rained sloppy kisses on him (which he preferred, considering that if she were sober, he'd have gotten a violent rage and open-handed slaps because of what he had done to the carpet) and guided him into the bathroom.
While she tried to pull slivers of glass from his feet (she said she was sorry for breaking the glasses on the floor earlier), he watched her and winced. Her makeup was smeared with tears, and a cigarette danced in her mouth as she talked. It reminded him that she thought of herself as an early sixties hipster.
Because she was in such bad shape, she tended to drive the slivers deeper into his foot with the tweezers before regaining her balance enough to pull them out. He told her he was okay even though he wasn't, and he bandaged his own feet while she went out to rejoin his father and the pitcher of martinis
With new batteries, the flashlight glowed white and strong and he lay on his stomach in his sleeping bag and wished he lived somewhere in the mountains, anywhere other than where he was. It was then that he read the advertisement in the back of the Fur, Fish, and Game magazine:
Under the text was a photo of a rugged and smiling proto game warden in a six-point hat holding up what appeared to be a bobcat. The game warden had indeed looked like a million.
'I want to be a game warden,' Joe had said aloud.
'Me, too,' Victor mumbled from deep in his sleeping bag, surprising Joe.
'I want to go where you go.'
Joe reached in Victor's sleeping bag and found Victor's hand. They shook on it.
The next day, Joe sent in his five-dollar fee. It had set him on this course.
Victor never followed. Ten years after that night, while Joe was in his second year of college and Victor Pickett was a senior in high school, Victor broke up with his girlfriend, got drunk, and drove his car into the massive stone arch to Yellowstone National Park's north entrance. It was three in the morning, and he was going 110 miles per hour. No one ever knew why Victor had traveled for two hours to get to Yellowstone to do what he did. Joe could only speculate that it had something to do with a vicious emotional brew of alcohol and violence and the dream escape from both that a place like Yellowstone seemed to offer.
***
Joe parked his truck on a hilltop that allowed him to see most of the break land, and he ate his lunch and drank coffee. He mounted his spotting scope on his window and left the radio on. The sun had burned off the early morning damp and the day was warm, dry, and cloudless. From this vantage point, Joe watched as a scenario developed far below him. A large herd of nearly 80 pronghorn antelope were spread out along the top of a plateau, warily eating grass and moving east to west. To the west, snaking along a four-wheel drive road, was a single white vehicle. The occupants of the vehicle were below the rim of the plateau where they could not be seen by the herd. From the movements of the antelope, Joe could tell they had not yet noticed the white vehicle.
Chewing on a chicken salad sandwich, Joe focused on the white truck through his spotting scope. He recognized the vintage International Scout and the two older hunters who were driving it. Joe watched as the hunters stopped their vehicle and slowly walked up the side of theplateau. It took nearly a half an hour for the hunters to get to the top. Once there, they hunkered down behind a reef of tall sagebrush to take aim.
Joe leaned away from the scope and watched the herd in its entirety. The herd, as a single unit, suddenly jerked to life and rocketed east along the plateau, each animal trailing a thin plume of dust. Then the delayed sound of two heavy shots, one a definite hit, washed up to him over the distance. He lowered his eye to the scope again and could see at least one downed antelope in the distance. One of the hunters was now walking toward it, and the other was going back to get the Scout.
Joe washed down the last of his sandwich with coffee, then started the pickup and began to move over the hill. The herd was now a long way away, still running fast. He could no longer make out individual animals, just a rapidly retreating white cloud of dust. Pronghorn antelope were the second fastest mammals on earth--only an African cheetah could outrun them.
By the time Joe drove his pickup over the rim of the plateau, the hunters had completely field-dressed the pronghorn and were in the process of attaching the back legs of the animal to a hook tree. He recognized the men as Hans and Jack, a retired ranch hand and retired school teacher from Saddlestring. Hans now ran a janitorial business part-time, cleaning downtown commercial buildings such as the drugstore and the video rental store. Hans and Jack had hunted together for more than 30 years, and they had developed antelope hunting into an annual craft. Their Scout was a customized traveling meat-processing plant. The older they got, the more refinements they made to compensate for their age and the more their appreciation for taking care of and eating game meat grew. First it was the old freezer they packed with ice that filled most of the bed of the small pickup.
They had learned to cool down the meat as soon as possible to prevent any spoilage from the warm days of September. Then they had added the winch and the crane to elevate the carcass from the ground in order to skin it and further cool it out. They showed Joe their newest invention, a five-gallon gravity based water tank with a hose that they could use to wash and scrub the carcass down once it was skinned. Joe watched as the hunters quartered the animal into sections and rotated each section on the winch to the icebox. Hans' movements were getting shakier with each year, Joe noticed, and Jack kept his distance when both of them were skinning with their knives.
Then Hans asked Joe a strange thing. 'You ever heard anything about endangered species being found up in the mountains, Mr. Pickett?'
'What?' Joe asked, suddenly paying more attention to what the two old men were saying.
'Hans,' Jack said, eyeing his partner.
'Just wondering.' Hans said with a bemused, holier-than thou expression on his face. Hans and Jack exchanged glances, and went back to their work. Joe waited for more that finally came.
'It'd probably be best for everyone if nothing was ever found,' Hans said, looking up at Joe.
