“Mmmm-hmmm,” McCain said and was just about to ask the gentleman which way they went when Grimes hollered at the barking mop-dog again.
“Millie, quiet! I know they were a piece of crap because I used to own one. Probably the worst vehicle Ford ever made. Well, except for the Pinto, and maybe the Maverick. And then there was the Escort.”
The dog kept yapping.
“Millie, shut up!” the man yelled.
“Mr. Grimes,” McCain asked. “Did you see which way the vehicle went?”
The man reached down to swat the dog, missed, and about fell over because Millie had turned and was sprinting back into the bowels of the motorhome.
“They went upriver,” Grimes said pointing up the highway.
McCain thought seriously about asking the man why in the world he had camped there, but he decided it wasn’t worth it. He thanked the gentleman for reporting the bait-fishermen and turned to walk back to his truck. In the background he could hear Millie yapping.
The upper Yakima River, between Yakima and Ellensburg, had become one of the West’s premier trout fishing streams. Regulations on the river were changed back in the 1990s to make that part of the river, all the way up to the headwaters in the Cascades, a catch-and-release only fishery. Fishing with bait was made illegal—only barbless, single-hooked flies, and lures were allowed.
Once the regulations changed it didn’t take long before word of the quality of Yakima trout reached the fly-fishing world, and anglers from all over came to sample some of it. The popularity of the Brad Pitt movie, A River Runs Through It, certainly helped, as about a third of the folks living around Puget Sound decided they’d like to stand in a river and fling a fly. Seattle was less than two hours away, and soon the Yakima River became the place for the folks on the west side of the Cascades to come fish. The high percentage of the anglers knew the regulations, but every once in a while there would be someone who didn’t know the rules, or more likely, was just ignoring them.
McCain spotted the brown Ford Bronco II parked in a pull-out about three miles up from the Big Pines campground. He parked far enough away that he could get out and walk up to watch the anglers for a bit. Sure enough, Grimes was right. The three men were using night crawlers. McCain could see a belly-up trout on a stringer in the water next to one of the men.
He went back to his truck, grabbed his citation book, let Jack out, had the dog heel, and walked over to talk to the three men.
“Hi, fellas” McCain said. “Can I see your fishing licenses and IDs?”
The men jumped a bit when McCain spoke, and then they started talking to one another in a foreign language. McCain thought they were speaking Russian.
“Yes, please, officer,” the youngest of the three men said. “We are fishing okay, no?”
“No, you are not fishing okay,” McCain said. “I need to see your fishing licenses and your driver’s licenses.”
“Yes, no please, we get for you,” the youngest man said. He spoke to the two other men in Russian, and they reached into their back pockets for their billfolds and started digging through them for their licenses.
Similar to other states in the country, there were many new Russian immigrants in Washington and a lot of them liked to fish. Unfortunately, there were some who bent the laws just a tad. And there were a few who not only bent the laws, they broke them into about a thousand pieces.
The men handed McCain their licenses. Everything seemed to be in order. McCain asked if they could understand English, and they all nodded their heads. McCain could see in their eyes that maybe the only one who actually could was the youngest, a Sergi Ivanonov, according to his driver’s license.
The whole time McCain was talking, the three men were watching Jack. They looked like they would jump in the river if the dog moved a step toward them.
McCain explained to Ivanonov the rules regarding no bait, and not being able to keep any trout in this part of the river. Ivanonov seemed honestly perplexed. He told them they needed to be sure they knew the rules of all the rivers around here, because some rivers were different, and even some parts of some rivers were different.
“No more bait,” McCain said. “No more keeping fish. Understand?”
“No, yes, please,” Ivanonov said. The other two men nodded their heads and looked at Jack.
McCain took the fish on their stringer and left the men with citations for a couple different violations. He wondered if they would pay the fines.
When he left the three Russians, he decided he’d drive on up the Yakima and check on the last few anglers on the river.
Chapter 10
Al Stephens rode comfortably up the trail above Rimrock Lake. He and seven other members of the Central Washington Backcountry Horsemen’s club were heading up a couple days early for their annual 4th of July trip into the high Cascades. The group was packing in wall tents and enough food and gear to have a good four-day stay.
The string of horses and riders was about a third of the way up the trail to the Twin Sisters Lakes where they would camp when Stephens spotted a cluster of yellowish-white bones down the hill in some brush. The riders occasionally saw bones of dead animals on their outings into the mountains, so he didn’t think much about it. That is until he looked a little closer and saw a large round bone that looked eerily like a human skull.
“Whoa,” Stephens said to his horse as he gently pulled on the reins and pointed toward the bones. “Hey, what does that look like to you guys?”
One of the younger members, named Dave Davis, dismounted and walked the forty yards down the hill to get a closer
