Despite his almost giddy excitement about moving back to his wife, Marybeth, and his daughters, he couldn’t in good conscience vacate the area without investigating the complaint about the butchered elk. That wouldn’t be fair to the new game warden, whoever he or she would be. He’d leave the other reported crimes to the sheriff.
JOE PICKETT WAS LEAN, of medium height and medium build. His gray Stetson Rancher was stained with sweat and red dirt. A few silver hairs caught the sunlight on his temples and unshaved chin. He wore faded Wranglers, scuffed lace-up outfitter boots with stubby spurs, a red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on his shoulder, and a badge over his breast pocket with the designation GF-54. A tooled leather belt that identified him as “JOE” held handcuffs, bear spray, and a service issue .40 Glock semiauto.
With every mile of his last patrol of the Sierra Madre of southern Wyoming, Joe felt as if he were going back into time and to a place of immense and unnatural silence. With each muffled hoofbeat, the sense of foreboding got stronger until it enveloped him in a calm, dark dread that made the hair prick up on the back of his neck and on his forearms and that set his nerves on edge.
The silence was disconcerting. It was late August but the normal alpine soundtrack was switched to mute. There were no insects humming in the grass, no squirrels chattering in the trees to signal his approach, no marmots standing up in the rocks on their hind legs and whistling, no deer or elk rustling in the shadows of the trees rimming the meadows where they fed, no grouse clucking or flushing. Yet he continued on, as if being pulled by a gravitational force. It was as if the front door of a dark and abandoned house slowly opened by itself before he could reach for the handle and the welcome was anything but warm. Despite the brilliant greens of the meadows or the subdued fireworks of alpine flowers, the sun-fused late summer morning seemed ten degrees cooler than it actually was.
“Stop spooking yourself,” he said aloud and with authority.
But it wasn’t just him. His horses were unusually twitchy and emotional. He could feel Buddy’s tension through the saddle. Buddy’s muscles were tight and balled, he breathed rapid shallow breaths, and his ears were up and alert. The old game trail he took was untracked and covered with a thin sheet of pine needles but it switchbacked up the mountain, and as they rose, the sky broke through the canopy and sent shafts of light like jail bars to the forest floor. Joe had to keep nudging and kissing at his mount to keep him going up the face of the mountain into the thick forest. Finally deep into the trees, he yearned for open places where he could see.
JOE WAS STILL UNNERVED by a brief conversation he’d had with a dubious local named Dave Farkus the day before at the trailhead.
Joe was pulling the cinch tight on Buddy when Farkus emerged from the brush with a spinning rod in his hand. Short and wiry, with muttonchop sideburns and a slack expression on his face, Farkus had opened with, “So you’re really goin’ up there?”
Joe said, “Yup.”
The fisherman said, “All I know for sure is I drink beer at the Dixon Club bar with about four old-timers who were here long before the energy workers got here and a hell of a lot longer than you. A couple of these guys are old enough they forgot more about these mountains than either of us will ever know. They ran cattle up there and they hunted up there for years. But you know what?”
Joe felt a clench in his belly the way Farkus had asked. He said, “What?”
“None of them old fellers will go up there anymore. Ever since that runner vanished, they say something just feels wrong.”
Joe said, “Feelings aren’t a lot to go on.”
“That ain’t all,” said Farkus. “What about all the break-ins at cabins in the area and parked cars getting their windows smashed in at the trailheads? There’s been a lot of that lately.”
“I heard,” Joe said. “Sheriff Baird is looking into that, I believe.”
Farkus snorted.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Joe had asked.
“No. But we all heard some of the rumors. You know, camps being looted. Tents getting slashed. I heard there were a couple of bow hunters who tried to poach an elk before the season opened. They hit one, followed the blood trail for miles to the top, but when they finally found the animal it had already been butchered and the meat all hauled away. Is that true?”
Like most hunters who had broken the law, the bow hunters had come to Joe’s office and turned themselves in. Joe had cited them for hunting elk out of season, but had been intrigued by their story. They seemed genuinely creeped out by what had happened. “That’s what they said.”
Farkus widened his eyes. “So it’s true after all. And that’s what you’re up to, isn’t it? You’re going up there to find whoever took their elk if you can. Well, I hope you do. Man, nobody likes the idea of somebody stealing another man’s meat. That’s beyond the pale. And this Wendigo crap—where did that come from? Bunch of Indian mumbo-jumbo. Evil spirits, flesh eaters, I ask you. This ain’t Canada, thank God. Wendigos are up there, not here, if they even exist. Heh-heh.”
It was not much of a laugh, Joe thought. More like a nervous tic. A way of saying he didn’t necessarily believe a word of what he’d just said—unless Joe did.
Joe said, “Wendigos?”
THEY BROKE THROUGH THE TREES and emerged onto a treeless meadow walled by dark timber, and he stopped to look and listen. Joe squinted, looking for whatever was spooking his horses and him, hoping reluctantly to see a bear, a mountain lion, a wolverine, even a snake. But what he saw were mountains that tumbled like frozen ocean waves all the way south into Colorado, wispy puffball clouds that scudded over him immodestly showing their vulnerable white bellies, and his own mark left behind in the ankle-deep grass: parallel horse tracks, steaming piles of manure. There were no human structures of any kind in view and hadn’t been for a full day. No power lines, microwave stations, or cell phone towers. The only proof that he was not riding across the same wilderness in the 1880s were the jet trails looking like snail tracks high in the sky.
THE RANGE RAN south to north. He planned to summit the Sierra Madre by Wednesday, day three, and cross the 10,000-foot Continental Divide near Battle Pass. This was where the bow hunters said their elk had been cut up. Then he would head down toward No Name Creek on the west side of the divide and arrive at his pickup and horse trailer by midday Friday. If all went well.
THE TERRAIN got rougher the higher he rode, wild and unfamiliar. What he knew of it he’d seen from a helicopter and from aerial survey photos. The mountain range was severe and spectacular, with canyon after canyon, toothy rimrock ridges, and dense old-growth forests that had never been timbered because cutting logging roads into them would have been too technical and expensive to be worth it. The vistas from the summit were like scenery overkilclass="underline" mountains to the horizon in every direction, veins of aspen in the folds already turning gold, high alpine lakes and cirques like blue poker chips tossed on green felt, hundreds of miles of lodgepole pine trees, many of which were in the throes of dying due to bark beetles and had turned the color of advanced rust.
The cirques—semicircular hollows with steep walls filled with snowmelt and big enough to boat across—stair-stepped their way up the mountains. Those with outlets birthed tiny creeks and water sought water and melded into streams. Other cirques were self-contained: bathtubs that would fill, freeze during winter, and never drain out.