He patrolled a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tract to the west of Saddlestring, a huge, nearly treeless expanse that stretched from the river to the foothills of the Bighorns. It was deceptive, complicated country, and he had always liked it. From a distance, it appeared to be simply a massive slow rise in elevation from the valley floor to the mountains. In actuality, it was an undulating, cut-and-jive high-country break land of hills and draws and sagebrush. The landscape had folds in it like draped satin, places where shadows grew and pronghorn antelope and large buck mule deer thrived. A spider’s web of old unnamed ranch roads coursed through it. Herds of deer and antelope had long learned how to take advantage of the land and the landscape, to live within its folds and draws and literally vanish when pursued. The antelope especially used the starkness of the break land for defense, and they often frustrated hunters by silhouetting themselves on the tops of hills and rises so that they were so much in the open there was no way to sneak up on them. The only trees in the area were the silent markers of hundred-year-old failed homesteads and cabins.
It was opening day of antelope season, the only day there would be real hunting pressure, and it was Joe’s job to check the licenses and wildlife stamps of hunters. Most of the hunters he had checked that morning were local and out for meat, although he did visit the trailer camp of an outfitter with four hungover Michigan auto executive clients who were wearing state-of-the-art outdoor gear and were struggling through a Dutch-oven breakfast. Everyone was legal, with the correct licenses and stamps. They planned to go hunting later in the day when they sobered up.
Joe idly wondered how Missy Vankeuren would react when Marybeth told her about Joe’s job offer with InterWest Resources. Joe harbored a feeling of sweet vengeance and secretly wanted to be there when Marybeth gave her the news. It had been a special time in bed after he told Marybeth, and they had both been a little giddy. Marybeth had even broken her rule about not having sex while her mother was under the same roof. Neither before or after had Marybeth said she wanted Joe to take the job, and Joe didn’t say he wanted to take it. But the possibilities electrified them both. He wondered now if Missy would warm up to him, now that she knew that his salary could soon triple. In his experience, the women in his life were brutally, honestly practical. Maybe she would think that her daughter had done all right after all.
As he left the camp, he heard the booming of rifles in the distance, and he drove toward the direction of the shots. There was the closed-in pow-WHOP sound rather than an open-ended explosion, and he knew that whoever had been shooting had hit something. They had; three local hunters had killed four antelope, which was one too many. The hunters explained to Joe that a bullet had passed through a buck and hit a doe unintentionally. Although Joe believed them, he gave them a speech about shooting into the herd instead of selecting specific targets, and he ticketed the hunter who had killed two. Joe asked the hunters to field dress all four animals and to deliver the extra animal to the Round Home, a halfway house in Saddlestring that fed and housed transients and local alcohol and drug addicts. More than half of the Round Home population consisted of Indians from the reservation, and they preferred wild game meat.
Throughout what remained of the morning, Joe moved from camp to camp, stopping periodically to survey the landscape through his spotting scope. He liked working outside, in the break lands and in the mountains. He liked working outside and coming home and taking a shower before dinner. When he went to sleep most nights, he was physically tired. He knew there were not many jobs left like his anywhere in the world.
Joe vividly remembered, as a 10-year-old, when it first came to him that being a game warden was the thing he wanted to do. He and his younger brother, Victor, had been sleeping outside in the backyard like they did most nights in the summer—in sleeping bags spread out on the trampoline. The stars were bright, and there was a light night breeze. Inside the house, his parents were yelling, fighting, and drinking, which was not unusual for a Friday night. Outside in his sleeping bag, young Joe Pickett read the latest issue of Fur, Fish, and Game magazine under a flashlight. He couldn’t wait until the magazine was delivered every month, and he read it from cover to cover, even the advertisements in the back that sold animal traps and urine lures and do-it-yourself boats. Victor slept next to him in his sleeping bag, or at least Joe hoped he did. It was worse than usual with his parents that night. Inside, there had been a loud crash of glass, and he had heard his father scream “Goddamnit, woman!” and then his mother was crying and his father was consoling her. It went back and forth like this a lot, only usually it wasn’t this loud. While he read and hoped his little brother slept, he heard the clattering rattle of ice in a shaker. His father was the last of the great martini drinkers, and this was the eighth time he had heard the shaker that night. The hollering and crashing was punctuated by periods of silence marked by ice rattling in a shaker, as if both parties had agreed upon time-out while they refueled. Joe knew the neighbors had probably heard the commotion as well.
His flashlight was dimming but he hadn’t finished reading yet, so he climbed down from the trampoline and tried to sneak through the house to his bedroom where he kept fresh batteries. He didn’t want to be seen and he didn’t want to see his parents, but he stepped on broken glass in his bare feet in the kitchen and trailed bloody footprints down the hall carpet, all the way to his room. On the way back outside, with two D batteries in his pajama pockets, he met his mother in the hallway. She was drunk and sentimental, the way she sometimes got, and she 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:
HOW TO BECOME A GAME WARDEN
Don’t be chained to a desk, machine, or store counter.
This easy home-study plan prepares you for an exciting
career in conservation and ecology.
Forestry and wildlife men hunt mountain lions,
parachute from planes to help marooned animals,
or save injured campers.
Live the outdoor life you love. Sleep under pines.
Catch your breakfast from icy streams.
Live and look like a million!
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 girl-friend, 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 the plateau. 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’s 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, holierthan-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. “My guess is that we wouldn’t be able to hunt out here anymore if someone thought there were endangered animals out here.”
“Damned right,” Jack said.
“Why’d you bring this up?” Joe asked. “Do you know something?”
“No reason,” Jack said.
“Just bullshitting you,” added Hans.
“If you know something, you need to report it,” Joe said looking from one to the other. He couldn’t tell whether he was being fooled with or not.
“And that’s what we would do,” Jack assured Joe. “Indeed we would.”
“Indeed,” Hans echoed.
It had been a strange interlude, Joe thought.
When they were done and the Scout was hosed down and cleaned, Jack and Hans offered Joe a cold beer from the cooler. He thanked them but declined, and he wished them luck for the rest of the day. He knew that if Hans and Jack didn’t get their second antelope today, they eventually would, so he would see the Scout out in the break land every day until that happened. Hans and Jack had the patience of the retired, and they were both known as good hunters and good cooks.
Joe had no problem with hunters hunting for meat. He felt, compared with buying it at the supermarket in cellophane-wrapped parcels, that hunting was basically more honest. He had never understood the arguments of people who opposed hunting on principle while eating a cheeseburger. He thought it was important for people to know that animals died in order for them to eat meat. The process of stalking, killing, dressing, and eating an animal was much simpler and easier to understand to Joe than having a cow killed by a sledgehammer-swinging meat-processing plant employee and having the eventual results appear as a small packet in a shopping cart. He appreciated people like Hans and Jack.
For Hans and Jack, hunting for meat was still a way of life and not really a sport. The greeting of “Got your elk yet?” was as common as hello in the small mountain towns, and the health and size of game herds was a matter of much public concern and debate.
Joe figured this was why the murders in the elk camp were the talk of the town. The killing of three outfitters realized every hunter’s nightmare: that out in the field someone may be hunting for them. No one had ever heard of such a thing happening before. Sure, there were accidental shootings and incidents of fistfights and threats—the kind of things that would inevitably happen when men (there were very few women in the elk camps) left their jobs for a week or two and got together in the mountains to hunt. But considering the number of guns and the gallons of alcohol available, deliberate killings during hunting season were incomprehensible to the people of Saddlestring.
And the more Joe thought about it, the more he realized that the killings were incomprehensible to him.
Feeling good about the day and the job he had done, Joe worked his way through the break land toward the road that would take him back into town. Vern Dunnegan had called him early that morning, before the funeral, and asked Joe to meet him at five in the Stockman’s Bar. If it was like the old days, Vern would be in the last booth on the right, past the pool table. That was Vern’s booth.
13
The Stockman’s Bar was a dark place where they served shots and beer under the dusty heads of local game animals and where the walls were covered with black-and-white photos of local rodeo contestants from the 1940s and ’50s. No matter what day or hour it was, there seemed to always be the same number of patrons. Joe walked past a dozen men on stools, toward the pool table in the back. A hanging Coors beer lamp illuminated the green felt of the pool table and highlighted the side of Vern’s face. Vern was in his booth, and he had company.
“You’re early.” Vern said as a greeting, extending his hand toward Joe. “Joe Pickett, this is Aimee Kensinger.” She was in shadow. Joe’s eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark bar.
Joe took off his hat. “We’ve met.”
?
??See, I told you that,” Aimee said to Vern.
Vern chuckled and gestured for Joe to sit across from him in the booth.
“Will you drink a beer with me?” Vern stated more than asked. “Aimee’s got to get going.”
“Oh, yes, I had forgotten about that,” Aimee said sarcastically. Joe liked her voice. As his eyes adjusted, he could see she was wearing some kind of fuzzy, black sweater and a thin gold necklace. She was smiling at him. “I’ll see you around, Joe Pickett.”
Vern stood and let her out of the booth. She tousled Joe’s hair as she left, which embarrassed him. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about that. Vern followed her as far as the bar and returned with four shots of bourbon and four mugs of beer on a tray.
“Happy hour,” Vern said. “Two for one.” He downed a shot and chased it with beer. “You’re looking good, Joe. How’s the pellet wound?”
Joe told him it was fine and took a long drink from a mug. The cold beer tasted good. The afterimage of Aimee Kensinger hovered next to Vern.
“She still likes me,” Vern said, smiling. “Even though I don’t wear the uniform anymore.”
Vern threw another shot down his throat. “She likes you, too.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Joe didn’t respond. He didn’t want to go there.
Joe tried to gauge how much Vern had been drinking. This certainly didn’t seem to be his first shot of the afternoon, judging by how flushed his face was. Vern had always been a hard drinker, and there had rarely been a night after work when Vern didn’t suggest they stop for one or two. But since Vern had returned, Joe had yet to see him without bourbon within his grasp.
“Have you given what we talked about any thought?” Vern asked.
Joe nodded.
“Well?”
“I need to discuss it with Marybeth,” Joe said. “We really haven’t had a chance to talk it over yet.”