“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
