But he couldn’t stop thinking about the carcass he’d found. Or the arrow.
THAT NIGHT, he camped on the shoreline of a half-moon-shaped alpine lake and picketed the horses within sight of his tent in lush ankle-high grass. As the sun went down and the temperature dropped into the forties, he caught five trout with his 4-weight fly rod, kept one, and ate it with fried potatoes over a small fire. After dinner he cleaned his dishes by the light of a headlamp and uncased his satellite phone from a pannier. Because of the trouble he’d had communicating several years before while temporarily stationed in Jackson Hole, he’d vowed to call home every night no matter what. Even if there was no news from either side, it was the mundane that mattered, that kept him in touch with his family and Marybeth with him.
The satellite phone was bulky compared to a mobile, and he had to remove his hat to use it because the antenna bumped into the brim. The signal was good, though, and the call went through. Straight to voice mail. He sighed and was slightly annoyed before he remembered Marybeth said she was taking the girls to the last summer concert in the town park. He’d hoped to hear her voice.
When the message prompt beeped, he said, “Hello, ladies. I hope you had a good time tonight. I wish I could have gone with you, even though I don’t like concerts. Right now, I’m high in the mountains, and it’s a beautiful and lonely place. The moon’s so bright I can see fish rising in the lake. A half hour ago, a bull moose walked from the trees into the lake and stood there knee-deep in the water for a while. It’s the only animal I’ve seen, which I find remarkably strange. I watched him take a drink.”
He paused, and felt a little silly for the long message. He rarely talked that much to them in person. He said, “Well, I’m just checking in. Your horses are doing fine and so am I. I miss you all.”
HE UNDRESSED AND SLIPPED into his sleeping bag in the tent. He read a few pages of A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, which had turned into his camping book, then extinguished his headlamp. He lay awake with his hands beneath his head and stared at the inside of the dark tent fabric. His service weapon was rolled up in the holster in a ball near his head. After an hour, he got up and pulled the bag and the Therm-a-Rest pad out through the tent flap. There were still no clouds and the stars and moon were bright and hard. Out in the lake, the moose had returned and stood in silhouette bordered by blue moon splash.
God, he thought, I love this. I love it so.
And he felt guilty for loving it so much.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26
2
THE RHAPSODY ENDED AT NOON THE NEXT DAY. THERE WAS a lone fisherman down there in the small kidney-shaped mountain lake and something about him was wrong.
Joe reined to a stop on the summit and let Buddy and Blue Roanie catch their breath from clambering up the mountainside. The late-summer sun was straight up in the sky, and insects hummed in the wildflowers. He shifted in the saddle to get his bearings and searched the sky for more clouds. The sun had been relentless on the top of Battle Pass. There was little shade because he was on the top of the world, with nothing higher. He longed for an afternoon thunderstorm to cool things down, but the thunderhead had slowed its sky march and the rain column now looked like an afterthought. He hoped for a more serious cloud, and to the south he could see a bank of thunderheads forming at what looked from his elevation like eye level.
But first, he’d need to check out the fisherman.
Joe raised his binoculars and focused in, trying to figure out what there was about the man that had struck him as discordant. Several things popped up. The first was that although the hundreds of small mountain lakes in Sierra Madre had fish, the high-country cirques weren’t noted for great angling. Big fish were to be had in the low country, in the legendary blue-ribbon trout waters of the Encampment and North Platte rivers of the eastern slope or the Little Snake on the western slope. Up here, with its long violent winters and achingly short summers, the trout were stunted because the ice-off time was brief. Although today it was a beautiful day, the weather could turn within minutes. Snow was likely any month of the summer. While hikers might catch a small trout or two for dinner along the trail, as he had, the area was not a destination fishing location worth two or three days of hard hike to access.
Second, the fisherman wasn’t dressed or equipped like a modern angler. The man—who at the distance looked very tall and rangy—was wading in filthy denim jeans, an oversized red plaid shirt with big checks, and a white slouch hat pulled low over his eyes. No waders, no fishing vest, no net. And no horse, tent, or camp, from what Joe could see. In these days of high-tech gear and clothing that wicked away moisture and weighed practically nothing, it was extremely unusual to see such a throwback outfit.
He put away the glasses, clicked his tongue, and started down toward the lake. Leather creaked from his saddles, and horseshoes struck stones. Blue Roanie snorted. He was making plenty of noise, but the fisherman appeared not to have seen or heard him. In a place as big and empty and lonely as this, the fisherman’s lack of acknowledgment was all wrong and made a statement in itself.
As he walked his animals down to the lake, Joe untied the leather thong that secured his shotgun in his saddle scabbard.
Joe had often considered the fact that, for Western game wardens, unlike even for urban cops in America’s toughest inner cities, nearly every human being he encountered was armed. To make matters even dicier, it was rare when he could call for backup. This appeared to be one of those encounters where he’d be completely on his own, the only things on his side being his wits, his weapons, and the game and fish regulations of the State of Wyoming.
Fat-bodied marmots scattered across the rubble in front of him as he descended toward the lake. They took cover and peeked at him from the gray scree. What do they know that I don’t? Joe wondered.
“HELLO,” JOE CALLED OUT as he approached the cirque lake from the other side of the fisherman. “How’s the fishing?”
His voice echoed around in the small basin until it was swallowed up.
“Excuse me, sir. I need to talk to you for a minute and check your fishing license and habitat stamp.”
No response.
The fisherman cast, waited a moment for his lure to settle under the surface of the water, then reeled in. The man was a spin-fishing artist, and his lure flicked out like a snake’s tongue. Cast. Pause. Reel. Cast. Pause. Reel.
Joe thought, Either he’s deaf and blind, or has an inhuman power of concentration, or he’s ignoring me, pretending I’ll just get spooked and give up and go away.
As a courtesy and for his own protection, Joe never came at a hunter or fisherman head-on. He had learned to skirt them, to approach from an angle. Which he did now, walking his horses around the shore, keeping the fisherman firmly in his peripheral vision. Out of sight from the fisherman, Joe let his right hand slip down along his thigh until it was inches from his shotgun.
Cast. Pause. Reel. Cast. Pause. Reel.
Interaction with others was different in the mountains than it was in town. Where two people may simply pass each other on the street with no more than a glance and a nod, in the wilderness people drew to each other the same way animals of the same species instinctively sought each other out. Information was exchanged—weather, trail conditions, hazards ahead. In Joe’s experience, when a man didn’t want to talk, something was up and it was rarely good. Joe was obviously a game warden, but the fisherman didn’t acknowledge the fact, which was disconcerting. It was as if the man thought Joe had no right to be there. And Joe knew that with each passing minute the fisherman chose not to acknowledge him, he was delving further and further into unknown and dangerous territory.