy mountains. He was still in deep snow, with twenty miles of rugged BLM breaklands laid out in a vista below him. The town of Saddlestring, beyond the breaklands, glittered in the morning sun.
His radio crackled to life.
“I think I’ve got a situation out here.” The signal was strong, and the voice belonged to a woman. “This is Jamie Runyan calling BLM headquarters. Does anybody read me?”
Joe heard a rush of static and assumed it was somebody trying to reply to Jamie Runyan from town.
“I didn’t get that at all,” she said. “Try again.”
There was another squawk.
“Damn it,” she said. “I don’t know whether anyone there can hear me or not, but I’m out in the joint management unit and I see a light-colored pickup up on top of a hill. I think it might be the vehicle Birch Wardell described. I don’t know whether to pursue it or not.”
“This is game warden Joe Pickett,” he said when she was through. “I read you loud and clear. Please stay put. I’m about fifteen minutes away from you.”
He increased his speed, and roared down the mountain as fast as he could without sliding off the road.
Jamie Runyan’s tan pickup with the BLM logo was pulled to the side of the gravel road with its exhaust burbling. Joe stopped behind her and swung outside. While driving down the mountain, he had unfastened his Remington WingMaster shotgun from his saddle scabbard behind his seat, and he carried it to her vehicle.
She was thick-bodied and plain, with a wide, simple face. She rolled her window down as he approached.
“Where did you see the truck?” Joe asked, scanning the horizon. Because she had parked in a depression, her truck would be hard to see from a distance.
She gestured up the road, over the hill. “I was going up that hill when I saw it. It was a light-colored, older- model pickup on the top of the next ridge. It looked to me like the guy was pulling our fence down with a chain.”
“Did he see you?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I backed down the road out of sight when I saw him.”
“Has anyone from your office replied to you?”
She shook her head. “I think I’m out of range in these damn hills. The only person I heard was you.”
Joe nodded. “Do you mind if I borrow your truck? You can stay here in my truck and keep warm.”
She searched his face while she decided. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’ve got a theory about what happened,” he said. “If you let me borrow your truck I’ll look like I’m BLM and I can test it out.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. Only authorized government personnel are allowed to drive these vehicles.”
“I’m authorized,” Joe lied. “The Game and Fish has an inter-agency agreement with the BLM.” He thought he sounded convincing, and it worked.
She got out of the cab, remembering to take her sack lunch.
Joe racked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun, then flipped the safety on and slid it muzzle-down onto the floorboards. He narrowed his eyes and gunned the truck up the gravel road.
As he cleared the hill he could see the light pickup Runyan had described. And she was right—it was in the process of pulling a post-and-wire fence down with a chain attached to its bumper. The fence had been erected by the BLM and Forest Service to keep the public off of the management study area.
The truck was about a half-mile from Joe. On his present course, he would soon be on the road beneath it. In his mind, he replayed the scenario Wardell had described to him that night in the hospital: how the truck took off out of sight over a hill while Wardell pursued. Joe wasn’t sure of the terrain over the hill, but he assumed it would be similar.
Despite the cold, Joe rolled down his window so he could hear the other vehicle better as he drove. As his BLM truck bucked and pitched on the frozen gravel road, the light-colored truck dropped in and out of view. Soon, Joe could hear the motor of the light-colored truck grinding in the still morning air. In a minute, Joe would be close enough to look up and see the driver, he thought, or perhaps a license plate.
But the next time the truck came into view, it was speeding away. Joe saw its outline against the deep blue sky as it crested the hill and went over it.
Following Wardell’s script, Joe jerked the wheel and left the gravel road, pointing the squat nose of his BLM truck up the hill where he had last seen the other truck. He crashed through two crusty drifts, and nearly lost traction as he approached the top of the hill. His back wheels threw plumes of frozen gray dirt as the pickup fishtailed on dirt and ice, but then they caught solid rock and propelled him up and over the top.
Joe’s heart pounded in his chest as he crested the ridge and plunged over it. The tire tracks from the other truck went down the hill and vanished into a wide, tall swath of evergreen brush at the bottom.
Joe reached for the shotgun, which had slid toward the passenger door during the rough ride up the hill, and pulled it close to him as he descended.
On cue, a light-colored truck emerged from the brush below and started climbing the opposite slope, directly across from him. The truck labored up the hill as well, sliding a little in loose shale and kicking out puffs of dislodged rock. At the rate Joe was flying down the hill and the other pickup was laboring up the opposite slope, he would be
