So Joe drove slowly and deliberately toward the wagon, letting the stock part out of the way in front of his truck. As he neared the wagon he got out and shut his pickup door with a bang and called out. Although there was a saddled horse tied to the side of the wagon and a curl of smoke from the chimney pipe, the door didn’t open and the curtains inside didn’t rustle, even though it was the middle of the day.
He walked up to the wagon with his right hand on the grip of his weapon, but removed it when he reached the door. If the sheepherder looked out and saw him standing there with his hand on his gun, he didn’t want to appear to provoke him. As he reached up to knock on the door, he heard a pair of voices coming from inside. Joe paused.
They were speaking in Spanish, Basque Spanish. It was obvious from the back-and-forth cadence that one man was telling the other a series of jokes. The second man found the jokes hilariously funny, and snorted when he laughed. He laughed so hard the wagon rocked.
Two herders in one wagon was unusual, Joe thought, but not unprecedented. The inside of a sheep wagon was spartan and simple — a table with a bench seat on each side, a compact pantry and cupboard at floor level, a small woodstove for cooking, and a raised bunk at the back for sleeping — perhaps the earliest version of a camper trailer. Two normal-sized men inside would likely find the situation suffocating.
Joe knocked on the door and instantly the joking stopped.
He waited a beat, and knocked again and identified himself.
Finally, there was a scuff of boots on the plank-wood floor inside and the top door swung open to reveal a dark and compact man in a snap-button cowboy shirt, a loose silk bandanna hanging from his neck, and black eyes so small and intense that Joe stepped back.
It was Ander Esti, and he was alone and it was obvious he was just finishing up his lunch. He’d been telling jokes to himself. And laughing.
After they’d rolled the wagon ten feet back, Joe asked Ander if he often told jokes to himself. Esti gestured that he didn’t understand the question, and Joe let it drop.
Later, during the winter, Joe spotted Ander in the front row of their church during services. The man sat alone wearing a clean but ancient snap-button western shirt and he appeared to listen intently to the minister. He left after services, before Joe could talk to him, and he showed up again seven weeks later.
Joe asked the minister about the man, and the reverend chuckled and said Ander attended a different church every week in Saddlestring and was on his second rotation of the winter. He was generous with his donation in the plate but had no interest in joining. And he wouldn’t show up again once the snows melted and the ranchers were hiring.
Ander Esti was the kind of character, Joe came to find out, who moved through the community and somehow left no impression he’d ever been there. During the winter months, he’d be on the periphery of the small Christmas parade put on by the downtown merchants or alone in the top row of the high school basketball game. He never spoke to anyone, and when he was gone no one recalled he’d been there.
Ander seemed to float through the seasons with a light footprint and a particular pattern: work all summer and fall in the high country without a day off, then winter in town like a ghost, slowly spending the wages he’d made until it was summer again. He was self-sufficient and never applied for unemployment insurance or welfare when he didn’t work, and never showed up for free lunch at the community center.
Joe noticed him, though, because he made a point of it. But he never got to know the man well and never had a conversation with him. And when he waved at Ander, the man appeared not to recognize him.
The sheep wagon Joe approached was the same unit where he’d originally met Ander but even more in need of a new coat of paint. Shards of green were curling off the base of the wagon and windows of galvanized metal could be seen on the sloped roof. It was warm enough that there was no curl of smoke from the stove. Ander Esti’s roan gelding looked thinner than the last time, and his dog more vicious.
Joe grabbed the mike from the dashboard and called it in. Because he was in the swale, reception was poor and filled with static.
“This is GF-24,” he said to the dispatcher two hundred and fifty miles away in Cheyenne. “I’m approaching the scene of the incident. It’s a sheep wagon belonging to the C Lazy U Ranch north of Kaycee. The perp in question appears to be inside and I know him. His name is Ander Esti…” Joe spelled out the name.
“Are you requesting backup?” the dispatcher asked.
Joe smiled to himself. “Negative. I’ll call in when I’m clear.”
Like before, Joe made sure his presence was known as he neared the wagon. He braked twenty yards from the front. Despite what the two hunters had claimed, Joe couldn’t imagine Esti being hostile. Nevertheless, he checked the loads in his shotgun before climbing out, but decided not to carry it to the front door of the wagon. Instead, he propped it inside the open door of his pickup. As he walked toward the front of the wagon, he touched the grip of his Glock with his fingertips but left it in the holster. He couldn’t conceive of a need to draw it out.
The sheep on all sides created a cacophony of mewls and abrasive calls. The blue heeler growled at him, showing its teeth and straining and lunging at a leash rope. The dog seemed unnaturally aggressive and upset, Joe thought.
Hundreds of sheep surrounded the wagon. They were so tightly packed together that they looked and functioned as a two-and-a-half-foot containment wall. Joe could hear them munching dry grass, and the sound became a low hum in the background.
“Ander? It’s Joe Pickett,” he called out as he neared the wagon but stopped well short of the dog. “Ander, you need to come out so we can talk. Some guys scouting for elk said you shot at their truck. They’re gone now — it’s just me.”
Although there were no sounds from inside, Joe noticed a very subtle shift in the wagon — weight being transferred from side to side, as if Esti was pacing. But it couldn’t be pacing because there wasn’t enough floor space. He must be shifting from the stool near the door to the bench at the table, Joe thought. He tried to picture Ander inside. The man was probably guilt-ridden and anxious about what he’d done. Joe couldn’t imagine what might go through a man’s mind after months of isolation with only a horse, a dog, and hundreds of sheep to talk to. Or what a man might think if he looked up and saw a strange pickup in the distance.
“Ander, come on out, but leave your rifle inside. Open your door so we can talk.”
Joe heard an impatient sigh and the latch of the upper door being thrown.
And Bryce Pendergast stood there holding Ander Esti’s lever-action carbine, pointing it directly at Joe’s face. Pendergast’s head was shaved and there were new tattoos on his neck and temple. He was shaking with rage or fear or meth and his eyes were wide open and wild.
Behind him, in the wagon, a female voice said, “Just shoot the motherfucker, Bryce. Just shoot him now.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Pendergast hissed to the woman. Then to Joe: “So, it’s you.”
Joe felt the blood in his face drain out and the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“Where’s Ander?” Joe asked. “Do you have him with you in there?”
“Who?” Pendergast asked, his voice high and tight.
“Ander Esti. The sheepherder.”
“So that’s his name,” Pendergast said.
Joe wondered what exactly that meant.
“Okay, game warden,” Pendergast said, as he dropped his left hand from the front stock of the rifle but kept it aimed at Joe. “You need to unbuckle that belt and let it drop to the ground. Do it slow.”