Launching his e-mail program, Joe scanned the incoming messages. Nothing yet from the laboratory in Laramie regarding the samples he had sent them.
One e-mail was from his district supervisor, Trey Crump, in Cody. The subject line said “???” He opened it.
“What in the hell is going on with these cows and a moose?” Crump asked. “And what is it with you and dead cows?”
Joe paused before responding. He ignored Crump’s jibe about dead cows. Two years before, an environmental terrorist, his wife, and another man were killed by cows strapped wtih explosives. Joe had inadvertently been involved in the case. In regard to Crump’s initial question, Joe didn’t want to speculate.
“It’s true,” he typed. “Tissue samples have been sent to Laramie for analysis. I’m keeping an eye on any future incidents, especially with the game population.”
Joe opened his browser, went to the Web site for the Roundup, and copied the link for the mutilation story to his e-mail, so Trey could read it for himself.
“There is probably an explanation,” Joe wrote. “I haven’t figured it out yet but I will try.”
He wrote that he had found massive bear tracks near the moose. “Could this be our rogue grizzly?”
Then he reread his e-mail, deleted the last line, and sent it.
Just as Joe was about to exit his e-mail program, a large file appeared in his inbox, and he waited as it slowly loaded. He recognized the return address as Dave Avery’s. Since the time years before, when samples he had sent for analysis had been “lost” at headquarters, Joe had never regained complete trust in the agency bureaucracy. So sometimes he chose to seek two opinions, one from the lab in Laramie and the other from Dave Avery, an old college roommate, who was now chief wildlife biologist for the Montana Fish and Game Department in Helena. Joe had been best man at Avery’s first two weddings, but had begged off when asked the third time last summer, claiming he might be bad luck.
There was no subject line, and no text, only six JPEG photos attached to the e-mail. Joe leaned back and waited for them to open, annoyed as always at his low-speed connection.
He scrolled down through the photos and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
The photos were of mutilated cattle in a meadow. He recognized the wounds, the bloated bellies, the madly grinning skulls. Joe wondered how Dave could have gotten a hold of these photos so quickly, but then Joe noticed something.
The sky in the top right corner of the second photo was dark and leaden. In the fourth photo, a skiff of snow could be seen in the foreground. The grass was yellowed, almost gray. These photos had been taken in winter. And they had been taken somewhere else.
Breaking the online connection so he could use the telephone, Joe found Dave Avery’s contact details and punched the numbers. His friend answered on the third ring.
“Avery.”
“Dave, this is Joe Pickett.”
“Joe! How in the hell are you?” “Fine.”
“I thought you’d be calling.”
“Yup,” Joe said, scrolling again through the photos on the screen. “I’m looking at these shots of mutilated cattle and wondering where they were taken.”
“Gee, Joe, ever heard of small talk? Like how am I doing these days, or how is the weather in Helena?”
Joe sighed. “So, Dave, how are you doing? What’s the weather like in Helena?”
“They were all taken outside of Conrad, Montana,” Avery answered, “last January. Do you know where Conrad is?”
“Nope.”
“Conrad and Dupeyer. Pondera County. Northwestern part of the state. East of Great Falls.”
“Okay . . .”
“Sixteen of ’em, from July through January of this year,” Avery said. “Maybe eight more, but we couldn’t be sure because the bodies were too old. So maybe two dozen cattle in all. They were found in groups of four to six, although there were a couple loners. No tracks, no reports of vehicles or lights in the area. Unfortunately, no one ever brought in a fresh one. All of the carcasses were bloated and old.”
“Any predation?”
There was a long pause, then “No.” “Was the blood drained out of them?”
“No. It just looks like that. Natural coagulation makes it look like they’re bloodless. Once you run some tests you’ll find that out.”
“Then you got the samples I sent you,” Joe said. “Got ’em at the lab.”
Joe waited. He could hear a Chris LeDoux CD playing somewhere in the background, and somebody—he guessed Dave’s new wife—singing along.
“And?” Joe finally asked.
“I haven’t dug into them yet, Joe, but I know what I’ll find.” “What’s that?”
“A whole lot of nothing,” Avery said. “Well, one thing, I guess, but I’m not sure it’s significant. Believe me, we’ve been analyzing tissue samples up here for nine months. My freezer’s full of cow heads and cored rectums in paper bags.”
“I hadn’t heard a single thing about cattle mutilations up there,” Joe confessed.
“I’m not that surprised,” Avery said. “Conrad’s pretty remote, even in Montana. Besides, they’re just cows.”
Joe smiled at that. He remembered a paper Avery had written in college, proposing that ninety percent of the cattle in the West be removed and replaced with bison. The paper had not been very well received at the University of Wyoming, home of the Wyoming Cowboys.
“Even so,” Avery continued, his voice rising with annoyance, “I got calls from kooks all over the place. The newspaper stories ran in the Great Falls Tribune, so of course they showed up on the Internet, and crazies from all over who are into this kind of thing took an interest. They’re like train buffs, Joe. You never know they’re even out there living among us normal people until some rare train comes through town and they rush the tracks.”
“What about wildlife?” Joe asked. “I found a bull moose mutilated in the same way.”
“Hmmm, no shit?”
“The samples I sent were from the moose.”
There was a pause. “I’ll take a look tomorrow,” Avery said in a serious tone.
“So there weren’t any wildlife deaths reported?” Joe asked again. He sensed that Avery had something to say but was holding back.
“Actually, there were a couple of reports, but they weren’t very credible.” “Who made them?” Joe asked.
Avery sighed. “Joe, there was a guy up here, a self-described expert in the paranormal. He just showed up out of the blue with a kind of laboratory-on-wheels. It’s a retrofitted RV with all kinds of equipment and shit inside. He claimed to represent some foundation somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico that funds him to do research. His name is Cleve Garrett”—Avery spat the name out as if it were a curse word—“and he practically camped on top of me all last summer. He’s got all kinds of theories about how these are alien abductions and how I’m engaged in a governmental conspiracy to keep it all quiet. The fucking dweeb. The moron.”
“So you don’t like him much?” Joe asked facetiously. “Hah!”
“Is he the one who reported the wildlife deaths?”
Joe heard Avery take a swallow of something before answering. “He claimed there were hundreds of cases of wildlife mutilations. He said they were all over the place—on the sides of highways, in the timber, all over. He said the reason we didn’t know about them was because we never thought to look. He said 25 percent of the deer killed on the highway were actually mutilated and dumped, but no one cared to notice. He loves talking to reporters and stirring this stuff up.”
Joe thought about that, his mind racing. How many dead deer, elk, moose, fox, antelope bordered the highways? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Who would think to examine them? They were roadkill.
“He brought in a mule deer carcass once,” Avery said. “And yes, it did look like it had been cut on. But the body was too old to determine anything conclusive. Plus, I didn’t trust the guy not to have done it himself.”