Nowhere to Run

Dismissive grunt.

“What kind of trouble did Camish run into yesterday?”

Silence.

“Some of the old-timers down in Baggs think someone’s been up here harassing cattle and spooking them down the mountains. There have even been reports by campers that their camps have been trashed, and there’ve been some break-ins at cabins and cars parked at the trailheads. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Caleb grunted. Again not a yes, not a no.

“The elk that was butchered confounds me,” Joe said. “Whoever did it worked fast and knew what they were doing. The bow hunters said it must have happened within twenty minutes, maybe less. Like maybe more than one man was cutting up that meat. You wouldn’t know who up here could’ve done that, then?”

“I already told you. I don’t know about no elk.”

“Have you heard about a missing long-distance runner? She disappeared up here somewhere a couple of years ago. A girl by the name of Diane Shober?”

Another inscrutable grunt.

“The Brothers Grim,” Joe said again.

“We prefer the Grim Brothers, damn you,” Caleb spat.

Joe eased his shotgun out of the saddle scabbard, glanced down to check the loads, and slid it back in. He’d have to jack a shell into the chamber to arm it. Later, though. When Caleb wasn’t looking. No need to provoke the man.

THEY WERE SOON in dense timber. Buddy and Blue Roanie detoured around downed logs while Caleb Grim scrambled over them without a thought. Joe wondered if Caleb was leading him into a trap or trying to lose him, and he spurred Buddy on harder than he wanted to, working him and not letting him rest, noting the lather creaming out from beneath the saddle and blanket. It was dark and featureless in the timber. Every few minutes Joe would twist in the saddle to look back, to try to find and note a landmark so he could find his way back out. But the lodgepole pine trees all looked the same, and the canopy was so thick he couldn’t see the sky or the horizon.

“Sorry Buddy,” he whispered to his gelding, patting his wet neck, “it can’t be much farther.”

Caleb’s subtle arcs and meandering made Joe suddenly doubt his own sense of direction. He thought they were still going north, but he wasn’t sure. Out of nowhere, a line came back to him from one of his favorite old movies, one of the rare movies he and his father had both liked, The Missouri Breaks:

The closer you get to Canada, the more things’ll eat your horse.

Joe could smell the camp before he could see it. It smelled like rotten garbage and burnt flesh.

FOR A MOMENT, Joe thought he was hallucinating. How could Caleb Grim have made it into the camp so much before him that he’d had the time to sit on a log and stretch out his long legs and read the Bible and wait for him to arrive? Then he realized the man on the log was identical to Caleb in every way, including his clothing, slouch hat, and deformed nose, and he was reading the missing half of the book he’d seen in Caleb’s daypack earlier—the New Testament.

Caleb Grim emerged from a thicket of brush and tossed his daypack aside and sat down next to his brother. Twins. Joe felt his palms go dry and his heart race.

“Why’d you bring him?” the brother—Joe assumed it was Camish—asked without looking up.

“I didn’t,” Caleb said. “He followed me.”

“I thought we had an agreement about this sort of thing.” His voice was nasal as well, but higher-pitched. “You know what happened the last time you did this.”

“That was different, Camish. You know that.”

“I didn’t know it at the time.”

“You should have known. They’re all like that—every damned one of them.”

“Especially when they got a badge to hide behind,” Caleb said.

“Especially then,” Camish said.

“What happened last time?” Joe asked. He was ignored. They talked to each other as if Joe weren’t there. He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry.

The camp was a shambles. Clothing, wrappers, empty cans and food containers, bones, and bits of hide littered the ground. Their tent was a tiny Boy Scout pup tent, and he could see two stained and crumpled sleeping bags extending out past the door flap. He wondered how the two tall men managed to sleep there together—and why they’d want to. The bones meant the brothers were the poachers, because there were no open game seasons in the summer. Joe saw no weapons but assumed they were hidden away. He could arrest them for wanton destruction of game animals, hunting out of season, and multiple other violations on the spot. And then what? he wondered. He couldn’t just march them for three days out of the mountains to jail.

Said Caleb to Joe, “You gonna stay up there on that horse?”

“Yup.”

“You ain’t gonna get down?”

“Nope. I’ll just take a look at your fishing license and I’ll get going.”

The brothers exchanged looks and seemed to be sharing a joke.