But a live situation trumped a cold one.
“Are there any injuries?” Joe asked the dispatcher, knowing the conversation was likely being monitored by other game wardens across the State of Wyoming as well as law enforcement and nosy neighbors throughout Twelve Sleep County.
“Negative,” the female dispatcher said. “The party reports bullet holes in the sidewall of his truck, but they didn’t hit anybody.”
“Yikes.”
“I’ll ask the RP to stay out of the line of fire but remain at the scene until you get there.”
“Do you have a name for the RP?” Joe asked, flipping open his spiral notebook to a fresh page while driving down the rough road, then uncapping a pen with his teeth.
The name was Burton Hanks of Casper. While Joe bumped up and down in the cab, he scrawled the name and Hanks’s cell phone number on the pad. His two-year-old yellow Labrador, Daisy, fixated on the wavery pen strokes as if she desperately wanted to snatch the pen out of his grip and chew it into oblivion, which she would if she got the chance.
“Did you run the name?” Joe asked the dispatcher.
“Affirmative. He’s got a general license deer tag and said he is attempting to scout Area 25.”
Joe nodded to himself. Area 25 was a massive and mountainous hunting area that included mountains, breaklands, and huge grassy swales. The official opening day was October 15, a few weeks away. Meaning Hanks was likely a trophy hunter out on a scout to identify the habitat of the biggest buck deer. Locals would literally wait until the opener to go up there, but serious trophy hunters would be out well in advance to mark their territory.
Joe had mixed feelings when it came to serious trophy hunters, but he put them aside.
As he motored down the washboarded county road, leaving a plume of dust behind him, the issue wasn’t scouting or trophy hunting or the ethics of trophy hunters. The issue was contained in two words: shots fired.
Before he reached the foothills to begin his climb into the timber and out the other side to Indian Paintbrush Basin, a herd of seventy to eighty pronghorn antelope looked up and watched him pass from where they grazed among the sagebrush. A herd that big — all does and fawns — meant there would be a bruiser of a buck somewhere watching over his harem, keeping them in line. Joe saw the buck over the next small hill. The animal was heavy-bodied and alert, with impressive curled horns with ivory tips and an alpha-male strut to his step.
Over the next hill, five young bachelor bucks, like pimply-faced adolescents with too much time on their hands and testosterone in their blood, milled about in a tight circle butting heads and, Joe assumed, plotting a coup attempt against the big buck to take charge of the harem. The bachelors strutted and butted at each other, and watched Joe go by with what looked like lopsided sneers.
Joe checked his wristwatch as he nosed his pickup through a steep-sided notch in the hill that would narrow ahead before the road climbed the last rise. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. He was expected home by six so he and his wife, Marybeth, could attend his daughter Lucy’s musical at the Saddlestring High School. She was a costar in a politically correct production he’d never heard of and was scheduled to sing a song called “Diversity.” He didn’t want to miss it, yet he did. Nevertheless, he hoped the shots-fired incident could be resolved quickly enough that he could make it home on time.
As the road got rougher and he pitched about within the cab, Daisy placed both her paws on the dashboard for balance and stared through the front windshield as if to provide navigation support.
“Almost there,” Joe said to her, shifting into four-wheel-drive low to climb the rise. The surface of the old two-track was dry and loose. He liked the idea of coming onto the scene from an unexpected direction. The sudden appearance of a green Game and Fish vehicle sometimes froze the parties in a dispute and gave him time to assess the situation on his own before confronting them or figuring out what to do. Most of all, it allowed him to see a situation with his own eyes before the involved parties weighed in.
He broke over the ridge and the vista to the east was clear and stunning: the foothills gave way to a huge bowl of grass miles across in every direction. The bowl — called Indian Paintbrush Swale, after the state’s official flower — was rimmed on three sides by timbered mountains either dark with pine in shadow or bright green if fused with afternoon sun. Between the swale and where Joe cleared the ridge top was a late-model maroon Chevy Avalanche faux pickup parked just off the county road. Two men stood with their backs to him at first, then wheeled around, obviously surprised that he’d come from behind.
One of the men, standing near the front of the Avalanche, was tall and heavy with a long mustache that dropped to his jawline around both sides of his mouth. He wore a battered brown cowboy hat with a high crown and had a deeply creased and weathered face that indicated he either worked outside or spent a lot of his hours outdoors. The second man looked to be around the same age — fifty-five to sixty — but was clean-shaven and softer in features. He was hatless but wore a starched chamois shirt and new jeans that looked hours out of the box.
The man in the hat waved Joe over. The second man was obviously subordinate to the large man and hung back to stay out of the way and observe.
Joe put his pickup into park and let Daisy out. The dog followed him a few inches from his boot heels and kept her head down, sniffing the grass and sagebrush along the way.
The man in the cowboy hat, Burton Hanks, said he was a little surprised Joe didn’t know of him.
“I’m the guy who broke the Boone and Crockett record for a mule deer in Wyoming last fall,” Hanks said. “Scored 201 and three-eighths overall. Six points on the right side and five on the left. The inside spread was twenty-eight and a quarter,” he said proudly.
“No offense,” Joe said, “but I don’t pay much attention to records. I’m here because someone reported shots fired. I assume you’re the reporting party.”
Hanks was chastened, but said, “That’s me.”
“So,” Joe said, “who was shooting at whom?”
“Some third-world asshole shot at us!” Hanks bellowed, gesturing toward his pickup. “All we were doing was starting to cross that basin down there. Come look at this if you don’t believe me.”
Joe followed Hanks around the Avalanche.
“Here’s the evidence,” Hanks said, pointing at the small bullet hole in the metal sheeting of the rear bumper guard.
“Yup,” Joe said, leaning close to the bumper. The hole was clean and the bullet was likely lodged somewhere in the sidewall of the bed. “Eight inches lower and it would have hit the tire,” Joe said.
“And five inches higher and it might have punctured the fuel line and blown us to kingdom come,” Hanks added. “Here, there’s another one,” he said, pressing his index finger against a second hole in the sidewall a few feet in back of the cab. The bullet had pierced the outside sheet metal and exited on the top rail of the pickup bed, leaving angry sharp tongues of steel. Which meant the shot had been fired from a lower elevation than the truck at the time, Joe thought.
“Let me get a couple of pictures,” Joe said, returning to his own truck for his digital camera. “Did you get a look at who did the shooting?”
“Hell yes,” Hanks said. “And you can put away that camera, Warden. I can point you at who shot at us and you can go down there and arrest him right now.”
Joe said, “You mean he’s still there?”