“It’s your whiskey,” Joe said, pouring again.
Smoke cleaned the last of the plates and suspended the skillet over the soapy water. “Do you wash your cast iron, or keep it seasoned?”
“Seasoned, I guess,” Joe said.
“Good man,” Smoke said, wiping out the skillet hard with paper towels. “Not many folks know anymore how much good taste and character you lose in your food when you wash the damn skillet every night with soap. Cast iron is meant to be seasoned.”
Smoke sat down at the table when he was through, the drying towel still draped over his arm. “I suppose I ought to think about getting back to my hunters pretty soon,” he said.
“They’ll be wondering if a bear got me.”
Joe felt a tightening in his chest. It didn’t feel right to let Smoke go back happily to his camp, only to arrest him in the morning.
“Something wrong?” Smoke asked, studying Joe’s face.
“Let’s have a nightcap,” Joe said, putting off his decision.
“Nightcap, hell,” Smoke said, pouring generously again, “let’s tie one on.”
“This is my thirtysecond year up here,” Smoke said wistfully. “I love it as much as my first.”
Joe nodded.
“Things have changed, though. I see it in Jackson all the time. But I never thought I’d see it up here, and it pisses me off.”
Smoke shifted and leaned across the table, his face thrust at Joe. Joe stanched an impulse to jump back.
“I’m a thirdgeneration outfitter,” Smoke said. “I got the same camp my dad and my grandpa used. A couple of years ago I sat down during a blizzard when we couldn’t hunt and I figured out that we’ve probably brought twentyfive hundred dead elk through that camp over the years. That’s a hell of a lot of meat. I also figured out that over the years we’ve probably contributed over a half a million in license fees, and we’ve spent about four million in the county to keep our business running. I’m the best there is at what I do, so I feel pretty damned good about it, overall. I get to show these outofstaters there is still some wildness left in this world, and that they’d better show some goddamned respect for it.
I’ve been known to send a whiner or two home, even at a financial loss to me, if that son of a bitch don’t respect what we’ve got up here.”
“Twentyfive hundred elk is a lot of elk,” Joe said.
Smoke weighed Joe’s comment for a minute, his eyes narrowing, then decided it was neutral, not critical.
“It is,” Smoke continued, “but in the big scheme of things, it’s not enough. Because of federal policies, we’ve got too goddamn many elk up here to sustain a healthy herd. There’s no good reason to have ten thousand elk come down to be fed on the refuge, like pets. They’re weak as a herd, and they spread diseases among themselves. The herd needs to be culled. It’s a goddamned meat farm, except that shooting them for meat is looked down on.”
Joe smiled. “You sound a little like Pi Stevenson.”
“Damnit!” Smoke shouted, thumping the table with his hand and making the cups jump. “Don’t get me started on her. Her stupid solution is to let the herds grow until they all starve to death in front of our eyes. Then listen to her bitch.”
“I can imagine,” Joe said.
Suddenly, Smoke broke out into a grin. “I used to have these kinds of discussions with Will Jensen all the time, right at this table. You’re a lot like him.”
“You’re not the first to say that.”
“It’s a compliment,” Smoke said. “I liked the hell out of old Will, even though he wanted to arrest me and throw my big wide butt in jail. He would have, you know. But I respected him, he was a man of his word. Too bad he went nuts in the end.”
“Were there people who hated him enough to kill him?”
Joe asked abruptly.
The question didn’t faze Smoke. “A few, I suppose. Your friend Pi Stevenson supposedly made some threats. I probably did too, when I was drinking. He made me pretty mad a couple of times.”
“But in the end you got along?”
“In the end he was crazy,” Smoke said. “Taking up with that Ennis woman the way he did. He even brought her up here one time, which told me he was forgetting who he was and where he was at. I consider this a cathedral, and he violated it. It got worse with the fights he got into, and then getting arrested himself . . .”
Joe watched Smoke closely.
“Before all of that, though, we coexisted pretty damned well, I’d say. We gave each other a wide berth. I think he even admired me, in a way, although he never actually said it. I’m one of the few who doesn’t mind the bear population increasing or the wolves the Feds released on us,” Smoke said. “They’re a part of all of this. We need ’em to get the herd sizes down to a level that makes some kind of sense. But I have arguments with the way those animals are portrayed by some folks, like they’re on a higher plane than us humans. It’s pretty damned simple, really. The Feds—and people like Pi Stevenson—don’t love the wolves and bears as much as they hate people. They’re winning the game, it seems to me. That pisses me off too.”
Joe found himself warming to Smoke, enjoying his company and his passion. Smoke was like a lot of the people he knew in Twelve Sleep County. He wondered, though, at what point Smoke’s rage turned into violence.
