He could simply call the number with the 910 area code, and see who answered. Fayetteville, he said to himself. What is in Fayetteville?
Joe pulled his cell phone from its mount on the dash and was reaching for his notebook to look up the number, when the phone trilled.
“Joe, it’s Trey Crump.”
Joe hadn’t talked to his district supervisor since before the task force was formed, although he had kept him up to date on the progress, or lack of it, via e-mailed reports.
“What’s up?”
“You’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from the bear guys up in Yellowstone. Apparently, they just picked up a signal on our missing grizzly.”
Joe had a feeling what was coming.
“They tracked him to a location that’s literally in your backyard, so to speak. Just east of the mountains, in the breaklands. He appears to have stopped, because they said the signal is strong and not moving.”
Joe grabbed his notebook from the seat, and flipped to a fresh page. “Do you have the GPS coordinates?” Joe asked.
“Got ’em. You ready?”
“Sure,” Joe said, scribbling.
As he shot through Saddlestring and out the other side toward the breaklands, Joe called Nate Romanowski. As usual, he got Nate’s unreliable answering machine.
“We located the bear,” Joe said. “If you get this, you’ll want to get right out to the BLM tract off Dreadnought Road. The bear is supposedly right in the middle of it, about six miles off-road to the north. Look for my truck.”
26
The break lands country beyond Dreadnought Road served as a kind of geological shelf before gradually rising into the foothills and then swelling into a sharp climb into the mountains. At first glance it looked flat and wide open, but in actuality it was deceptive terrain coursed through with deep draws of crumbly, yellow-white earth that created massive islands of grass-covered flats that were attractive to pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and ranchers. Before lamb and wool prices collapsed in the 1980s, the breaklands had been filled with sheep. Joe had seen photos from the forties and fifties on the wall at the Stockman’s Bar of sheep herds clipping the grass in the Dreadnought breaklands as far as the photographer could see. There were still a few bands of sheep in the area, tended by Mexican or Basque herders, but nowhere near the amount there had been.
Joe slowed his pickup on Dreadnought Road while watching the GPS unit on his console, and scanned the surrounding area for Nate Romanowski. He was wary of striking off-road as it approached dusk because of the network of arroyos and draws that could cut him off, isolate him, or get him stuck.
Joe didn’t find a road, and realized he had gone beyond where he should have turned right. He stopped and studied a well-worn topo map of the area, trying to find if there was another approach—one with roads—to where the bear had been located. There was an old road of some kind that entered the area from the exact opposite direction but he estimated it would take close to an hour to get to it. His only choice, he concluded, was to go off- road.
On the floor of the pickup was a tranquilizer gun in its plastic case. The gun had a pistol grip and shot a single fat dart loaded with a debilitating sedative. The warnings on the box of darts said that the sedative was extremely concentrated, and designed for animals weighing over 400 pounds. The dosage was lethal to humans. Reversing down the empty county road for nearly quarter of a mile, he slowed, cranked the wheel so that the nose of the pickup pointed straight out into the breaklands, punched the fourwheel-drive high switch, and started crawling across the sagebrush in the dusk. His tires crushed sagebrush, and the sharp, juniper-like smell perfumed the chilling air. As usual, he kept both windows open so he could see and hear better. As the front tires bucked down and up through a hidden, foot-deep channel, he instinctively reached over with his arm to prevent Maxine from toppling from the seat to the floorboards before re-membering Maxine wasn’t there.
wenty minutes after he had left the road, Joe glanced up and saw a pair of bobbing headlights in his rearview mirror. The vehicle was at least ten minutes behind him, and seemed to be using the same set of tracks that he had cut across the grass and brush.
Who could possibly be following him, or even know where he was? Maybe Nate got his message after all.
While he was watching the mirror instead of where he was going, his left front tire dropped into a huge badger hole and jerked the truck to a stop. The steering wheel spun sharply left as the tire fell and twisted in the hole, and maps, memos, and other paperwork rained on him from where they had been wedged under rubber bands on his visor for safekeeping. The motor died. He picked up all the paper that had fallen on him and shoved it out of the way between the seats. He looked up and saw lazy dust swirling in his headlights, lit up with the last brilliant half hour of the ballooning sun.
Feeling his chest constrict, he checked his mirror. Because he had stalled out in a small dip in the terrain, he couldn’t see the headlights behind him. He turned in his seat, looked through the glass, but couldn’t see the vehicle.
Was it Nate? If Joe could see the headlights again, he could be sure. Nate’s Jeep had a recognizable grille and set of lights. It looked like an owl’s face.
He had a wild thought: what if it wasn’t Nate? What if someone had used the same frequency as the bear collar to alert the biologists and lure Joe out here? The frequency itself, though assigned to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was available on the handheld radios favored by most hunters and fishers, even though use of it was discouraged.
Uh-oh, Joe thought. Did he have time to unsheath his shotgun before the vehicle behind him caught up?
Then headlights cleared the wash and Joe instantly recognized the grille of Nate’s Jeep. Nate thrust his head out the window.
“Hey, Joe,” Nate Romanowski, the driver, said in greeting. “I got your message about the bear and came straight out.”
Joe sighed, relaxing. “Have you ever considered calling ahead, Nate? Have you ever thought about calling me
