“That’s different,” Joe said. “Putting salt blocks out isn’t natural.”
Smoke’s cup exploded with a pop from his tightened grip. Joe felt drops of Wild Turkey hit his face. Smoke’s voice rose as he talked. “Neither is feeding hay to ten thousand goddamned elk so tourists can look at ’em on the elk refuge, Joe! Neither is letting the herd explode in numbers in Yellowstone because there are no natural predators left, or introducing a species of gray wolf in the state that never actually lived here. Neither is building a goddamned private village so rich people can raise their own ‘pure’ food that’s the result of hundreds of years of genetic engineering!”
Joe pushed his chair back and stood up. The shotgun was within reach. “I’ll make a deal with you, Smoke. If you destroy the salt sets and give me your word you’ll never do it again, we’ll pretend this conversation never happened.”
Tracing his finger through the spilled whiskey on the table, Smoke said, “I can’t do that, Joe.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think what I did is wrong. It’s all a big game, just like everything these days. It’s a big game set up to get rid of people like me.”
“Then I need to write out the citation,” Joe said, his voice wavering.
“I ain’t going to quit my way of life, Joe,” Smoke said, looking up. “Not because of a set of rules that don’t make biological or scientific sense. I won’t let you take my life away from me.”
“I gave you a choice I shouldn’t have given you,” Joe said.
“And I appreciate that,” Smoke said. “Don’t think I don’t. It shows you’re the fair man I thought you were, just like Will. But my decision is made.”
Joe felt his heartbeat in his ears as he pulled his citation book out of his panniers and wrote out a ticket. In his peripheral vision, he was aware of both Smoke’s position at the table—slumping back, both hands on the table where he could see them—and the shotgun propped up in the corner.
“I’ll trust your word if you say you’ll get rid of that salt set.”
“I know that, Joe. I appreciate your trust. But it ain’t going to happen.”
Shaking his head, Joe tore out the ticket and handed it to Smoke. Smoke took it, slowly wadded it up into a ball, and dropped it on the table into the pool of whiskey.
“That won’t change anything,” Joe said, feeling sudden malevolence emanate from Smoke’s person the way the odor of horses and wood smoke had earlier.
“I ain’t going to let you do this,” Smoke said, rising almost sadly from the table. “I got no place to go.”
Joe said, “It doesn’t have to be this way, Smoke.”
“Yeah, it does.”
Joe stood with the back of his hand brushing against the barrel of the shotgun while Smoke retrieved his coat, gathered the bottle, and lumbered out the door without another word.
He brewed coffee to help him stay awake and read through the pages of the last spiral notebook. The door was bolted shut, and a heavy gun case was pushed against it. The shutters were closed so no one outside could look in and see him. The horses had been moved closer and picketed at the front and back of the cabin so Joe could hear if they sensed someone approaching. The shotgun, still loaded with slugs, was on the table where he read. He could not recall ever being as scared. When a squirrel suddenly chattered from a tree outside, Joe was up with the shotgun pointed at the door, his heart thumping.
Even the things he read in the notebook, as terrifying and revealing as they were, could not make him tear his mind away from the threat of Smoke outside. Will’s notebook was a journal of the madness that had engulfed him. The ex–game warden’s writing changed from cribbed, guarded comments to large block letters, with sections underlined so violently that the paper had ripped. Then the handwriting changed again, to outright loopy. The content changed from reports and observations to Will’s innermost thoughts and fears. What scared Joe was imagining Will, a man as guarded and reserved as anyone he had known, turn into something else. The last entry was from three weeks before:
They’re getting to me somehow. They’re inside my head and inside my body. They know where I’m going and they track my movements. I know it sounds crazy, and it IS crazy. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. They figured out a way to screw me up.
And there was more.
Twenty Nine
A half hour before the sun broke over the eastern mountains, while the mist still hung tight to State Lake, Joe heard the black gelding snort in alarm. From somewhere in the shadowed trees where the trail tunneled through, an approaching horse called back. Joe’s eyes shot open in his sleeping bag, and despite the cold, it was as if an electric current had jolted him awake.
He had bedded down on a ground cloth in the tall grass behind a gnarled stand of ancient pine trees. Somewhere around three in the morning, after rereading the spiral notebook and coming to surprising conclusions, he felt he could no longer stay in the cabin and wait. He felt trapped in there, with no way of knowing if Smoke was coming back for him and, if so, from which direction. So he had stoked up the stove so that smoke would curl out of the chimney pipe as if the cabin were occupied, and dragged his sleeping bag and the ground cloth out into the night. He slept in his clothing with the shotgun parallel to his legs.
Sitting up, he could see the front door of the cabin through the tree trunks. The black gelding, his ears straight up, looked down the trail in the direction where the approaching horse had responded. It was colder than he had anticipated as he unzipped his sleeping bag, the cold numbing his hands and face. He rolled out of the bag, hearing the frozen grass crunch beneath him. He rose to his knees and stayed hidden behind brush while peering down the trail in the same direction the gelding was looking.
Smoke, who had obviously dismounted, appeared out of the shadows on foot. His big blocky form was unmistakable. Clouds of condensation billowed around his head, then snapped away into the air. Joe thought it was remarkable that a man so large could walk so quietly.
It took ten minutes for Smoke to position himself in front of the door of the cabin. The outfitter had approached
