Blood Trail

by C. J. Box

  He said, “When your teacher called me this morning to ask if I could come talk to you before my press conference this afternoon, I jumped at the chance. Because any opportunity I have to address our nation’s youth is vitally important. I appreciate it very much, and I thank you, Mrs. Whaling.” He nodded to her as he said her name, and she blushed.

  “Life without hunting is not only possible, it’s important,” Moore boomed. “Think about it. There was a time when it was a matter of life or death for human beings to hunt animals in order for people to survive. If the caveman didn’t go out and kill a mastodon, his babies didn’t eat. And even a hundred years ago there were still places in these United States where people hunted for subsistence because they had no choice.”

  Klamath Moore suddenly stopped and swept his eyes across the room, pausing for great effect, before whispering, “That time has passed.”

  He made it a point to find and hold sets of eyes until the viewer had no quarter and was forced to look away, conceding Moore’s superior focus and passion. His voice was deep and raspy, his words dramatic, if well rehearsed, Sheridan thought. She recognized much of the exact wording from his website.

  “I’m not saying there aren’t still a few places on this earth where hunting is necessary, for remote tribes in remote places. But in this day and age, where technology has made it possible to feed us all without our having to go out and get our hands bloody, hunting is an anachronism. Can anyone in this room tell me why there are men in the richest country on the face of the earth who find it necessary to take a gun they shouldn’t be allowed to have in the first place and go out into our nature—that’s right, it belongs to all of us—and kill an innocent animal with a high-powered rifle simply for the twisted fun of it? How would you like it if somebody killed your pet dogs and cats, or your little sisters or brothers . . . simply because they loved doing it? It’s the same thing, believe me.”

  Sheridan stopped sketching, realizing she had been idly working on a scene of a falcon dropping from the sky to hit a rabbit. Trying not to draw attention to herself, she moved her arm over the drawing so no one could see it.

  As Klamath Moore went on, Sheridan found herself looking at the woman with him, who she assumed was his wife. The woman sat on a chair next to Mrs. Whaling’s desk with her hands in her lap, her eyes on Moore. She was beautiful, with high cheekbones, obsidian eyes, and long dark hair parted in the middle. She wore jeans and a loose chambray shirt over a white top and little makeup because it wasn’t necessary. Sheridan guessed she was Native, and she had a kind of calm serenity about her that was soothing to behold. She’d not said a word, but her presence seemed to bolster Moore’s message in a way that was hard to explain. As her man spoke, she would occasionally look down into the stroller next to her and brush her sleeping baby’s apple-red cheeks with the back of her fingers. Sheridan resented Klamath more—and her teacher—for not introducing the woman and baby as well.

  “Hunting is a dying activity in the United States, I’m happy to say,” Moore said, “but it isn’t dying fast enough. Most studies say less than five percent of Americans hunt. That’s around fifteen million hunters. Around here, I’d guess the percentage is much higher, maybe thirty percent? Fifty percent? Too damned many, that’s for sure. But whatever the number, these so-called sportsmen kill over two hundred million birds and animals every year. Two hundred million! That includes four million deer, two hundred thousand elk, twenty million pheasants, and over twenty-five thousand bears. Think about this kind of slaughter on a mass scale—it’s horrendous! My mission in this life is to hasten the overdue death of blood sports and to raise awareness about what it really is, what it really does. I firmly believe that every time a rich man pulls the trigger and an animal dies, we as human beings die just a little bit as well. In nature, predators kill only the sick and weak. But hunters kill the biggest, healthiest, and strongest in the herd, which plays hell with the balance of nature. We will never achieve moral greatness until this practice is abolished.”

  From behind Sheridan, a male voice mumbled, “What bullshit.” It was Jason Kiner. Jason’s father, like Sheridan’s, was a game warden. Sheridan had fought with Jason the year before but they’d mended fences, just like their fathers had. Sheridan still wasn’t sure she liked him, but she felt a growing kinship with him as Moore went on because he, like her, felt their fathers were being attacked here in their classroom.

  “Ah,” Moore said, stopping and raising a stubby finger in the air. “I hear some dissent. That’s okay, that’s okay. I encourage it. It’s the American way and I’m all for the American way. And I expect it, here in the heart of what I like to call the Barbaric States. Do you know what a barbarian is?”

  No one raised a hand.

  “The definition I like is thus: lacking refinement, learning, or artistic culture. That pretty much describes a hunter, I’d say. Think of him out there,” he said, gesturing out the windows toward the Bighorns, “swilling beer, farting, trying to keep his pants up because he’s so fat, using high-tech weapons to kill Bambi and Thumper so he can cut their heads off and stick them on his wall. Do you know how the word barbarian came to be?”

  Again, no hands.

  “The ancient Romans came up with it to describe the hordes of slimeballs who were trying to take them down. They spoke a different language which, to the Roman ear, sounded like ‘Bar-bar-bar-bar.’” He said it in a stupid, drooling way that made several kids laugh. “That’s what I hear when so-called hunters tell me why they do it. They get all high and mighty and say they’re honoring the animal they killed, or they’re getting right with nature, or some other kind of nonsense. But when they go on and on all I can hear is—” He stopped, made his face slack and his eyes vacant, opened his mouth to appear like an idiot, and said, “Bar-bar-bar-bar-bar.”

  Sheridan noticed how his wife did a well-practiced smile, and how several kids laughed, getting into it. Mrs. Whaling seemed a little uncomfortable with the way things were going, Sheridan thought. Her teacher’s eyes darted around the room more than usual.

  “Do you know what hunters actually do?” he asked. “Do you know what takes place? I’ve got no doubt some of your relatives probably hunt, this being the Barbaric States. But how many of you have actually been there?”

  He paused. The silence started to roar.

  Finally, Jason Kiner raised his hand. Moore nodded at him, as if approving. “Any more?” he asked.

  Two boys in the back cautiously raised their hands as well. One was Trent Millions, a Native who split his time between his father’s house on the reservation and his mother’s house in town. Trent appeared puzzled by the question, since hunting on the reservation was done without controversy and was a matter of course.

  Taking a deep breath, Sheridan raised her hand.

  “Four of you?” Moore said. “Just four? I would have thought more. I guess hunting is dying out even in the bloody heart of the Barbaric States.”

  Then he looked at the kids one by one with their hands up and said, “You’re all murderers.”

  Which startled Mrs. Whaling and made her turn white. “Mr. Moore, maybe—”

  He ignored her.

  “If you kill an animal for the joy of killing, you’re a murderer,” he said. Sheridan felt the eyes of most of the room on her now, but she kept her hand up. She felt her face begin to burn with anger and, surprisingly, a little shame. “Okay,” he said, “you can put your hands down now if you want.”

  He shook his head sadly, said, “Blessed are the young for they know not what they do.”

  Sheridan kept her hand up.

  “Right now as I speak to you,” Moore said, pointing out the window, “there is a man up there in those mountains who is killing hunters. Unlike the innocent animals hunters kill, this man seeks and destroys other men who are armed and capable of fighting back. But this man who does to hunters what hunters do to innocent wild animals is considered a sicko, a mad dog, and that’s why I’m her
e. I’m here to support him in his noble quest to raise awareness of what is happening over two hundred million times a year in this country. If we condemn him and say his methods are brutal and deviant, how can we turn around and say what hunters do is not? This man, whoever he is, should be celebrated as a hero! He’s fighting for the animals who can’t fight back themselves, and I, for one, hope he’s just getting started.”

  Sheridan shot a look at Mrs. Whaling, who was now as white as a porcelain bowl.

  “Not that I condone murder, of course,” Moore said, quickly backtracking. “I condemn it when it’s done to animals, and I condemn it when it happens to human beings, who are just animals themselves—but animals who should know better.

  “For those of you who haven’t murdered an animal, let me tell you how it’s done,” Moore said. “And those of you proud murderers feel free to correct me if I get any part of this wrong.

  “Once the animal is down, after it’s been shot, the first thing you do is take your knife out and slit its throat, right? So it will bleed out into the ground. Many times, the animal isn’t even dead yet. Then you turn it on its back and slit it up the middle, right? So you can reach inside and pull its guts out into a pile, right?”

  There were several gasps, and at least one girl put her face in her hands. Another plugged her ears with her fingers. Sheridan kept her hand up, glaring back at Moore.

  “When that’s all done and you’re covered with blood and your hands stink of guts, you cut the head off the innocent animal and take it to a taxidermist. Then you proudly put it up on the wall as your trophy, as proof of what a big man you are.”

  He turned his eyes directly on Sheridan. “Or in your case, what a big girl you are. So tell me, how did it make you feel?”

  “You’re asking me?” Sheridan said. She noticed that the woman was looking at her as well, with a surprising nod of sympathy. In fact, the woman turned from Sheridan and glared at her husband.

  “I’m asking you,” Moore said. “Did you like it? Did you like taking the life of an innocent animal? Did it please you in some way?”

  Sheridan’s face was burning, and her throat ached.

  “Klamath,” the woman whispered, “leave her alone.”

  “Did you like the warm blood on your hands?” he goaded.

  “I’ve never killed anything,” Sheridan said.

  Moore was perplexed. “Then why did you raise your hand?”

  “I just wanted to show I oppose you,” she said, her voice firm. “I’m an apprentice falconer. I’ve watched falcons hunt. They don’t just kill the sick and weak, so I know you’re lying. Plus, I see a big difference between hunting animals and killing a man. And I think you’re an asshole and you should stop trying to intimidate us.”

  “Sheridan!” Mrs. Whaling gasped.

  Sheridan thought she detected a slight smile in the woman’s eyes.

  The bell rang, saving the day.

  Jason Kiner whooped. Jarrod Haynes said, “This is why I love that girl.”

  Klamath Moore stepped back to let the classroom empty, but Sheridan could feel his eyes burning through her. She kept her head down and clutched her books to her chest. She could hear Mrs. Whaling apologizing to Klamath Moore’s back about Sheridan’s language.

  As she passed the woman, Sheridan felt a hand on her arm. She looked over to see the woman’s large dark eyes on her. Then the woman reached up and stroked Sheridan’s cheek with the back of her fingers, the same way she’d stroked her sleeping baby.

  Sheridan didn’t jerk back, but was shocked by the intimacy of the gesture.

  “You’re the daughter of the game warden, aren’t you?”

  Sheridan nodded her head.

  “You’re terribly misguided, but I hope your father knows what a brave daughter he has,” she said, and looked at Sheridan with a sudden sadness that, for some reason, made Sheridan want to cry for the second time that morning.

  14

  JOE SAT ALONE in the middle of a row of red molded plastic chairs in the hallway of the Saddlestring Hospital near the secure doorway to ICU. On the other side of the doors, surgeons worked to save Robey Hersig’s life. Joe rubbed at the stubble on his chin and covered his eyes with his hand and tried to get a few minutes of sleep. When he drifted off, though, violent recollections of the night before came rushing back as if his mind had just been waiting for the opportunity to try to expel them from his memory by force. Like the thought of Chris Urman and him carrying Buck Lothar’s dead body through the dark forest, while Urman moaned with shame and guilt. Then Lothar’s body slipping at times through their hands to crumple into a pile on the forest floor until they fashioned a travois of two stout lodgepoles and secured the body so they could drag and carry it through the brush. Or Joe’s growing comprehension as they struggled through the black, unforgiving timber that he and Lothar had been tracking not the killer but Urman the entire night while the killer slipped around them and returned to the original crime scene. Remembering his guilt for not immediately identifying himself when Lothar stepped out into the meadow cradling his automatic weapon, and wondering if his choice to remain silent was tactical—as he thought at the time—or cowardly resulting in Lothar’s death. Thinking of Robey’s lack of response on the radio and failure to respond to Joe’s periodic three-shot signaling, the first indication that something tragic had happened to his friend. Then finding Wally Conway’s dead body and Robey bleeding out next to his slumping pickup at the same time Phil Kiner and Deputy Reed arrived twenty minutes too late to provide backup. Picturing the garish image of Wally Conway’s face in the beam of a flashlight, his mouth open, the bright red poker chip next to his extended purple tongue. And the shocking realization that of the four of them who’d been on the mountain just two hours before, he was the only one still alive and unhurt, and that everything they’d done was misguided and stupid and epically wrong; that Robey, his friend and colleague and fishing partner since he’d been in Saddlestring and one of the most honest and good-hearted men Joe had ever known, in all likelihood wouldn’t survive the morning.

  “YOU SHOULD get yourself cleaned up, Joe.” County coroner Will Speer stood before Joe and looked down through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with pained sympathy in his eyes. Speer had a light brown thatch of hair and a graying mustache, and wore an open white lab coat.

  Joe sat up, blinking, momentarily confused. He hadn’t heard Speer walk down the hall and didn’t know how long he’d been half-sleeping, suffering through the nightmares. Joe could smell himself: dried sweat and mud, with flowery bloodstains on his Wranglers and the sleeves of his red uniform shirt, half-moons of black blood under his fingernails that wouldn’t wash out. “Maybe so,” Joe said, nodding toward the ICU entrance, “but I think I’ll wait until I hear about Robey.”

  Speer nodded. That he didn’t volunteer words of encouragement was not lost on either of them.

  “Does Nancy know?” Speer asked.

  “She was in Casper at a meeting,” Joe said. “She’s on her way here.”

  “I bet that wasn’t an easy conversation.”

  Joe shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Let’s hope things calm down out there,” Speer said, gesturing vaguely with his chin in the direction of the mountains. “I only have three drawers down in the morgue and they’re all full. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”

  It took Joe a moment to figure out what Speer meant. “Frank Urman, Lothar, and Wally Conway,” Joe said. Meaning if Robey didn’t pull through, Speer wouldn’t know where to put his body.

  “At least we were able to reunite Mr. Urman’s head with his body,” Speer said with bitter humor.

  Joe winced. He’d forgotten about the hysterical cell phone call he’d received from Randy Pope as he, Kiner, and Reed drove down the mountain with all the victims. At the time, Joe cradled Robey in his arms, hoping the makeshift compresses they’d fashioned would stanch the flow of blood from the entrance and exit wounds in Robey’s chest
and back. Pope had screamed about finding the head mounted in his room, saying, “Now this is personal !” like the tagline to an action movie. Joe had said, “I’m busy right now,” and closed his phone.

  It was clear now to Joe what the killer had been doing between the time he shot Frank Urman and when he returned to the crime scene—mounting Urman’s head on a plaque in Pope’s hotel room. The savagery of the act was incomprehensible, and Joe did his best to shove it aside for later when he could better process the information.

  “I suppose you heard,” Speer said, “the governor closed all hunting and access to state lands and he’s asking the Feds to do the same.”

  Joe hadn’t heard, but he wasn’t surprised. Pope and the governor’s worst-case scenario had materialized. Joe was numb and completely unmoved by the news, although he knew what kind of uproar was likely to erupt statewide. All he cared about now was what was happening on the other side of the ICU doors. He had several messages on his cell phone from the governor, but hadn’t the will nor the energy to return them. He had four from Randy Pope. They’d been left while he was giving his statement to Deputy Reed earlier. Sheriff McLanahan had stood off to the side, a disdainful look on his face. Disdainful but triumphant, a look that said, You froze me out of the investigation, and just look what happened. . . .

  Chris Urman was in custody in the sheriff’s department, but Joe expected him to be released quickly. Joe told Deputy Reed that Urman had simply defended himself, firing only after being surprised by Lothar and being fired upon. Joe knew Urman felt horrible about what had happened, and had dismissed any suspicion he may have had of him on their trek back to the pickup to find Robey and Conway. Joe’s pickup was still on the mountain, shot up and bloodstained. He’d need to send a tow truck for it. Another year, another damaged truck.