his lower jaw. Caleb had an AR-15 with a scope across his lap, with the muzzle loosely pointed a foot to the right of Joe. Joe was sure the weapon was locked and ready to fire, and that Caleb was capable of spraying full automatic fire at him and Nate in a heartbeat. The weapon must have come from the Michigan boys, Joe thought.
In between them, they’d started a small fire. Farkus sat on a stump near the fire, positioned carefully equidistant from both logs. Farkus fed the fire with pencil-sized twigs. The fire shot lizard tongues at the darkness and occasionally flared due to a particularly dry piece of wood or because of time-concentrated pitch within the stick. The effect made Camish and Caleb’s faces fade in and out of the darkness in various stages of orange.
Nate sat silently on the log to Joe’s left. His friend didn’t even attempt to hide his proclivities, and he kept his .454 lying across the top of his thighs with his hand on the grip and his finger on the trigger. Joe knew Nate was capable of raising the weapon and firing at both of them in less than a second.
Whether Nate could take out both brothers before Caleb could fire his weapon at Joe and Nate was the question.
Joe said to Caleb, “I see your tactical vest now. I guess you were wearing it when I shot you with my Glock. Now I know why you didn’t go down.”
Caleb glared back at him, his eyes dark and piercing but his expression inscrutable.
“You know he can’t talk,” Camish said. “That shot to his lower jaw splintered his chinbone and somehow drove slivers of it into his talk box. The point-blank shot to his chest later probably didn’t help much, either. Anyways, he hasn’t spoken a word since that night.”
He said it matter-of-factly, and Joe let it sink in. Joe said, “I fired blindly when I hit him in the face. Not that I wasn’t trying to do damage—I was.”
Caleb almost imperceptibly nodded his head.
Joe said to Caleb, “I would have been happy to have killed you given the circumstances.”
Camish nodded, and he and Nate shared a look, which Joe found disconcerting.
“The circumstances are different depending on where you stand, I guess,” Camish said. “You have one version, we have a different version.”
Joe nodded. “Maybe so. But what I know is you boys came after me and killed my horses.”
Camish made his eyes big, and there was a slight smile on his face. “My version, game warden, is me and my brother were minding our own damned business and not bothering a soul when you rode up and wanted to collect a tax on behalf of the government, the tax being a license to fish so we could eat. And when we didn’t produce the license, you threatened our liberty. We, as freeborn Americans, resisted you.”
Joe held his tongue, but he shared a look with Nate. This confirmed his friend’s earlier theory.
Nate tipped his head toward Joe, but never took his eyes off Caleb. He said, “Joe’s kind of like that. It’s his worst fault. He’s damned stubborn.”
“My horses,” Joe said, glaring at Camish. “They belonged to my wife. She loved them like only a woman can love horses. You two killed them and butchered them.”
“Better than letting them go to waste, eh, Caleb?” Camish said, as if it made all the sense in the world, Joe thought. “Anyway,” Camish said, “we didn’t target your horses. They were collateral damage. We came after you so hard because there was something in your eyes when we met you. We knew you’d follow this goddamned stupid fishing license deal to the gates of hell. Otherwise, we’d just have let you ride away. We practically begged you to just ride out of here. But you wouldn’t let it go. You said you’d march us into court. All for a stupid twenty-four- dollar license.”
Joe said, “You boys are out of state. It’s ninety-four dollars for Michigan residents.”
Camish leaned back on his log and tipped his head back and laughed. Caleb snorted, sounding like the angry pneumatic staccato spitting of a pressure cooker on a stovetop.
Nate moaned.
Joe felt his neck get hot. He said, “It’s my job. I do my job.”
Camish finished his run of laughter, then cut it off. He leaned forward on the log and thrust his face at Joe. “That may be. But the things you set in motion . . .”
Joe stood up. He let the muzzle of the shotgun swing lazily past Camish, past Caleb, past Nate. He said, “Tomorrow by this time, these mountains are going to be overrun. There will be hundreds of law enforcement personnel. Some of them will even know what they’re doing. You boys assaulted a sheriff and humiliated him. You assaulted
From the far end of the downed log, Farkus said, “They killed four, not three.”
Camish said, “I wish you’d shut up, Dave.”
Joe broke in. “Four, three, it doesn’t matter at this point. You boys are done. Even if you figure out a way to hole up and not get caught tomorrow, this is only the beginning. You can’t really think you can stay here, do you? That you can set traps and hang dead men from cross poles and the world will just stay away? What are you thinking?”
With the last sentence, Joe stood and leaned into them and his voice rose. And he realized, by looking at Nate’s face, and the Grim Brothers, and Farkus in the light of the fire, how utterly alone he was.
“YOU PEOPLE,” CAMISH SAID, his eyes sliding off Nate and settling on Joe, “you government people just keep coming. It’s like you won’t stop coming until you’ve got us all and you own everything we’ve got. Until we all
“Hell, we know we make people nervous, me and Caleb. We know we look funny and we act funny to some people. We know they judge us. They made my mom out into some kind of stupid hillbilly when they went after her.”
Joe studied Camish’s face in the flickering firelight. Unlike Caleb’s terrifying, almost manic glare, Camish’s attitude had softened from its initial ferocity. Into what? Joe thought. Victory? Resignation?
