As Joe opened his door, there was a roar from below that not only ripped through the silence but also seemed to roll through the earth itself.

"Sounds like we got him," Trey said. There was no joy in his voice.

Joe felt a shiver that raised the hair on his forearms and the back of his neck.

SIX

Even before the headlights painted the inside of the culvert trap, Joe could smell the grizzly. The odor was heavy and musky, what a wet dog might smell like if it was twice the size of an NFL linebacker.

"Jesus Christ," Trey said when they could see the bear huddled at the back of the trap, his eyes blinking against the artificial light. "He's even bigger than the last time I saw him."

"Is it 304?" Joe's voice was weak, as if the presence of the bear had sucked something out of him. The bear filled the back of the trap; his huge head hung low, his nose moist and black. A stream of pink-colored saliva hung like a beaded ruby necklace from his mouth to the half-devoured roadkill on the floor of the trap. The bear was frightened, and breathing hard, which made the trap rock slightly back and forth.

"Yup, it's him."

On the seat between them was a tranquilizer gun loaded with a dart filled with Telazol. Once the bear was down, Trey had told Joe, they would need to confirm 304's ear tag and inject the animal with a lethal dose of euthanol to kill it.

Joe drove close to the steel gate on the trap and turned the wheels slightly, giving Trey a good shot at the bear.

"I hate this," Trey said, cocking the tranquilizer gun and aiming it out the window. "I hate this with all of my heart."

The gun popped and Joe saw a flash of the dart through his headlights as it flew into the back of the trap. Joe couldn't see where the dart hit within the thick fur of the grizzly, but he heard the bear grunt.

"Hit it?" Joe asked.

"I'm pretty sure I did."

"How long before he's down for the count?"

"Five minutes."

They waited ten. Joe couldn't tell if the bear was sleeping or not. He could still see eyes reflecting the light, still see the stream of saliva.

Trey said, "I think we're okay now," and slid out of the truck with his shotgun loaded with slugs and a kit containing the lethal dose of euthanol. Joe exited the driver's side with his weapon, and the two game wardens approached the front of the trap. Joe could hear the bear breathing, and the odor was very strong and mixed with the smell of blood from the roadkill. They snapped on their flashlights. Trey shone his on the locking mechanism of the trapdoor, while Joe trained his on the bear.

What Joe saw scared him to death. The grizzly not only blinked at the light, but turned his head to avoid it.

"Trey …" Joe whispered urgently.

"Shit.'" Treyhollered, wheeling around. "The gate didn't lock!"

The grizzly bear roared and charged the front of the trap with such speed and force that the unlocked gate blew wide open, the steel grate clanging up and over the top of the culvert. Joe had never seen an animal so big move so fast, and he knew that if the bear chose him as a target there was nothing he could do about it. He found himself backing up toward the truck while raising his shotgun and he felt more than saw Trey blindly fire toward the huge brown blur as the bear ran toward the dark timber.

304 crow-hopped the instant Trey's shotgun went off as if kicked from behind, then kept going. Joe aimed at the streaking form, saw it, lost it, and didn't pull the trigger.

For a moment, they both stood and listened to the bear crash through the timber with the sound and subtlety of a meteorite. Joe was surprised he could hear anything over the sound of his own whumping heartbeat.

It took nearly twenty minutes for Trey and Joe to calm down and assess the situation. Joe was glad it was dark so that Trey wouldn't see his hands shaking.

He held the shotgun close to him, listening for the possible warning sounds of the bear doubling back on them, while Trey examined the trapdoor to try to figure out why it didn't work.

"I don't know what went wrong," Trey said morosely, pulling himself clumsily back to his feet and snatching his shotgun from where he had leaned it against the trap, "but it looks like I might have hit that bear. There's a splash of blood out here on the grass."

They followed the bear's churned-up trail through the meadow to where it entered the trees. There were flecks of blood on blades of grass and fallen leaves. Joe felt his heart sink.

"We've got a wounded grizzly and there's nothing more dangerous than that," Trey said, his voice heavy. "We've got to hunt him down."

Trey called dispatch and gave the dispatcher their coordinates. "We'll stay out here until we find him. Please call my wife and Marybeth Pickett in Saddlestring and tell 'em what the situation is. Oh-and call Jackson Hole. Tell 'em Joe Pickett is going to be a little late for his new job."

For the next three days they drove the primitive back roads, pulling Trey's horses in a trailer, tracking the wounded bear. They found where he had fed on a rotting moose carcass, and picked up his track where he had crossed a stream. The bear had tried to break into another cabin-they could see deep gouges on the front door and the shutters as well as a gout of blood on the porch. Joe found it remarkable and sickening how much blood this bear had lost, and both he and Trey kept expecting to find the bear's body any minute. Joe admired the big bear nearly as much as he feared it. He would have liked to simply let it go and die in peace, if there was a guarantee that the bear would die.

The tension in the situation, and between Joe and Trey, thickened. Trey admonished himself for taking a wild shot that wounded the bear, and Joe felt that Trey was blaming himfor not firing. Joe blamed himself as well, and replayed the bear escape over and over in his mind as he rode. He wasn't convinced that he had frozen, but he sure hadn't shot the bear. Things had happened so quickly that he hadn't had a sure shot. Had he?

On the second afternoon, they lost the signal. They drove to the highest hill they could get to and parked. The only thing they could do, Trey said, was hope the bear wandered back into range of the receiver.

"We might as well get right to it while we're waiting," Trey said, his tone even more rock bottom than usual. "We've got a hell of a mess in Jackson, Joe. I want you to know what you're getting yourself into."

Joe nodded.

Trey made a pained face. "I'm getting more than a little concerned that some of my game wardens are letting the pressure get to them. I wish I knew how I could help them deal with it. But I don't."

Joe asked, "What do you mean?" But he knew. In the past year, a game warden at a game check station in the Wind River mountains had gotten into an argument with his son, shot him, then turned the pistol on himself. No one knew what the argument was about. Another game warden in southern Wyoming, assigned to a huge, virtually uninhabited district, simply vanished from the state. He was later found in New Mexico at the end of a three-week bender. He would tell anyone who would listen to him that the locals had been out to get him, that he had run for his own life. A departmental investigation could find no evidence of his charges, and he was dismissed.

Unlike any other law enforcement personnel Joe was aware of, game wardens were literally autonomous. They ran their own districts in their own way. Monthly reports to district supervisors like Trey were required, but because supervisors had districts of their own to contend with, they rarely micromanaged game wardens in the field. This was one of the many aspects of his job that Joe valued. It was about trust, and competence, and doing the right thing. But this kind of autonomy brought a secret lonely hell to some men, and ravaged them.