Savage Run

by C. J. Box

Four miles away, a fire lookout heard the guttural boom and ran to the railing of the lookout tower with binoculars. Over a red-rimmed plume of smoke and dirt, he could see a Douglas fir launch into the air like a rocket, where it turned, hung suspended for a moment, then crashed into the forest below.

  Shaking, he reached for his radio.

  2

  Eight miles out of Saddlestring, Wyoming, Game Warden Joe Pickett was watching his wife, Marybeth, work their new Tobiano paint horse, Toby, when the call came from the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s office.

  It was early evening, the time when the setting sun ballooned and softened, defining the deep velvet folds and piercing tree-greens of Wolf Mountain. The normally dull and pastel colors of the weathered barn and the red-rock canyon behind the house suddenly looked as if they had been repainted in rich acrylics. Toby, who was a big dark bay gelding swirled with brilliant white that ran over his haunches like thick paint that spilled upward, shone deep red in the evening light and looked especially striking. So did Marybeth, in Joe’s opinion, in her worn Wranglers, sleeveless cotton shirt, her blonde hair in a ponytail. There was no wind, and the only sound was the rhythmic thumping of Toby’s hooves in the round pen as Marybeth waved the whip and encouraged the gelding to shift from a trot into a slow lope.

  The Game and Fish Department considered the Saddlestring District a “two-horse district,” meaning that the department would provide feed and tack for two mounts to be used for patrolling. Toby was their second horse.

  Joe stood with his boot on the bottom rail of the fence and his arms folded over the top, his chin nestled between his forearms. He was still wearing his red cotton Game and Fish uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on the sleeve and his sweat-stained gray Stetson. He could feel the pounding of the earth as Toby passed in front of him, making a circle. He watched Marybeth stay in position in the center of the pen, shuffling her feet so she stayed on Toby’s back flank. She talked to the horse in a soothing voice, urging him to gallop—something he clearly didn’t want to do.

  Marybeth stepped closer to Toby and commanded him to run. Marybeth still had a slight limp from when she had been shot nearly two years before, but she was nimble and quick. Toby pinned his ears back and twitched his tail but finally broke into a full-fledged gallop, raising the dust in the pen, his mane and tail snapping behind him like a flag in a stiff wind. After several rotations, Marybeth called “Whoa!” and Toby hit the brakes, skidding to a quick stop where he stood breathing hard, his muscles swelled, his back shiny with sweat, smacking and licking his lips as if he were eating peanut butter. Marybeth approached him and patted him down, telling him what a good boy he was, and blowing gently into his nostrils to soothe him.

  “He’s a stubborn guy. A lazy guy,” she told Joe over her shoulder as she continued to pat Toby down. “He did not want to lope fast. Did you notice how he pinned his ears back and threw his head around?”

  Joe said yup.

  “That’s how he was telling me he was mad about it. When he does that it means he’s either going to break out of the circle and do whatever he wants or he’s going to do what I’m asking him to do. In this case he did what he was supposed to and went into the fast lope. He’s finally learning that things will go a lot easier on him when he does what I ask him.”

  Joe smiled. “I know it works for me.”

  Marybeth crinkled her nose at Joe, then turned her attention back to Toby. “See how he licks his lips? That’s a sign of obedience. He’s conceding that I am the boss.”

  Joe fought the urge to theatrically lick his lips when she looked over at him.

  “Why did you blow in his nose like that?” he asked.

  “Horses in the herd do that to each other to show affection. It’s another way they bond with each other.” Marybeth paused. “I know it sounds hokey, but blowing in his nose is kind of like giving him a hug. A horse hug.”

  Joe was fascinated by what Marybeth was doing. He had been around horses most of his life, and by now he had taken his buckskin mare Lizzie over most of the mountains in the Twelve Sleep Range of the Bighorns. But what Marybeth was doing with Toby, what she was getting out of him, was a different kind of thing. Joe was duly impressed.

  A shout behind him pulled Joe from his thoughts. He turned toward the sound, and saw ten-year-old Sheridan, five-year-old Lucy, and their eight-year-old foster daughter April stream through the backyard gate and across the field toward Joe and Marybeth. Sheridan held the cordless phone out in front of her like an Olympic torch, and the other two girls followed.

  “Dad, it’s for you,” Sheridan yelled. “A man says it’s very important.”

  Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks and Joe took the telephone. It was County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum.

  There had been a big explosion in the Bighorn National Forest, Barnum told Joe. A fire lookout had called it in, and reported that through his binoculars he could see fat dark forms littered on the ground throughout the trees. They suspected a “shitload” of animals were dead, which was why he was calling Joe. Dead game animals were Joe’s concern. They assumed at this point that they were game animals, Barnum said, but they might be cows. A couple of local ranchers had grazing leases up there. Barnum asked if Joe could meet him at the Winchester exit off of the interstate in twenty minutes. That way, they could get to the scene before it was completely dark.

  Joe handed the telephone back to Sheridan and looked over his shoulder at Marybeth.

  “When will you be back?” she asked.

  “Late,” Joe told her. “There was an explosion in the mountains.”

  “You mean like a plane crash?”

  “He didn’t say that. The explosion was a few miles off of the Hazelton Road in the mountains, in elk country. Barnum thinks there may be some game animals down.”

  She looked at Joe for further explanation. He shrugged to indicate that was all he knew.

  “I’ll save you some dinner.”

  Joe met the sheriff and Deputy McLanahan at the exit to Winchester and followed them through the small town. The three-vehicle fleet—two county GMC Blazers and Joe’s dark green Game and Fish pickup—entered and exited the tiny town within minutes. Even though it was still early in the evening, the only establishments open were two bars with identical red neon Coors signs in their windows and a convenience store. Winchester’s lone public artwork, located on the front lawn of the branch bank, was an outsized and gruesome metal sculpture of a wounded grizzly bear straining at the end of a thick chain, its metal leg encased in a massive sawtoothed bear trap. Joe did not find the sculpture lovely, but it captured the mood, style, and inbred frontier culture of the area as well as anything else could have.

  Deputy McLanahan led the way through the timber in the direction where the explosion had been reported and Joe walked behind him alongside Sheriff Barnum. Joe and McLanahan had acknowledged each other with curt nods and said nothing. Their relationship had been rocky ever since McLanahan had sprayed an outfitter’s camp with shotgun blasts two years before and Joe had received a wayward pellet under his eye. He still had a scar to show for it.

  Barnum’s hangdog face grimaced as he limped alongside Joe through the underbrush. He complained about his hip. He complained about the distance from the road to the crime scene. He complained about McLanahan, and said to Joe, sotto voce, that he should have fired the deputy years before and would have if he weren’t his nephew. Joe suspected, however, that Barnum also kept McLanahan around because the deputy’s quick-draw reputation had added—however untrue and unlikely—an air of toughness to the Sheriff’s Department that didn’t hurt at election time.

  While they had been walking, the sun had dropped below the top of the mountains, the peaks now no more than craggy black silhouettes. The light dimmed in the forest, fusing treetops and branches that had been discernible just moments before into a shadowy muddle. Joe reached back on his belt to make sure he had his flashlight. As he did so, he let his arm brush his .
357 Smith & Wesson revolver to confirm it was there. He didn’t want Barnum to notice the movement since Barnum still chided Joe about the time he lost his gun to a poacher he was arresting.

  There was an unnatural silence in the woods, with the exception of Barnum’s grumbling. The absence of normal woodland sounds—the chattering of squirrels sending a warning up the line, the panicked scrambling of deer, the airy winged drumbeat of flushed Spruce grouse—confirmed that something big had happened here. Something so big it either cleared the wildlife out of the area or frightened them mute. Joe could feel that they were getting closer before he could see anything to confirm it. Whatever it was, it was just ahead.

  McLanahan suddenly stopped and Joe heard the sharp intake of his breath.

  “Holy shit,” McLanahan whispered in awe. “Holy shit.”

  The still-smoking crater was fifteen yards across. It was three feet deep at its center. A half-dozen trees had been blown out of the ground, and their shallow rootpans were exposed like black outstretched hands. Eight or nine black baldy cattle were dead and still, strewn among the trunks of trees. The earth below the thick turf rim of the crater was dark and wet. Several large white roots, the size of leg bones, were pulled up from the ground by the explosion and now pointed at the sky. Cordite from the explosives, pine from broken branches, and upturned mulch had combined in the air to produce a sickeningly sweet and heavy smell.

  What little daylight was left was quickly disappearing, and Joe clicked on his flashlight as they slowly circled the crater. Barnum and McLanahan followed suit, and the pools of light illuminated the twisted roots and lacy pale yellow undergrowth in the crater.

  The rest of the herd, apparently unhurt, stood as silent shadows just beyond Joe’s flashlight. He could see dark heavy shapes and hear the sound of chewing, and a pair of eyes reflected back blue as a cow raised its head to look at him. He approached the nearest cow and shined the flashlight on its haunch to see the brand. It was the letter V with a U underneath, divided by a single line—the Vee Bar U Ranch. These were Jim Finotta’s cows.

  McLanahan suddenly yelped in alarm, and Joe raised his flashlight to see the deputy in a wild, self-slapping panic, dancing away from the rim of the crater and ripping off his jacket as quickly as he could. He threw it violently to the ground in a heap and stood over it, staring.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” Barnum barked, annoyed.

  “Something landed on my shoulder. Something heavy and wet,” McLanahan said, his face contorted. “I thought it was somebody’s hand grabbing me. It scared me half to death.”

  McLanahan had dropped his flashlight, so from across the crater, Joe lowered his light and focused a tight beam on the deputy’s jacket. McLanahan bent down into the light and gingerly unfolded the jacket, poised to jump back if whatever had fallen on him was still in his clothing. He threw back a fold and cursed. Joe couldn’t see for sure what McLanahan was looking at, but he could make out that the object was dark and moist.

  “What is it?” Barum asked.

  “It looks like . . . well . . . it looks like a piece of meat.” McLanahan looked up at Joe vacantly. The flashlight reflected in his eyes.

  Slowly, Joe raised his flashlight, sweeping upward over McLanahan and then up the trunk of a lodgepole pine and into the branches. What Joe saw, he knew he would never forget.

  Part of it was simply the initial shock. Part of it was seeing it in the harsh beam of a flashlight that lit up the texture, colors, and shapes and threw misshapen shadows about in unnatural and unsettling ways. He was not expecting—and could never have imagined—what it would look like to see the whole of a half-ton creature exploded into a thousand shards of different lengths, hanging down from branches like icicles, as high as his flashlight’s beam would reach. Entrails looped across the branches like popcorn strings on a Christmas tree.

  He gagged as he swept the flashlight from tree to tree on McLanahan’s side of the crater. McLanahan retrieved his own flashlight and started sweeping the trees with the beam as well.

  “I want to go home and take a shower,” McLanahan said. “The trees are covered with this shit.”

  “How about you go back to the Blazer and get the crime-scene tape and your camera instead,” Barnum barked. Barnum’s voice startled Joe. The sheriff had been so quiet that Joe had almost forgotten he was there. He looked over to where Barnum stood, several yards away, his flashlight pointed down near his feet. “There’s a pair of big-ass hiking boots sitting right here. The laces are popped open.”

  The sheriff paused and looked at Joe. “I think the poor dumb son-of-a-bitch who was wearing these got blown right out of them.”

  They weren’t finished taping off the area until well after ten. The clouds that had covered the mountains and kept the sky closed like a lid on a kettle had dissipated, leaving a gauze of brilliant blue-white stars, like a million pinpricks in a dark cloth. The moon was barely more than a thin slash in the sky, providing a scant amount of light to see, so McLanahan and Joe, their flashlights clamped under their arms, fumbled clumsily through and around trees with rolls of the plastic band reading CRIME SCENE CRIME SCENE CRIME SCENE while Barnum tried in vain to maintain radio contact. Joe wondered how much evidence they were crushing or disturbing as they wound the plastic through the timber. He mentioned this to Barnum, but Barnum was busy trying to contact the Sheriff’s Department dispatcher via his radio and just waved him off.

  “We started with an explosion called in by the fire lookout and now we’ve got us a full-fledged murder investigation,” Barnum growled into his handheld between ferocious bouts of static. “We need state forensics as fast as they can get here and we’ll need the coroner and a photographer out here at dawn. We can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “Come again?” the dispatcher asked through more static.

  “She can’t hear a word I’m saying,” Barnum declared angrily.

  “Why don’t you wait and try her again from the radio in the Blazer?” McLanahan asked. Joe was thinking the same thing.

  Barnum cursed and holstered his radio. “I need to take a leak and then let’s get out of here.” Barnum turned and limped away into the dark brush.

  Joe tied off the tape on a tree trunk sticky with pine sap and took his flashlight from where he had been holding it steady under his arm. He shined it on his boots. They were slick with blood.

  “Jesus Christ!” Barnum yelled from the darkness. “We’ve got a body. Or at least half of one. It’s a girl. A woman, I mean.”

  “Which half?” McLanahan asked stupidly.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Barnum answered bluntly.

  Joe didn’t want to look. He had seen enough for one night. The fact that Barnum was coming toward him, limping as quickly as he could around the crime scene tape, didn’t even register with Joe until Barnum stopped two feet in front of him and waved his finger in Joe’s face. Joe couldn’t tell if the sheriff was really angry or he was watching another display of Barnum’s famous bluster. Either way, being this close reminded Joe of how formidable Barnum still was, even after twenty-six years as Twelve Sleep County sheriff.

  “Why is it, Game Warden Pickett, that we rarely if ever have any trouble in my county,” the sheriff’s voice rising as he spoke, “but every goddamned time we find dead bodies strewn about you seem to be standing there in the middle of them?”

  Joe was taken aback by Barnum’s sudden outrage. It was now obvious to Joe that Barnum had been harboring resentment for quite some time because Joe had solved the outfitter murders. Joe could not come up with a good response. He felt his cheeks flush red in the dark.

  “Sheriff, you called me to the scene, remember?”

  Barnum sneered. “But I thought we had a bunch of dead elk.”

  Abruptly, Barnum turned and began to limp in the direction of his Blazer. McLanahan dutifully fell in behind him after giving Joe a look of superior satisfaction. Joe wondered just what it was he had done to arouse Barnum. He guessed it was exa
ctly what Barnum had said: that he was there was enough. The new game warden, two years in the Saddlestring District, still wet behind the ears, who was now right square in the middle of another homicide. Or suicide. Or something.

  There had been few violent deaths in Twelve Sleep County in the past two years aside from the outfitter murders. The only one of note was the rancher’s wife who killed her husband by burying a hay hook into his skull, straight through his Stetson, pinning his hat to his head. In one version of the story that Joe had heard, the wife had gone home after the incident, mixed herself a pitcher of vodka martinis, and then called the sheriff to turn herself in. The pitcher was nearly empty when they arrived a short time later.

  Before following the sheriff and his deputy, Joe stood quietly in the dark. He could hear the rest of the herd of cows grazing closer to the crater. In the distance, a squirrel chirred a message. The wildlife was cautiously moving back in. But there was something else.

  A tremor quickly ran the length of his spine, and he felt the hairs prick on his forearms and neck. He looked straight up at the cold stars, then swept his eyes through the black pine branches. He knew that the fire lookout station was out of range. The black humps of the Bighorn Mountains did not show a single twinkling light of a cabin or a headlight. So why did he feel like someone or something was there with him, watching him?

  Driving back on the interstate toward Saddlestring, Joe watched the little screen on his cell phone until it indicated he was finally receiving a signal. As he had guessed, Marybeth was still awake and waiting to hear from him. He gave her a quick summary of what they had found.

  She asked if the victim was someone local.

  “We have no idea,” Joe said. “At this point we don’t even know if we’ve got one body or two. Or more.”

  She was silent for a long time.

  “A cow exploded?” she finally asked, incredulous.

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “So now we’ve got exploding cows to worry about?”