A brass urn sat squarely on a stand atop a red tapestry in front of the podium. Damn, Joe thought, there wasn’t much left of Will, just his ashes in the urn and a framed photo of him in his red game warden uniform. In the photo, Will was saddling one of his horses and turning to the photographer with a loopy smile on his face. Who knew what was so funny at the time? Joe wondered. On the other side of the urn was a framed photo of the Jensen family—Will, Susan, his two sons wearing illfitting jackets and ties. The photo looked to be a few years old to Joe because the boys appeared to be the same age they had been when he saw them in the Jensen house for the first and only time. In the photo, the family looked stiff but happy. All those ties made Will, and the boys, uncomfortable, he guessed.
Joe had spent the morning in the office, reading through the first three spiral notebooks and halfway through the fourth. Patterns were emerging. During the deep winter, in January when the notebooks all began, Will spent a good deal of time in the office, writing up reports on oftencontroversial policy issues that he was required to comment on, and visiting with local ranchers, outfitters, and the Feds. Spring was consumed with more reports and comments, but also preparations for the summer and fall, working with his horses, repairing tack and equipment, signing off on outfitter camp locations, and making recommendations for season lengths and harvests. During the summer months, he was out in the field nearly every day, checking licenses of fishermen on the rivers and lakes, doing trend counts of deer, elk, and moose, or horsepacking into the backcountry to check his remote cabin and repair winter damage. Fall, as Joe suspected, was a whirlwind of activity once the hunting seasons started and opener after opener arrived. The pattern in the fall was the lack of a pattern, and at first Joe thought Will was flying by the seat of his pants, dashing from place to place. Will patrolled the front country and backcountry seemingly at random, covering his district in a way that seemed haphazard. One day he would be in the southeastern quadrant in his pickup, the next he would be on horseback in the northwestern corner—where he might be gone for days. But then Joe saw the logic in it, and admired the way Will worked.
The only way a single game warden could be effective in nearly nineteen hundred miles of rough country was to be as unpredictable as possible, to keep his movements erratic. If he patrolled in a systematic way, sweeping from north to south or methodically along the river bottoms, the poachers and violators could anticipate his location and change their plans to avoid him. But by moving from here to there, front country to backcountry, changing his itinerary and location, they would never know when and where he might show up. Joe had no doubt the hunters and fishers—and especially the professional outfitters—shared information about Will’s whereabouts. If they didn’t know when he’d be patrolling the outfitter camps, and from what direction, they’d have to be ready for him at all times, meaning proper licenses, good camp maintenance, and adherence to rules and regulations.
Joe had experienced the “familiarity” of hunters and fishers before, and had learned to be friendly but closedmouthed about his intentions. Over a beer at the Stockman’s Bar or with his family at a restaurant or function in Saddlestring, someone occasionally sidled up to him in all apparent innocence and asked him about his day—where he’d been, if he’d seen game, where he might be going tomorrow. Although the questions were often just conversation, sometimes they were more than that.
He’d learned not to say anything.
Joe turned in his pew when he heard the door open behind him and a murmur of voices. Susan Jensen arrived at the chapel with her two boys and three older people, two women and a man. The older man, no doubt their grandfather, ushered the two young boys ahead of him and down the aisle. Will’s boys were small versions of their father, Joe thought. Stolid, serious, allboy. The younger one took a swipe at the older one when the older boy crowded him, and the embarrassed grandfather leaned forward to gently chastise him.
Susan looked to be much older than Joe remembered; her face was pinched, pale, and drawn. She had shortcropped brown hair, blue eyes, and was well dressed in a professionallooking suit. Joe stood, and she looked up and saw him. A series of emotions passed over her face in that instant: recognition, gratitude, then something else. Revulsion, Joe thought.
“I’m real sorry, Susan,” he said, moving down the aisle toward her.
“Thank you for coming, Joe,” she said. Her eyes were blank, but her mouth twitched. Joe guessed she was cried out. “It’s good of you to come.”
He didn’t want to admit he was there to take over Will’s district. He wanted her to think he was in Jackson on his own accord.
“Are other game wardens here?” she asked, looking quickly around the empty chapel.
“The assistant director will be coming,” Joe said, wishing it was the director, or someone other than Randy Pope.
“Okay,” she said vacantly. He could tell she was disappointed, but resigned to it. There was a lot going on in her mind, he thought. If Will had been killed as the result of an accident or at the hands of another while on duty, the chapel would have been filled with red shirts. But that was not the case.
“Are you coming to the reception later?” she asked.
He hadn’t thought about it. “Yes,” he answered.
“Good.” Then: “Is your wife here? Marybeth?”
“She couldn’t make it,” he said. “School, too many things going on.”
“I know how that goes,” Susan said, her eyes already wandering from Joe. “The singleparent household.”
Joe tried not to cringe.
“Maybe I’ll see you at the reception,” she said, extending her hand. He took it. It was icy cold.
...
Joe had just sat back down, still reeling from the look of distaste that had passed over Susan Jensen’s face, when the back door banged open and a rough man’s voice said, “Damnit.”
Joe turned to see a man closing the door with exaggerated gentleness. Then the man wheeled and entered the chapel, blinking at its darkness.
The man was big, barrelchested, thicklegged, a wedge shape from his broad shoulders in a sheepskin coat to the points of his laceup highheeled cowboy boots. He wore a stained and battered gray felt hat, which he immediately removed to reveal a steelgray shock of uncombed hair. His bronze eyes burned under wild toothbrush eyebrows, and he squinted into the room like a man who squints a lot, looking for distant movement on mountainsides and saddle slopes. He was a man of the outdoors, judging by his leathery face and hands and thick clothing.
“Didn’t mean to throw the door open like that,” he mumbled to no one in particular.
And Joe stood to say hello to Smoke Van Horn.
Smoke pumped Joe’s hand once, hard, and let go.
“You’re the new guy, huh?” Smoke said, too loudly for the occasion, Joe thought. He could sense Susan Jensen and her boys turning to see what the commotion was about.
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied softly, attempting to provide an example to Smoke to lower his voice.
“Hope we get along,” Smoke said, just as loudly as before. “Me and Will had some issues. But he learned to get along with me. For a while, at least.” Smoke barked a laugh at that.
In the notebooks he had read that morning, Smoke Van Horn’s name had come up several times. Smoke had been accused of salting by another outfitter as well as by a National Park ranger. Salting involved hiding salt blocks to draw elk to where his paying clients could kill them. Will had written that he’d asked Smoke about salting, and although Smoke hadn’t really denied it, he hadn’t admitted it either.