While they ate, Smoke noticed Joe looking at the.44 Magnum.

"Something wrong?" Smoke asked through a mouthful.

"Do you ever take that off?"

"Nope."

"Have you ever considered carrying bear spray?"

"Nope."

"Have you ever had to use it?"

"Yup," Smoke said. "This steak needs something. You got any ketchup or hot sauce?"

Smoke surprised Joe by gathering up the dishes and dumping them in an old plastic tub that he'd filled with hot water from a pot on the stove. Joe said, "You don't have to do that."

"Camp law," Smoke said, not turning his head. "You cooked, so I clean. Have another snort. And give me a re-ride on mine, will you?"

Joe picked up the bottle and began to pour it into his cup, then thought better of it. He refilled Smoke, and put the bottle back down with a thump so Smoke would think Joe had taken some. Instead, Joe added more water to his cup.

"I've got to admit," Smoke said, washing a plate with his back still to Joe, "you are more wily than I gave you credit for when I met you outside of the Sportsman's. You must have known at the time you'd be coming up here into the backcountry, but you didn't give it away."

Joe didn't respond.

"That was an old trick of Will's too. He liked to keep everyone guessing. Shit, if I was the game warden, I'd probably do the same damn thing. This is a lot of country for just one man, ain't it?"

"Yes, it is."

"You ever seen anything like this before?"

"My district is in the Bighorns," Joe said. "We've got some rough country."

"Nothing like this," Smoke said, turning and taking a long drink, "nothing like this."

He banged the empty cup down. "How 'bout another re-ride?"

"It's your whiskey," Joe said, pouring again.

Smoke cleaned the last of the plates and suspended the skillet over the soapy water. "Do you wash your cast iron, or keep it seasoned?"

"Seasoned, I guess," Joe said.

"Good man," Smoke said, wiping out the skillet hard with paper towels. "Not many folks know anymore how much good taste and character you lose in your food when you wash the damn skillet every night with soap. Cast iron is meant to be seasoned."

Smoke sat down at the table when he was through, the drying towel still draped over his arm. "I suppose I ought to think about getting back to my hunters pretty soon," he said. "They'll be wondering if a bear got me."

Joe felt a tightening in his chest. It didn't feel right to let

Smoke go back happily to his camp, only to arrest him in the morning.

"Something wrong?" Smoke asked, studying Joe's face.

"Let's have a nightcap," Joe said, putting off his decision.

"Nightcap, hell," Smoke said, pouring generously again, "let's tie one on."

"This is my thirty-second year up here," Smoke said wistfully. "I love it as much as my first."

Joe nodded.

"Things have changed, though. I see it in Jackson all the time. But I never thought I'd see it up here, and it pisses me off."

Smoke shifted and leaned across the table, his face thrust at Joe. Joe stanched an impulse to jump back.

"I'm a third-generation outfitter," Smoke said. "I got the same camp my dad and my grandpa used. A couple of years ago I sat down during a blizzard when we couldn't hunt and I figured out that we've probably brought twenty-five hundred dead elk through that camp over the years. That's a hell of a lot of meat. I also figured out that over the years we've probably contributed over a half a million in license fees, and we've spent about four million in the county to keep our business running. I'm the best there is at what I do, so I feel pretty damned good about it, overall. I get to show these out-of-staters there is still some wildness left in this world, and that they'd better show some goddamned respect for it. I've been known to send a whiner or two home, even at a financial loss to me, if that son of a bitch don't respect what we've got up here."

"Twenty-five hundred elk is a lot of elk," Joe said.

Smoke weighed Joe's comment for a minute, his eyes narrowing, then decided it was neutral, not critical.

"It is," Smoke continued, "but in the big scheme of things, it's not enough. Because of federal policies, we've got too goddamn many elk up here to sustain a healthy herd. There's no good reason to have ten thousand elk come down to be fed on the refuge, like pets. They're weak as a herd, and they spread diseases among themselves. The herd needs to be culled. It's a goddamned meat farm, except that shooting them for meat is looked down on."

Joe smiled. "You sound a little like Pi Stevenson."

"Damnit!" Smoke shouted, thumping the table with his hand and making the cups jump. "Don't get me started on her.Her stupid solution is to let the herds grow until they all starve to death in front of our eyes. Then listen to her bitch."

"I can imagine," Joe said.

Suddenly, Smoke broke out into a grin. "I used to have these kinds of discussions with Will Jensen all the time, right at this table. You're a lot like him."

"You're not the first to say that."

"It's a compliment," Smoke said. "I liked the hell out of old Will, even though he wanted to arrest me and throw my big wide butt in jail. He would have, you know. But I respected him, he was a man of his word. Too bad he went nuts in the end."

"Were there people who hated him enough to kill him?" Joe asked abruptly.

The question didn't faze Smoke. "A few, I suppose. Your friend Pi Stevenson supposedly made some threats. I probably did too, when I was drinking. He made me pretty mad a couple of times."

"But in the end you got along?"

"In the end he was crazy," Smoke said. "Taking up with that Ennis woman the way he did. He even brought her up here one time, which told me he was forgetting who he was and where he was at. I consider this a cathedral, and he violated it. It got worse with the fights he got into, and then getting arrested himself…"

Joe watched Smoke closely.

"Before all of that, though, we coexisted pretty damned well, I'd say. We gave each other a wide berth. I think he even admired me, in a way, although he never actually said it. I'm one of the few who doesn't mind the bear population increasing or the wolves the Feds released on us," Smoke said. "They're a part of all of this. We need 'em to get the herd sizes down to a level that makes some kind of sense. But I have arguments with the way those animals are portrayed by some folks, like they're on a higher plane than us humans. It's pretty damned simple, really. The Feds-and people like Pi Stevenson-don't love the wolves and bears as much as they hate people. They're winning the game, it seems to me. That pisses me off too."

Joe found himself warming to Smoke, enjoying his company and his passion. Smoke was like a lot of the people he knew in Twelve Sleep County. He wondered, though, at what point Smoke's rage turned into violence. Joe admonished himself not to become complacent with this man.

"You know about that meat town they're trying to build outside of Jackson?" Smoke asked, his face wide with incredulity.

"Beargrass Village," Joe said. "I know about it."

"Not only is there no beargrass in Wyoming," Smoke said, his face flushing red, "but the whole fucking idea is to create an artificial environment for raising pure meat for millionaires! Jesus! They think that's real, somehow. It ain't real. This"-Smoke sat back, pointed toward the window- "thisis real. It's just messy, and it's complicated, but it's real. Why'n the helldon't they experience this?"