***
The first half mile of the canyon was easy going, even as the dark gray walls became sheer and the sky became no more than a ribbon of blue light straight overhead. There were Indian petroglyphs on the rocks, scenes of elk bristling with arrows, painted and feathered men on horseback, figures of warriors holding aloft the scalps and entire heads of other warriors. Near the petroglyphs, Joe found newer and much more stupid graphics written with a felt-tipped marker.
"Ote Keeley Sucks the Big One," someone had scratched.
"Kyle Eats Shit," said another.
"Calvin Is a Needle Dick." Yup, Joe thought, the outfitters had come up here all right.
The rock walls eventually became so narrow that Joe dismounted and hung the stirrups over the saddle horn so they wouldn't catch on the sides. Lizzie was fidgety, her ears were pinned back, and her eyes were wide with apprehension. He led her, coaxing her to continue and keeping up a singsong, inane monologue to calm her as the walls closed in around them. He stepped from stone to stone in the stream, trying to keep his boots dry. The mare's metal shoes clattered and sometimes slipped on the creek rocks, and the back of Joe's pants were soon soaked as a result.
He wished he hadn't brought the horse into the canyon and instead had tied her up and continued by himself. The canyon was much narrower than he had anticipated, and the roots, foliage, and thick spiderwebs that covered it made it claustrophobic. The problem he had now was that they had gone too far to turn around. He would have to back her out nearly a quarter of a mile along slippery rocks. The likelihood that she would fall and injure herself--as well as block the canyon--was too great. He had to continue on and hope she would trust him.
At one point when the walls became so narrow that they were literally touching both sides of her and the brush in the canyon was so thick above them as to block out the light. Lizzie finally balked and jerked back on the halter rope, pulling Joe into the creek. Her eyes were white and wild with panic, and they partially rolled back into her head. Joe tried to stop her as she backed up, and the rope sang through his hands, scorching his gloves. She finally stopped when her shoes skated over the tops of the rocks, and she sat down with an enormous thud and splash. Her breath pistoned out of her flared nostrils. She sat quivering and let Joe approach her. He spoke softly to her saying much the same things he had told Sheridan the night before. After a long ten minutes, she awkwardly scrambled upright. Her breathing had settled to a rhythm. He wedged in beside her and could find no injuries on her except for on her flank, where a small flap of torn hide stuck out like a pink tongue. He was now wet everywhere, and getting cold. The buckskin was wet also, and the canyon smelled strongly of horse.
"We are over halfway there, Lizzie," he told her, over and over again in a kind of mantra. "We can either keep going or back our way out. Let's keep going. It's not that far now. It'll get better, I promise. It's okay. Things are just real okay. Everything is not as bad as it seems."
As the walls eventually receded, the creek became shallow and soon Joe was able to mount again and ride upstream along a sandy bank. The sky didn't seem as gray as it had earlier in the morning, and the little bit of sun that filtered through the clouds warmed and dried them.
When the canyon walls finally opened, the bowl in the mountains was even more lush and untrammeled than Joe had imagined it could be. It was a beautiful, remarkable place. Around the rim of the bowl in all directions were sheer, red rock cliffs, which provided both protection and a windbreak. Thin rivulets of water that looked like old lace streamed down the rock walls from above. Joe imagined that in the spring the waterfalls would have real volume and would fill the bowl with their roar. The old-growth trees were mossy and tall, the foliage thick. Tall grass carpeted the edge of the creek while spring-fed pools full of clean, cold water dotted the creek bottom.
Something cracked in the trees and Joe pulled his shotgun out of the scabbard in a single movement. But even before he had racked the pump, he could see that the sound had come from a huge bull elk who had seen him and was now fleeing through the trees, a shadow moving through the thick timber like fan blades whirling in front of a light until it was gone. He lay the shotgun across the pommel of the saddle and nudged the buckskin on.
Joe knew what a unique place this was. It was like going back in time, like being one of the first to ride into a natural wonder like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon and not really being able to believe your eyes. Few people in the modern world would ever have the chance to see what he was seeing or experience what he was experiencing. Or so he thought.
He was nearly to the grassy rise before he realized exactly where he was.
Later, when he thought about it, he couldn't really say why he had stopped or how he had found it. It was a feeling he felt on the back of his neck like the lick of a ghost. But when he reined the buckskin and turned in the saddle, he had absolutely no doubt about what was there in front of him.
He was looking at a killing field.
It was a treeless slope that started at the edge of a dark timber stand and continued down until it reached the valley floor. What was peculiar about the field, now thick with dried, tall grass, was its lack of life. There were no birds, and nothing scuttled in the grass. It was dead, and Joe wanted to know why.
The mounds were there. He counted 26 of them. But the holes on the top of the mounds were blocked with new spiderwebs or bits of brush and grass that had blown into them. As Joe walked through the field, from mound to mound, he found the things he had suspected he would. There were spent casings from .22 shells buried in the dirt, as well as shotgun shells. He bent over a dried quarter of elk that was old enough to be skeletal but not old enough that he couldn't see and smell the poison it had been laced with. It was Compound 1080, a deadly substance preferred by those who took the killing of predators very seriously.
He found several M-44 cartridges wired into the carcass of a rabbit. The devices, long illegal, were designed to automatically fire a stream of cyanide into the mouths of whatever tugged on them. The cyanide, which reacted with saliva, would kill within seconds. The cartridges had been fired.
In a kind of stunned fog, Joe gathered what evidence he could. He pulled his camera from a saddlebag and took several rolls of film. Many of the shots, he knew, would be of Clyde Lidgard quality. But he found a scattering of tiny bones pressed into the soft earth of one of the mounds, and he filled a plastic bag with them. He gathered a handful of spent .22 brass for another sack, as well as the M-44 cartridges. Then he sat on a downed tree and simply stared at the field. He tried to imagine what it had looked like when it was teeming with the last colony of Miller's weasels on earth.
It WaS nearly dUSk when Joe cleared the elk camp in a trot and continued down the mountain. The long passage through the canyon had been made almost in a dream, and the buckskin mare seemed to sense that Joe was distracted, so she cooperated. She knew they were going home. Joe's mind was racing, and he was shaky from what he had discovered and from lack of sleep. Several times, he reached back into his saddlebags to confirm that he had in fact gathered the evidence he thought he had gathered. Already, the bowl seemed very far away.
He thought of the implications, which were huge. Terrible acts had taken place up there. They had happened right under his nose, in his jurisdiction, and on his watch. Of course there was now a conspiracy.
He doubted that it had started out that way. He guessed that what had happened was a series of incidents and mistakes that had mushroomed into something both big and awful. He didn't know how everything was connected yet, and he wasn't really sure he would be able to find out. But he knew he was now in the thick of it, no matter what. He wondered who out there would surface, once the word got out.