Additionally, he had time to do preliminary elk counts in the mountains, verify the licenses of fishermen, check the water guzzlers, and actually be home for dinner with his wife, Marybeth, and his three girls. It was as if he were a character in a movie and the scene was being shot in soft focus.
Despite the setting, he found himself scanning the horizon for the ferocious snouts of thunderheads and sweeping his eyes over the ocean of trees for gusts or one-hundred-mile-an-hour microbursts or some other kind of trouble.
He thought later he should have gone with his premonition that something was coming and it wouldn’t be good.
—
BEFORE HE RAN into Butch Roberson, he rode parallel to the western border of Big Stream Ranch, which was owned by a longtime local named Frank Zeller. It was one of the few of the big historic ranches in northern Wyoming still owned by the original family. Frank Zeller was a solid if taciturn man who managed the ranch with care. He ran huge herds of Angus cattle and pastured hundreds of saddle horses for guest ranches throughout Wyoming and Montana. He’d convinced the owners to allow the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to install water guzzlers near the forest boundary to help sustain the elk and mule deer herds not only because he cared for the wildlife, but also because he feared the spread of the brucella bacteria from the wildlife to the cattle if they mixed too much near the big creek on the valley floor.
Water guzzlers were shallow depressions in the ground covered with polyethylene fabric that captured rainwater and surface runoff—as much as five hundred to eight hundred gallons in each guzzler. The money for the guzzlers had come from an EPA grant Joe had applied for several years before, and the agency had sent an engineer up from Denver to help Joe design them. The guzzlers seemed to work. Parched herds from the mountains came down during drought years to drink, and pronghorns and mourning doves came up from the valley as well. His work, once a year, was to ride along the series of guzzlers to make sure the fabric was still intact and hadn’t been blown into shreds by the vicious winter winds, and to check that the depressions hadn’t been filled in with dirt or fouled by decaying carcasses.
Because water itself was rare and precious in a state that averaged less than thirteen inches of precipitation in a year—mostly snow—the wildlife literally flocked to it. As he approached each guzzler, he anticipated an explosion of doves and grouse that got Daisy excited, as well as deer bounding away through the sagebrush and elk crashing up into the timber. Once, the year before, he’d startled a black bear feeding on a deer carcass. The bear woofed at him and caused Toby to crow-hop and nearly dump Joe out of the saddle. But by the time he’d wheeled Toby around with a one-rein stop, the bear had run into the trees with startling speed and power, and it hadn’t come back.
—
HE’D RECEIVED PERMISSION from Zeller to access the ranch. After checking in at ranch headquarters and having breakfast with Zeller and his four Mexican ranch hands, because the foreman insisted he eat, Joe parked his green Game and Fish pickup and horse trailer two miles below the line of guzzlers near a head gate.
Still, parking so far from the Forest Service boundary was a pain in the neck, Joe thought, and a fairly recent one. When they’d installed the guzzlers, the two-track ranch road had joined with a Forest Service road on the other side of the fence. They’d been able to bring their gear and equipment close to the fence so they wouldn’t have to carry it across the folding foothills terrain. But two years before, the Forest Service had decided to prohibit through traffic. They’d fortified the gate, chained it, and locked it with a combination lock. Then, behind the gate, on the Forest Service side, they’d brought in a backhoe to scoop a deep hole into the road and use the dirt as a berm to prevent vehicles from using it. The coup de grâce was a small rectangular brown metal sign that read ROAD CLOSED.
He’d saddled his horse and checked seven of nine guzzlers throughout the day. Number three had required some dirt work, but it didn’t take long, because he’d packed along a shovel with the handle shoved down into his empty saddle scabbard.
—
JOE WAS RIDING between the seventh and eighth water guzzlers, through a stand of thigh-high aspen with their still, spadelike leaves, when he saw to his left that the three strands of barbed wire on the fence had been severed. Each wire was now curled back, leaving a gaping hole in the Forest Service fence. He clucked his tongue and turned his horse and rode Toby up through the small trees to the damaged fencing.
He swung down and grunted when his boots thumped on the ground. His knees ached from being wrapped around Toby’s belly. He tied Toby to a midsize pine tree with enough slack in the rope that his horse could graze, and walked off his aches to the fence.
As he limped, he resisted saying, Getting too old for this.
Joe Pickett wore his red uniform shirt with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department pronghorn patch on the shoulder, thin leather gloves, worn Wranglers, scuffed cowboy boots, and his sweat-stained gray Stetson. His duty belt with his cuffs, pepper spray, and .40 Glock was in the right saddlebag because it was uncomfortable to wear when riding. His radio, citation book, uneaten lunch, and notepad were in the left.
He thought for a moment that he should retrieve his weapon before checking out the fence, but decided against it. Joe despised his weapon, not because of its properties but because he really couldn’t hit anything with it. If it weren’t for a softhearted range officer, there were several times over the last few years when he shouldn’t have officially qualified. Although he was comfortable and fairly accurate with a rifle and deadly at close range with a shotgun, he considered his Glock more for show and always convinced himself that he’d never pull it again for the rest of his career if he could avoid it.
The strands of barbed wire had been snipped cleanly and very recently by a sharp tool, probably a pair of wire cutters. The end of the cut was still shiny and the edges sharp. He visualized each strand snapping back as it was severed, and imagined the pop and the sound of singing wire.
Joe let the wire drop back to the grass and looked around. The nearest road was where Joe had parked his truck and trailer, nearly two and a half miles away. There were no other vehicles parked at that location. Whoever had cut the wire had either walked a long way from the highway—probably six to seven miles, he guessed, and across the muddy pastures and serpentine creek—or had come down from the National Forest above. The vandal had been on horseback or on foot because there were no tire tracks. But if he didn’t drive a vehicle through the opening, what was the point of cutting the fence? Joe wondered.
He photographed the damage with his digital camera and took several close-in shots of the cut tips of the wire, and noted the time and location in his notebook. Then he dug his cell phone out of his breast pocket and opened it, thinking he would call Frank Zeller. Although the fence itself was the property of the U.S. Forest Service, Joe knew from experience it would take them weeks or even months to repair it due to the bureaucracy involved. Reports would have to be made and sent through channels, requests for proposal for repair of the fence would be published, bids would be taken or not from private contractors, and in the end a small army of federal employees would make their way up the mountain with newly requisitioned coils of barbed wire—probably as the first winter storm hit.
Rather, he would tell Frank Zeller, and Frank would send up his crew before nightfall so the cattle and horses belonging to the Big Stream wouldn’t wander through the hole into the public forest. Frank could sort out the repercussions later, Joe thought.