PRIOR TO THE FIVE-DAY TREK, Joe had been near the spine of the mountains only once, years before, when he was a participant in the massive search-and-rescue effort for the runner Farkus mentioned, Olympic hopeful Diane Shober, who’d parked her car at the trailhead and vanished on a long-distance run on the canyon trail. Her body had never been found. Her face was haunting and ubiquitous, though, because it peered out from hundreds of homemade handbills posted by her parents throughout Wyoming and Colorado. Joe kept her disappearance in mind as he rode, always alert for scraps of clothing, bones, or hair.
Since he’d been assigned districts all over the State of Wyoming as both a game warden and Governor Rulon’s point man, Joe ascribed certain personality traits to mountain ranges. He conceded his impressions were often unfair and partially based on his mood at the time or things he was going through. Rarely, though, had he changed his mind about a mountain range once he’d established its quirks and rhythms in his mind. The Tetons were flashy, cold, bloodless Eurotrash mountains—too spectacular for their own good. They were the mountain equivalent of supermodels. The Gros Ventres were a rich graveyard of human history—both American Indian and early white—that held their secrets close and refused to accommodate the modern era. The Wind River Mountains were what the Tetons wanted to be: towering, incredibly wealthy with scenery and wildlife, vast, and spiritual. The Bighorns, Joe’s mountains in northern Wyoming where his family still was waiting for him, were comfortable, rounded, and wry—a retired All-Pro linebacker who still had it.
But the Sierra Madre was still a mystery. He couldn’t yet warm to the mountains, and he fought against being intimidated by their danger, isolation, and heartless beauty. The fruitless search for Diane Shober had planted the seed in his mind. These mountains were like a glimpse of a beautiful and exotic woman in a passing car, a gun on her lap, who refused to make eye contact.
HE DISMOUNTED once he was on the floor of the basin to ease the pain in his knees and let his horses rest. As always, he wondered how horsemen and horsewomen of the past stayed mounted for hours on end and day after day. No wonder they drank so much whiskey, he thought.
Joe led his horses through a stand of widely spaced lodgepole pines that gradually melded into a pocket of rare and twisted knotty pine. Trunks and branches were bizarre in shape and direction, with softball-sized joints like swollen knees. The knotty pine stand covered less than a quarter mile of the forest, just as the elk hunters had described. As he stood on the perimeter of the stand he slowly turned and noted the horizon of the basin that rose like the rim of a bowl in every direction. This was the first cirque. He was struck by how many locations in the mountains looked alike, how without man-made landmarks like power lines or radio towers, wilderness could turn into a maelstrom of green and rocky sameness. He wished the bow hunters had given him precise GPS coordinates so he could be sure this was the place, but the hunters were purists and had not carried Garmins. Still, though, they’d accurately described the basin and the cirque, as well as the knotty pine stand in the floor of it.
In the back of his mind, Joe thought that if there really were men hiding out in these mountains stealing elk and vandalizing cabins and cars, they would likely be refugees of the man camps. Over the past few years, as natural-gas fields were drilled north of town, the energy companies had established man camps—clumps of adjoining temporary mobile housing in the middle of sagebrush flats for their employees. The men—and it was only men—lived practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Obviously, it took a certain kind of person to stay there. Most of the temporary residents had traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to the most remote part of the least-populated state to work in the natural-gas fields and live in a man camp. The men were rough, independent, well armed, and flush with cash when they came to town. And when they did, it was the New Wild West. For months at a time, Joe had been called just about every Saturday night to assist the local police and sheriff’s deputies with breaking up fights.
When the price of natural gas plummeted and drilling was no longer encouraged, the employees were let go. A half-dozen man camps sat deserted in the sagebrush desert. No one knew where the men went any more than they knew where they’d come from in the first place. That a few of the unemployed refugees of the man camps had stuck around in the game-rich mountains seemed plausible—even likely—to Joe.
He secured his animals and walked the floor of the basin looking for remains of the elk. Although predators would have quickly moved in on the carcass and stripped it of its meat and scattered the bones, there should be unmistakable evidence of hide, hair, and antlers. The bow hunters said the wounded bull had seven-point antlers on each beam, so the antlers should be nearby as well.
As he surveyed the ground for sign, something in his peripheral vision struck him as discordant. He paused and carefully looked from side to side, visually backtracking. In nature, he thought, nothing is perfect. And something he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—was too vertical or horizontal or straight or unblemished to belong here.
“What was it?” he asked aloud. Through the trees, his horses raised their heads and stared at him, uncomprehending.
After turning back around and retracing his steps, Joe saw it. At first glance, he reprimanded himself. It was just a stick jutting out from a tree trunk twenty feet off his path. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t a stick at all, but an arrow stuck in the trunk of a tree. The shaft of the arrow was handcrafted, not from a factory, but it was straight, smooth, shorn of bark, with feather fletching on the end. The only place he’d ever seen a primitive arrow like this was in a museum. He photographed the arrow with his digital camera, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and grasped it by the shaft and pushed hard up and down while pulling on it. After a moment, the arrow popped free and Joe studied it. The point was obsidian and delicately flaked and attached to the shaft with animal sinew. The fletching was made of wild turkey feathers.
It made no sense. The bow hunters he’d interviewed were serious sportsmen, even if they’d hunted prior to the season opener. But even they didn’t make their own arrows from natural materials. No one did. Who had lost this arrow?
He felt a chill roll through him. Slowly, he rotated and looked behind him in the trees. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Cheyenne or Sioux warriors approaching.
HE FOUND THE REMAINS of the seven-point bull elk ten minutes later. Even though coyotes and ravens had been feeding on the carcass, it was obvious this was the elk the bow hunters had wounded and pursued. The hindquarters were gone and the backstraps had been sliced away. Exactly like the hunters described.
So who had taken the meat?
Joe photographed the carcass from multiple angles.
JOE WALKED back to his horses with the arrow he’d found. He wrapped the point of it in a spare sock and the shaft in a T-shirt and put it in a pannier. He caught Buddy staring at him.
“Evidence,” he said. “Something strange is going on up here. We might get some fingerprints off this arrow.”
Buddy snorted. Joe was sure it was a coincidence.
AS HE RODE out of the basin, he frequently glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t shake a feeling that he was being watched. Once he reached the rim and was back on top, the air was thin and the sun was relentless. Rivulets of sweat snaked down his spine beneath his uniform shirt.
Miles to the southeast, a mottled gray pillow cloud and rain column of a thunderstorm connected the horizon with the sky. It seemed to be coming his way. He welcomed rain that would cool down the afternoon and settle the dust from his horses.