Sure, she had a right to be worried and angry. But he had wanted to talk with her, tell her how tough it had been to go facetoface with that bear, and what he had done. Instead, it had all been about her. She made him feel guilty. She always made him feel guilty. He knew the last five years had been tough on her. She’d gone through more than anyone deserved. But would there ever be a time when he didn’t have to walk around on eggshells? When she didn’t seem to blame him for what their life had become?
He was being unfair. Despite everything, he loved her.
Without her he would spin off the planet. He needed her to ground him.
But he looked forward to the change. He looked forward to his new district.
Had the pressures in Saddlestring, and in the house, really gotten to him to this degree, he wondered, that the prospect of riding up alone on armed men in a hunting camp seemed like a boy’s holiday? He tried to shake that thought out of his head. He tried to make an argument that it was good to have a mission, good to have a tough assignment. It was good to be trusted by Trey, to have been chosen out of the other fiftyfive game wardens for the hottest, most highprofile district.
As he drove up the canyon, he watched the signal on his cell phone recede to nothing, followed by a digital no service prompt.
Here we go, he thought. Here we go.
Seven
Even though he should have been prepared for them, even though he had seen them dozens of times in photos, paintings, movies, on postage stamps, and in person, Joe still felt his heart skip a beat when the timber opened up on the road south of Yellowstone Park and the Tetons filled up the late afternoon vista. Mount Moran in particular, with its commashaped glacier of snow, burned bright in the cloudless sky. The dark, rounded shoulders of the Bighorns, his mountains, had been replaced by the glittering silverwhite Tetons, which thrust upward like razoredged sabers trying to slice open the sky. He felt like he was switching his comfortable horizon with a new, dazzling, hightech model.
He wondered if he would ever get used to seeing those mountains without feeling a flutter in his stomach each time he looked. It was hard, Joe thought, not to be intimidated by the Tetons. There were no other mountains like them in the world; so new, sharp, and lethal that foothills hadn’t yet had the courage to approach them. He wondered if Will Jensen had ever gotten used to them. How could something that dramatic ever really provide the comfort of familiar scenery?
Traffic south to Jackson through Grand Teton National Park was heavy, and Joe became part of a long parade of vehicles. The highway was choked with huge recreational vehicles helmed by older drivers who apparently thought the fiftyfivemileperhour speed limit was a challenge they wouldn’t dare confront. He settled in, unable to pass because the exodus of tourist traffic in the oncoming lane was just as dense. Driving cautiously, he knew that the sighting of a moose, elk, or bear from the highway would instantly cause visitors to hit their brakes and, without pulling over to the shoulder, pour out of their vehicles with cameras and camcorders. On his left the ground rose in a gentle swell toward the Gros Ventre Mountains. On the raised flats, barely visible from the road, were old dude ranches. The movie Shane had been filmed on one of them, Joe remembered. It was the only movie he and his father had ever agreed on, maybe the only thing they had ever agreed on. Then he realized something that both scared and exhilarated him: This was his new district. As far as he could see in every direction, from the Tetons to the west, Gros Ventres to the east, Yellowstone Park to the north, to the town of Jackson ahead of him to the south, was his new responsibility.
Jackson was just a couple of hundred miles from Saddlestring, Joe thought, but it was a world apart.
The big new twostory state building had a parking lot in front for visitors and a private lot in back for employees of various agencies. Joe cruised through the staff lot, looking for a parking space, but they all appeared to be designated. The only open one he saw was marked for w. jensen. Even though there wasn’t anywhere else available behind the building, he chose not to use it. Not yet. Instead, he wheeled around the front, parked between two RVs, and entered the building through the double doors.
In the lobby, tourists stood and rifled through a rack of brochures offering horseback rides, an aerial tram ride to the top of the Tetons, chuck wagon cookouts, whitewater rafting, and other excursions, as well as accommodations.
A darkskinned, wizened woman with coalblack hair peered over her goldframed glasses at him as he approached her counter carrying his battered briefcase and daypack. He nodded his hat brim to her, and she nodded back.
“Joe Pickett,” he said.
She stood. She was not much taller standing than she had been sitting down. “Mary Seels. We expected you five days ago.”
“Hello, Mary. I was helping my supervisor with a bear.
You should have gotten word from dispatch that I’d be late.”
She assessed him. He thought he saw a slight smile on her mouth, as if she were hiding her amusement. “I’ve heard about you.”
He nodded again, not taking the bait, not saying, What have you heard ? But he thought he already had her figured out, simply by the way she looked at him, with the same dispassionate sharpness of one of Nate’s falcons, and by the way she projected her innate territoriality. Mary was the one who ran the place, he thought. She appraised him as if he had walked into the building hat in hand looking for the last bed in town, and she had the power to give it to him or turn him away.
“Will said you were a good guy,” she said.
“I’m glad to hear that. I thought quite a bit of Will.”
“If Will says you’re a good guy, you’re a good guy,” she said, more to herself than to Joe. “I suppose you want to use his office?”
Inwardly, Joe cringed. He had not parked in Will’s space because he felt he was encroaching.
“How many offices are in this building?” he asked.
She ticked her head from side to side like a metronome as she silently counted. “Twentysome. We’ve got biologists, habitat specialists, fisheries guys, and communications people. Plus a library and a conference room. There’s a corral out back. Will’s four horses are kept there.”
“Twenty offices,” Joe repeated. “In my district I work out of my house. In a space about as big as your counter here.”
“That’s interesting,” she said, her tone dismissive. “I hope you don’t get lost here.”
“Me too,” he said.
There were a few beats of silence as Joe and Mary looked at each other.
“Are you going to move in or not?” she asked finally.
“Any empty rooms?”
“A couple. But they have the lousiest furniture, if they have furniture at all. People raid the empty offices for what they want all the time. You’ll need a desk, won’t you? A computer that works?” She was still testing him. “You know you want Will’s office, so just take it.”
He started to protest, but thought better of it. “Okay, ma’am.”
“You can call me Mary,” she said, again with that ghost of a smile, “but if you call me ma’am you’ll get a hell of a lot better service around here.”
He smiled at her.
“The office is upstairs,” she said, and sat down to answer a ringing phone. “All of his files and records are up there.
I’m sure you’ll want to look at them.”
“Yup.”
Joe gathered his briefcase and pack from her counter and began to climb the wide stairs to the second floor.
Mounted elk, deer, and bighorn sheep heads watched his progress with glasseyed indifference, as if they’d seen the likes of him before.
“Hey, Joe Pickett,” Mary called out from her desk.
He stopped on the top step and turned to her.