Singewald knew he wouldn’t last much longer, either. The first two bullets, he suspected, had collapsed his lungs. He couldn’t draw breath, no matter how hard he tried, and he was drowning in his own blood. He gurgled when he tried to speak.
Baker’s weapon lay in the dirt between them. Singewald hadn’t drawn his before he was cut down.
In the distance, he heard shouting. Then a tractor started up.
DAY TWO
2
The next afternoon on the long western slope of the Bighorn Range, where the sage and grass met the first lone scouts of pine preceding the army of dense timber descending from the mountain, game warden Joe Pickett encountered Butch Roberson. By the way Butch looked back at him, Joe knew something was seriously wrong.
The mid-August afternoon was uncharacteristically sun-splashed and soft under the massive blue sky, which was cloudless and clear except for a single fading vapor trail miles above. The warm air was still and perfumed with juniper, sage, pine, and mountain wildflowers: Indian paintbrush and columbine. Insects hummed at grass level, and Joe was so far away from the distant state highway he couldn’t hear traffic sounds from the occasional passing vehicles.
Joe was riding Toby, his fourteen-year-old Tobiano paint. The day and the surroundings brought a bounce to the gelding’s step, and the horse had trouble focusing on the task. There was rich grass on both sides of the narrow trail, and Joe had to be constantly alert so Toby wouldn’t dip his head to grab a bite. Joe’s one-and-a-half-year-old yellow Labrador, Daisy, loped alongside or drifted behind so she could hoover up Toby’s droppings, even though Joe hollered at her to stop. The new dog had joined Tube, their less-than-ambulatory corgi-Lab cross, in the Pickett household. The new dog had been dropped off at the local veterinarian’s office by disgusted Pennsylvania bird hunters the winter before. They claimed she was useless. Joe knew that all year-old Labs were useless, and took her home to mature. She seemed to be settling down, now that every shoe in the house had been destroyed. And so far on this ride he’d been impressed with her, except for eating the horse droppings.
It was a rare and perfect day; so perfect, in fact, that after the year he’d had and the things that had happened, the day seemed cheap and false and somehow unearned. As he rode the Forest Service boundary, which was marked by a three-strand fence line of barbed wire, Joe had to keep reminding himself he had nothing to feel guilty about. He told himself he should just enjoy the moment because they came so few and far between. It was sunny, dry, warm, cloudless, and calm. After all, there he was in the Bighorn Mountains on a sunny day with his horse and his dog, and he was doing the job he loved in the place he loved. The opening days for hunting seasons in his district were weeks away, and he’d spent the summer recuperating his left hand from when he’d broken it pulling it out of his own handcuffs the October before. Except for the shot-up body of a pronghorn antelope found south of Winchester, he had no other pending investigations. The crime bothered him for its viciousness, though: the buck had been practically cut in two by the number of bullets, and whoever had done it had also fired several close-range shots to the head after the animal was obviously down. That kind of bloodthirsty crime was a window into the soul of the perpetrator, and Joe wanted to find whoever had done it and jack him up as much as possible. There was little to go on, though. Several rounds had been caught beneath the tough hide, and he’d sent the bullets in for analysis. But there were no shell casings, footprints, or citizen’s reports of the crime. Joe could only hope whoever had done it would talk and word would get back to him.
Additionally, he had time to do preliminary elk counts in the mountains, verify the licenses of fishermen, check the water guzzlers, and actually be home for dinner with his wife, Marybeth, and his three girls. It was as if he were a character in a movie and the scene was being shot in soft focus.
Despite the setting, he found himself scanning the horizon for the ferocious snouts of thunderheads and sweeping his eyes over the ocean of trees for gusts or one-hundred-mile-an-hour microbursts or some other kind of trouble.
He thought later he should have gone with his premonition that something was coming and it wouldn’t be good.
Before he ran into Butch Roberson, he rode parallel to the western border of Big Stream Ranch, which was owned by a longtime local named Frank Zeller. It was one of the few of the big historic ranches in northern Wyoming still owned by the original family. Frank Zeller was a solid if taciturn man who managed the ranch with care. He ran huge herds of Angus cattle and pastured hundreds of saddle horses for guest ranches throughout Wyoming and Montana. He’d convinced the owners to allow the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to install water guzzlers near the forest boundary to help sustain the elk and mule deer herds not only because he cared for the wildlife, but also because he feared the spread of the brucella bacteria from the wildlife to the cattle if they mixed too much near the big creek on the valley floor.
Water guzzlers were shallow depressions in the ground covered with polyethylene fabric that captured rainwater and surface runoff-as much as five hundred to eight hundred gallons in each guzzler. The money for the guzzlers had come from an EPA grant Joe had applied for several years before, and the agency had sent an engineer up from Denver to help Joe design them. The guzzlers seemed to work. Parched herds from the mountains came down during drought years to drink, and pronghorns and mourning doves came up from the valley as well. His work, once a year, was to ride along the series of guzzlers to make sure the fabric was still intact and hadn’t been blown into shreds by the vicious winter winds, and to check that the depressions hadn’t been filled in with dirt or fouled by decaying carcasses.
Because water itself was rare and precious in a state that averaged less than thirteen inches of precipitation in a year-mostly snow-the wildlife literally flocked to it. As he approached each guzzler, he anticipated an explosion of doves and grouse that got Daisy excited, as well as deer bounding away through the sagebrush and elk crashing up into the timber. Once, the year before, he’d startled a black bear feeding on a deer carcass. The bear woofed at him and caused Toby to crow-hop and nearly dump Joe out of the saddle. But by the time he’d wheeled Toby around with a one-rein stop, the bear had run into the trees with startling speed and power, and it hadn’t come back.
He’d received permission from Zeller to access the ranch. After checking in at ranch headquarters and having breakfast with Zeller and his four Mexican ranch hands, because the foreman insisted he eat, Joe parked his green Game and Fish pickup and horse trailer two miles below the line of guzzlers near a head gate.
Still, parking so far from the Forest Service boundary was a pain in the neck, Joe thought, and a fairly recent one. When they’d installed the guzzlers, the two-track ranch road had joined with a Forest Service road on the other side of the fence. They’d been able to bring their gear and equipment close to the fence so they wouldn’t have to carry it across the folding foothills terrain. But two years before, the Forest Service had decided to prohibit through traffic. They’d fortified the gate, chained it, and locked it with a combination lock. Then, behind the gate, on the Forest Service side, they’d brought in a backhoe to scoop a deep hole into the road and use the dirt as a berm to prevent vehicles from using it. The coup de grace was a small rectangular brown metal sign that read ROAD CLOSED.
He’d saddled his horse and checked seven of nine guzzlers throughout the day. Number three had required some dirt work, but it didn’t take long, because he’d packed along a shovel with the handle shoved down into his empty saddle scabbard.