He could report hearing the distant gunfire to Bill Long, who might even know who was responsible for it and have a logical explanation.
Or maybe not.
But Bill definitely wouldn’t want him to wade into a potentially dangerous situation on an unfamiliar mountain without backup or local support. So maybe he should—
Pow-whop.
Dammit.
Another heavy shot.
And it came with the abrupt, brutal, closed-in point-blank sound of a bullet hitting flesh, which carried a completely different sound than a miss.
It was a game changer.
He turned his horse toward the southeast, did a mental inventory of his shotgun in its saddle scabbard and handgun in its holster, clicked his tongue, and said, “Let’s go, Rojo.”
He could smell the camp before he could see it. Clinging to the brush and evergreen boughs was the stale odor of grease from cooking fires mixed with the sweat of dirty men.
That, and the smell of gunpowder.
It was the smell of a hundred elk camps Joe had entered over the years.
Without warning Rojo snorted and balked. The horse detected something ahead that Joe hadn’t noticed.
He urged him on.
Entering a wilderness campsite for the first time was always fraught with tension. Small, bonded groups enjoyed getting away from it all. Inside the camp were guns, alcohol, and as often as not, clouds of testosterone. The last thing hunters wanted to see was a representative of the Game and Fish Department asking them questions and checking licenses and permits. And the last thing Joe wanted to do was surprise them or appear threatening, because he was always outnumbered and outgunned.
It was part of the job.
“Hello, there,” he called out. “Just your friendly neighborhood game warden here.”
There was no response, although Joe thought he heard footfalls through the brush on the far side of the camp. Someone running away?
“Hello?” he called out again.
Rojo walked forward, taking halting steps. Joe sat tall in the saddle and didn’t look down as he untied a leather string that secured the butt of his shotgun in its scabbard. He hoped he wouldn’t have to pull it out.
He pushed through the trees into a rough clearing and took it in all at once. Four dirty wall tents, stumps where trees had been cut down, camp chairs for sitting, a large blackened fire ring that was still smoldering, and trash strewn everywhere. It was a crude and dirty camp, he thought, something out of the Gold Rush days or built by mountain men just before the winter roared in. He decided he didn’t much like the people in the camp. They had little respect for the wilderness and practiced poor camp hygiene.
Walls of trees surrounded the clearing. Beyond them the mountains rose vertically in three directions to their treeless summits. Granite outcroppings pierced through the trees like knuckles, a few of them topped with massive eagle nests. Just inside the tree line were a small mountain of coolers and cartons of canned food. A yellow Gadsden DON’T TREAD ON ME flag with a coiled rattlesnake hung from a crooked flagpole made of a bark-stripped lodgepole pine. On the far side of the clearing was the framing and half walls of a large log building still under construction. The walls were no more than four feet high. It looked like a crude open shoebox. Hand tools—axes, saws—leaned against the outside of the structure.
What appeared to be a bundle of dirty clothing was lying half in, half out of the open framed door of the log building. Only when he rode closer did he realize it was the body of a bearded man with wide-open eyes and a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
The body was twitching in what might be death throes, and the smell of gunpowder hung bitter in the still air.
The fatal wound was that recent—the kill shot Joe had heard.
He tried to keep his heart from racing by placing his right hand over his breast pocket and pressing.
It didn’t help.
He cleared the shotgun from the scabbard before dismounting and walked Rojo across the opening to tie the gelding up to a dead tree. Rojo was understandably spooked and he wanted his horse to stay put. Before calling in the incident to dispatch on the handheld radio or the satellite phone—both of which he’d left back in his saddlebag on the horse—Joe wanted to check on the condition of the victim in the doorway.
He took a deep breath and raised his gaze up above the treetops as he walked across the clearing toward the fallen man. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. He could see no movement on the mountainsides or even an eaglet poking its head up in one of the nests. But he had the feeling—and it was only a feeling—that he was being observed from above.
Maybe whoever had shot the man and run off had come back?
He leaned his shotgun against the log wall and squatted next to the gunshot victim. He was grateful to be low and out of sight, on the other side of the building.
He reached out and pressed his fingertips to the man’s dirty neck. No pulse. The victim was indeed dead now and completely still. His gray eyes were staring but unseeing, and a single black trail of blood from the bullet hole had congealed on his face next to his nose. Joe wanted to close the man’s eyes but not badly enough to touch him again.
The dead man stank as if he’d been wearing the same clothes—greasy jeans, heavy boots, layers of undershirts, shirts, and Dickies denim jacket—for weeks. His skin was ashen and his beard was long and unkempt. He studied the body and noticed the glint of a steel rifle muzzle protruding an inch from beneath the man’s shoulder. Obviously, he’d fallen on top of his weapon and it was pinned beneath him.
The muzzle was equipped with a tubular conical guard. A military feature used to reduce the flash of a shot, not an accessory needed by hunters. Just like the camp didn’t look or feel like a typical elk camp, the victim didn’t appear to have been an ordinary hunter.
Joe had never run across hunters who erected log buildings or raised flags.
What was going on here?
He knew he shouldn’t move the body before he photographed it or before a Teton County forensics tech arrived. He couldn’t determine if the man had been murdered while standing in the doorway and collapsed on his rifle, or some other scenario. And he wondered if the rifle pinned below the body had been the one he’d heard firing multiple times before the three heavy booms. It certainly looked like the kind of military-style black rifle chambered-in .223 that would make the snapping sound he’d heard.
Maybe, he thought, he’d been mistaken about the number of guns firing prior to the heavy booms. Maybe the dead man had fired his rifle as fast as he could pull the trigger and the shots had echoed around on top of one another until it sounded like multiple shooters.
But who was the victim shooting at?
And who had put a bullet hole through his head?
As he grasped the log wall to push himself back to his feet, Rojo suddenly snorted and reared behind him. He wheeled around to see his horse pull back in sudden fright and with enough momentum to pull the dead tree it was tied to on top of him. The trunk largely missed Rojo but several spindly branches raked the horse’s haunches as it fell. Rojo, white-eyed with terror, bolted across the clearing in the direction from which they’d come.
“Stop,” Joe yelled.
He watched helplessly as his horse—stirrups flapping on the sides and reins dancing in the air behind its mane—vanished into the northern wall of trees. He took a few steps toward where Rojo had gone, but pulled up short. He’d never run down his gelding. He could only hope that the horse wouldn’t go far and that he could catch him later.