“That’s what I’m saying. You can borrow my binocs and I’ll point him out to you.”
Joe was surprised. Previously, a series of likely scenarios had circled around in the back of his mind: the shooter was also a trophy hunter intending to spook the competition; the shooter was zeroing in his rifle when the Avalanche got in the way; the shooter was poaching elk and was surprised by the intrusion. It didn’t occur to him that the shooter would still be in the basin twenty minutes later.
He frowned. The last thing he needed — or wanted — was a situation where a man with a rifle was hidden away in isolated terrain. A whole new set of scenarios — more dangerous than the first set — began to emerge. Joe knew that by the time the sheriff’s department arrived, the shooter could either escape or bunker in for a long standoff.
Hanks handed Joe a pair of Zeiss Victory 8×42 binoculars and arched his eyebrows in anticipation of a compliment. The binoculars were known to be the best, and were among the most expensive optics available, at over $2,000 a pair. Joe took them and refrained from commenting on them. But looking through them was like being transported into a clearer and sharper world than what was available to the naked eye.
Joe swept the grassy basin and the lenses filled with the backs of hundreds of sheep he hadn’t noticed before. The herd was so large it had melded into the scenery of the basin but now it was obvious. The sheep were moving only a few inches at a time as they grazed on the grass, heads down, like a huge cumulus cloud barely moving across the sky. Unlike cattle, sheep snipped the grass close to the surface and left the range with the appearance of a manicured golf green. Which is one of the primary reasons sheepmen and cattlemen had gone to war over a century before.
“All I see is sheep,” Joe said to Hanks.
“Keep going,” Hanks said. “Look right square in the middle of that basin.”
Joe found a distant structure of some kind and focused in.
“The sheep wagon?” Joe said.
The ancient wagon was parked in the middle of the giant swale. It had a rounded sheet metal top painted white that fit like a muffin top on a squared-off frame. Sheep wagons were hitched to vehicles and towed to where the herds were and left, sometimes for weeks. They had long tongues for towing, water barrels cinched to the sides, small windows on the sides of the metal cover skin, and narrow double doors on the front. The black snout of a chimney pipe poked through the roof.
There wasn’t a pickup parked beside the wagon but a saddled horse was tied to a picket pin, as well as a black-and-white blue heeler dog.
“That’s where the shots came from,” Hanks said.
“And all you were doing was going down the road minding your own business?”
“I don’t like the insinuation,” Hanks said haughtily. “We were driving on a county road through private land, legal as hell. When I drove the Avalanche down there from up here, I heard the first bullet hit before I even heard a shot. Then the second one hit. I stopped the truck and glassed the basin and saw that sheep wagon. The guy who shot at us had the top door open on the wagon and I could see a rifle barrel sticking out. I never saw him clearly. He didn’t close the door until we hightailed it back up here and called 911.”
Joe lowered the binoculars and handed them back. “You’re sure you didn’t do anything to provoke him?” he asked. “Were you spooking his sheep?”
“I goddamned told you exactly what happened,” Hanks said, turning to his friend. “Isn’t that right, Bill? I didn’t leave anything out, did I?”
Bill said, “Nope. All we were doing was driving along the road and that nut down there started popping off at us. We didn’t threaten him or nothing. And we weren’t even close to his sheep yet.”
“Why are you even asking these questions?” Hanks said to Joe. “Don’t you believe us? You saw the bullet holes.”
“I did. But this is the first time I ever heard of him getting aggressive and shooting at somebody.”
“You know him?” Hanks asked, incredulous.
“His name is Ander Esti. I recognize his horse. He’s been around this country for a long time — before I ever got here. He’s not the type to just shoot at somebody.”
“Well, this time he did, Warden,” Hanks said.
Joe nodded. He could detect no discrepancies in their story, although he couldn’t yet be sure.
“Where are you boys staying in town?” Joe asked.
Hanks said the Holiday Inn.
“Why don’t you go on back there for now. I’ll drive down and talk to Ander and I’ll bring him in to the county jail. I’ll stop by the Holiday Inn on my way home and let you know where things stand.”
Hanks and Bill looked at each other, obviously a little suspicious of the methodology Joe had suggested.
“Go back, relax, have a beer,” Joe said. “There’s no reason for the three of us to go charging down there. Ander Esti is… well… a unique individual. He can get a little excitable—”
“That’s fucking obvious,” Hanks huffed.
“There’s no need to spook him,” Joe continued. “I think I can handle this best on my own and I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Hanks turned somber. “Are you sure you don’t want me to cover you? I have my .308 Winchester Mag along with me,” he said, chinning toward the Avalanche. “Bill brought along his AR-15.”
Joe hardened his expression and said, “If you stick around here much longer, I’ll need to start asking you two why you brought your hunting rifle along a month before the season opens.”
Hanks and Bill looked at each other, and that seemed to settle it. Joe guessed Hanks to be one of those trophy hunters who maybe just couldn’t pass up a record-setting buck even if it was before the season opened. They agreed to meet Joe later and climbed into their Avalanche and started the slow, four-wheel-drive trek back to the highway.
When the Avalanche was out of view, Joe said to Daisy, “There’s something wrong here.”
The first time Joe met Ander Esti was on a similarly warm September day eight years before. Joe was assisting an exploration survey crew hired by the state to confirm corner posts and benchmarks that had been established in the 1890s, when the state was first mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey. The crew needed to reestablish property lines in the Pumpkin Buttes area for a new plat of the ownership of private and state lands. Because Joe was the warden for the district and knew the territory as well as most of the local landowners, he was asked to be on call if there were access issues for the survey crew, who had flown in from Virginia and were completely new to the vast and empty terrain.
When one of the surveyors did his triangulation of a possible benchmark from a hilltop, he determined that the ground they needed to stake happened to fall right in the middle of a sheep wagon that had been parked in a semi-arid mountain valley. The surveyor was uncomfortable approaching the wagon — he’d never seen such a thing in his life — and told Joe he’d witnessed a man wading through a herd of sheep with a rifle resting on his shoulder. So Joe volunteered to approach the sheepherder and suggest that together they could roll the wagon a few feet forward or back so a survey stake could be driven into the ground.
Joe knew at the time that the best way to approach sheepherders — who were often left with the herds for weeks at a time — was head-on and as obvious as possible. The men employed by ranchers to tend the massive herds were often Basque and some barely spoke English. Fresh water and food was delivered to them every ten days to two weeks by the rancher who employed the Basques. Because of their lack of human interaction, they could become isolated and jumpy, especially when coyotes or eagles were preying on the stock. Rarely was a sheepherder in a situation where his rifle wasn’t within reach.