poachers, the ones who leave the bodies on the ground, usually go check out the target.”
“Maybe it was just sick and it died,” she said reasonably.
Joe had turned and was leaning back against the sink with the towel still over his forearm.
He said, “Of course animals die of natural causes all the time. But you just never find them. You may find some bones if the skeleton hasn’t been too scattered by predators, but you just don’t happen upon animals that have died of old age. Or if you do, it’s damned rare. Dying animals tend to seek out cover where nothing can find them. They don’t just keel over in the middle of a meadow like that.”
“But you don’t know that it wasn’t shot, or hit by lightning or something,” she said.
“It wasn’t lightning. There were no scorch marks. It may have been shot; I’ll find that out tomorrow. But my gut tells me I won’t find any lead.”
“Maybe it was poisoned somehow?” Marybeth asked.
Joe was silent for a moment before answering, reviewing the scene in his head. He was pleased that Marybeth was so wrapped up in what had happened to the moose. She’d been so distracted by her new business that it had been a long time since she’d been interested in anything he’d been doing.
“Again, I think the bull would have sought cover to die. Unless the poison killed him so quick he just dropped, which doesn’t sound very likely to me. And those wounds . . .”
“You described them as incisions earlier,” Marybeth said.
“Yes, they were more like surgery than butchery. No animal I know of makes perfect cuts like that. And the parts that were cut away were removed from the scene, taken away. As if they were trophies of some kind.”
Marybeth grimaced. “I’d hate to see that trophy collection.” Joe laughed uncomfortably, agreeing with her.
“It’s almost as if the moose was dropped from the sky,” Marybeth said. “Aw, jeez,” he moaned. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”
She prodded him hard in the ribs with her finger. “But that’s what you were thinking, weren’t you, Joe?”
At first he thought about denying it. But she was so damnably keyed into his thoughts that he didn’t dare.
“Yup,” he said.
“I can’t wait to hear what you find out,” she said, turning and reaching through the wash water for the plug. “Should I ask my mother what she thinks about it?”
Joe bristled, as Marybeth knew he would, and she laughed to assure him she was kidding. Her mother, the former Missy Vankueran, was soon to marry a local rancher named Bud Longbrake. In addition to getting remarried (she had four ex-husbands), and discussing exactly how Joe had stifled Marybeth’s potential, Missy’s top passion was reading books and watching television shows and movies about the paranormal. She loved to speculate about situations and events around Twelve Sleep County—and the world—and ascribe supernatural explanations to them.
“Don’t tell her, please,” Joe begged, exaggerating his please, but not really. “You know how I hate that woo- woo crap.”
“Speaking of woo-woo crap,” Sheridan said as she entered the kitchen from where she’d been eavesdropping, “did I tell you I had that dream again?”
3
The next morning, monday, Joe hiked up the Crazy Woman Creek drainage with his necropsy kit to discover that the grinning moose was no longer there. The absence of the dead moose in the meadow stopped him outright, and he stood still for a moment, surveying the crushed grass. He was thinking about Sheridan’s dream, which made him uncomfortable. Joe refused to believe in aliens or creeping mist or anything else he couldn’t see or touch. Had there been a time when he believed in monsters and things that went bump in the night? Nope, he thought. He had always been a skeptic. He remembered when neighborhood kids gathered around a Ouija board, and urged him to join them. Instead, he went fishing. When his friends stayed up late at night to watch creature movies, Joe fell asleep. Sheridan was different, though, and always had been. He hoped she’d outgrow the dreams.
Something had dragged, or carried, the carcass away. The trail was obvious; a spoor of flattened grass led across the meadow in a stuttering S-curve toward the northern wall of pine trees. Puzzled, he followed it.
The mature bull moose weighed at least 600 pounds, he guessed. Whatever had moved it had tremendous strength. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a set of pickup or ATV tracks in the meadow, but they weren’t there. He wondered if it could be the grizzly. As he walked silently across the meadow in the flattened grass track of the moose, he tried to peer ahead into the dark trees and see into them. He listened intently for sounds, and noted the absence of them. There were no chattering squirrels in the trees, or calling jays. Except for the low hum of insects in the grass near his feet and the high, airy flow of a cold fall breeze through the branches, it was deathly silent in the meadow. Again, he felt a chill run up his spine, which raised the hairs on his neck and forearms.
He couldn’t explain the odd feeling he got again from the meadow. It felt as if something was physically pushing against him from all sides. Not hard, but steadily. The crisp fall mountain air tasted thicker than it should have, and when he breathed in, his lungs felt heavy and wet. He sensed a kind of shimmer in the air when he looked at the wall of trees and the granite mountains that pushed up behind them. He didn’t like the feeling at all, and tried to shake it off.
Joe slipped the strap of the necropsy kit over his head so that his hands were free. He drew his semiautomatic weapon and worked the slide, seating a cartridge in the chamber. With his left hand, he unclipped the large can of bear spray from his belt and thumbed off the guard. He cautiously approached the wall of trees, his weapon in his right hand and the spray in his left. All of his senses were tuned to high, and he strained to see, hear, or smell anything that would give him a warning before it was too late.
That’s when he saw the bear track in the center of the crushed grass. The huge paw was the size of a pie plate and had pushed down through the mat of grass into dark soil. He could see the heel imprint clearly; it was pressed into the dirt, as were the prints of all five toes. Nearly two inches from the end of the toe marks were sharp punctures in the ground, as if a curved garden rake had been swung overhead and embedded deeply into the earth. The creature that had made the tracks was the rogue grizzly bear, he was sure of it. None of the native black bears could leave a track that large. The odd thing, he thought, was that the track was pointed toward him, and not toward the wall of trees. Why wasn’t the track heading away from the meadow?
