“Smoke?”
“It really hurts, it really hurts, it really hurts . . .”
Joe looked up toward the cabin, wondering stupidly if there was a firstaid kit inside. But the outfitter had taken two twelvegauge slugs in his chest. There was no way anyone could fix him now, or save him.
“Smoke, can you hear me?”
It really hurts, it really hurts, it really hurts . . .
With a rattle that sounded exactly like a playing card in a bicycle spoke, Smoke seized up and his hand clenched back and his last bloodsmelling copper breath wheezed out of his chest like a bellows.
Joe stayed motionless, his eyes closed tight, until the sun broke over the mountains moments later and he felt the sudden warmth on his back. Letting Smoke’s hand drop, he stood and his head reeled, and he nearly fell on top of the body. His side screamed at him, and his right arm was shaking uncontrollably. For the first time, he looked down. Blood had soaked through his three layers of clothing and glinted darkly in the morning sun. He took a sharp breath through gritted teeth, hoping the pain would stop searing him, but it didn’t. He needed something to put the fire out.
Blindly lurching through the trees, almost tripping over his sleeping bag, he made it to the rocky edge of the lake and pitched forward into the icy water.
As the water numbed him and pink curlicues of blood swirled to the surface from where the bullet had creased his ribs and inner arm, he thought, I’ve shot and killed a man, and it was awful.
Thirty
Leading two horses, Joe Pickett rode south out of the Thorofare, on the trail to Turpin Meadows, in what became a kind of trek of lamentation. Smoke’s body was wrapped in the ground cloth Joe had slept on the previous night, and it was roped over the back of the outfitter’s own sorrel, the third horse in the string. Joe led his procession through camp after camp along the trail, too injured and tired to fully engage the guides and hunters who wanted to hear the whole story. The only men whom he told were the hunters from Georgia in Smoke’s camp, with their hired guides looking on. The guides stared at the canvas bundle on the back of their boss’s horse.
“We wondered where he went this morning,” Smoke’s lead guide had said, shaking his head sadly. “I always knew that hot head of his was bound to get him into trouble.”
There was no anger, no accusations aimed at Joe from Smoke’s men, which surprised him. What he saw was stoic sadness. And overt selfishness: “We can still hunt, can’t we?” one of the hunters asked.
“I don’t see why not,” the guide said, with just a hint of disgust.
“I’m sorry and all,” the hunter said, looking to the other hunters for support, “but some of us paid real good money for this.”
“I know,” the guide said, eyeing his clients and spitting a long brown stream of tobacco juice between his boots.
Then, to Joe: “Sometimes I wish I’da never gone into the service industry.”
Before setting out that morning, Joe had patched himself up. The crease from Smoke’s bullet had split the skin on his side and sliced a threeinch gash on the inside of his right arm. The bleeding from his side was profuse. He had lost more blood than he realized, which made him lightheaded. He grimaced while he pinched the wound together, catching a glimpse of a white rib, which had also been nicked. There was a roll of gauze in the cabin but no medical tape to hold it to his side, so he used silver duct tape instead. He was a fan of duct tape, once telling Marybeth that it was one of the five greatest inventions of modern history. Painfully, he pulled on a fresh shirt over the dressing and tossed the heavy, wet one into the cookstove to burn.
The news preceded him as he rode. Outfitters communicated with one another in a combination of ways—facetoface meetings, radio calls, and satellite phones, known as the “outfitter telephone line.” Normally, the “line” was used to pass along word that the elk were moving, or that a guide had been bucked off his horse and was injured, or that a hunter was sick or disillusioned and needed a ride back to the trailhead. In this case, the news was that the new game warden had shot and killed the most infamous among them, Smoke Van Horn, the Lion of the Tetons, in a gunfight.
As Joe rode south, they anticipated him in each camp. In one of the camps he had checked on the day before, both the guides and their clients stood silently on the side of the trail with their cameras, and Joe heard the whispery clicks of shutters as he rode by.
A hunter dressed in headtotoe camo gear said, “It’s like something out of the Old West!”
Joe was slumping in his saddle, fighting shock and the exhaustion that came from it, when he reached the edge of Turpin Meadows at dusk. The Tetons were backlit by the setting sun, their profiles sharp and black against a bruisepurple sky.
As he led the horses toward the campground, he saw emergency vehicles, ambulances, and sheriff ’s department SUVs in the lot, and people milling around. Apparently, Joe thought, one of the outfitters had been able to get the news to Jackson.
When they spotted him coming, he watched the small crowd stop what they were doing and turn toward him as one, some raising binoculars. One of the sheriff ’s men unnecessarily whooped his siren for a moment, to signal Joe to come in.
“You’ll need to turn over all of your weapons,” Sheriff Tassell told Joe as he helped him down from his horse. “We’ll get you to the hospital and then I’ll need a statement from you.”
Joe nodded grimly and dismounted. He could feel the scab of the wound in his side crack open under the dressing.
“How bad are you hurt?” Tassell asked.
“Not too bad,” Joe said. “I need some stitches, I think.
Lost some blood.”
“You need the ambulance to take you in?” Tassell asked.
“No.”
Tassell turned to his deputies and gestured toward the third horse. “Untie the body and put it in the ambulance,” he told them. “Tell the driver to go straight to Dr. Graves’s.”
Joe walked slowly toward his pickup.
“You’re not driving yourself,” the sheriff called after him, exasperated. “What in the hell are you thinking?”
Randy Pope stepped out from the small crowd. He wore crisp jeans, new boots, a snapbutton shirt, and a denim jacket.
“I talked to Trey Crump,” Pope said. “He said to tell you you’re on administrative leave until the investigation of the shooting is concluded. As you know, it’s routine procedure.”
Joe nodded. “I figured that would happen.” Looking Pope over, he said, “Looks like you’ve been to the westernwear store.”
He ignored Joe’s comment. “He said to tell you to give him a call as soon as you could.”
“I planned to,” Joe said.
Pope stepped in close. “So was it a gunfight, like they say?”
“It was more like assisted suicide,” Joe said glumly.
“Smoke fired first.”
“Then you shot him?”
Joe nodded, too tired to speak.
Pope sighed and looked toward the darkening sky. Stars were beginning to poke through like needle pricks in dark fabric. “I need to work overtime just to keep up with the paperwork you generate,” he complained.
Tassell turned his SUV over to a deputy and drove Joe’s pickup, while Joe slouched in the passenger seat.
They were on the blacktop when the sheriff said, “This is Will Jensen’s truck, isn’t it?”
Joe nodded. “Mine burned up.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I heard about that. Things tend to happen around you, don’t they? Just like Barnum said they would.”
Joe didn’t respond.
“Will tried for years to build a case on Smoke, and in the three days you’re up there you kill the guy.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Joe said, but didn’t want to explain.
He was thinking about the contents of the last spiral notebook. How it was all coming together. How ugly it had been for Will at the end.