Trophy Hunt

by C. J. Box

  Joe asked Avery to contact him if he found anything unusual in the tissue samples. They talked for a few moments about game-management issues, and Avery reported what was happening in Montana with whirling disease in the rivers. Joe told Avery about confirmed findings of chronic wasting disease in mule deer in southern Wyoming. They agreed to keep in better touch.

  Then Joe cradled the telephone and sat back.

  He was still sitting there when Marybeth rapped on the door and opened it. She was in her nightgown; the short, black one he liked.

  “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

  Joe looked at his wristwatch, surprised to see that it was 11:30.

  “I didn’t kiss the girls good night,” he said, alarmed.

  “What have you been doing in here?”

  “Work. I talked to Dave Avery.”

  Marybeth smiled, rolling her eyes.

  “I remember Dave being sober on his wedding day,” she said. “I realized I didn’t even know him. He was drunk almost all of college.”

  “He’s a good biologist, though,” Joe said, “and a good friend.”

  “What did he say about the moose?”

  Joe looked away, then back. “We may have a problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are the horses in the barn or in the corral tonight?” Joe asked.

  Marybeth frowned. “They’re in the corral, why?”

  “I think we need to start putting them in the barn at night,” Joe said, standing up and clamping on his hat.

  8

  SHERIDAN PICKETT STEPPED OUT of the shadowed gnarl of river-bottom cottonwoods. She looked up and searched the dull, gray sky in silence until she saw what she was looking for. She felt a small shiver of excitement, and dread. They were up there, all right.

  As she had been instructed, she went no farther into the clearing. Behind her, on the other side of the thick old trees, was the Twelve Sleep River. The river was placid and low, the water in it clear and nearly still this late in the season. A rusted metal bridge spanned the river but was blocked off to vehicles, because it was old and unsafe. She had walked across it a half hour before, trying not to look down at the gaps between the wood planks where she could see the water. Her footfalls on the bridge seemed unnaturally loud as they crossed. Her breath came in puffs of condensation. It was a cold fall day, and the clouds that had pulled a blind over the wide-open sky looked like they could bring rain or even snow.

  She was dressed warmly in jeans and her mother’s old, canvas barn coat with the corduroy collar and too-long sleeves. Her dad had insisted that she wear a pullover blaze-orange vest, since it was hunting season, and she did so, even though she felt a little like a human highway cone. A black headband held back her blond hair and had a dual use if she needed to pull it over her ears to keep them warm.

  She waited, as she had been told to do. Before her was a clearing bordered by skeletal dark trees. Tall, khaki-colored grass furred the clearing, broken up by solitary sagebrush and a few young river cottonwoods. A lone, deep green pine—a perfect-sized Christmas tree, she thought—added the only real color. The tree was as out of place as she was, she thought. The clearing was eerily still. She felt a little scared.

  The night before, she had the dream again. It was the same as before, with the mist pouring across the forest like water released from a small dam. But the dream continued on. This time, the mist stopped at the forest edge and proceeded no farther. There was something out there that stopped it, made it cautious. A standoff was taking place, but in the dream she couldn’t see what opposed the advance of the mist. Whatever it was had a solid presence, and it had traveled a long way to get there to mount a challenge. This time, she didn’t tell her dad about the dream.

  After nearly a year of apprenticeship in falconry, which consisted mainly of the care and feeding of Nate Romanowski’s two peregrine falcons, and his almost whispered lectures concerning the philosophy of falconry, this was a special lesson. For the first time, Nate had brought her hunting. Hunting with falcons, Nate had told her, was a whole different thing than the kind of hunting she might be familiar with from her father, the game warden. In this instance the agents of the kill weren’t rifles or shotguns, but the birds themselves. Humans were there to flush out the prey like bird dogs, so the falcons could rocket down from the sky and kill what had been scared out into the open. Nate had told her that many times she wouldn’t even see the prey she had flushed until the falcon swept down and hit it.

  “This is how mankind conceived of an air force,” Nate had said. “This is where it all started, the idea of striking targets from the air.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sheridan had asked.

  “Fire from the sky. Hell from the heavens,” Nate had said. “This is where it all began.”

  “Huh?”

  The lessons took place after school, unless she had basketball or choir practice or Nate was out of town. Her mom or dad would drive her out to Nate Romanowski’s cabin near the river, and Nate took her home afterward and often stayed for dinner. Her mom and dad seemed to have a special relationship with Nate, although they never really talked about it with her. They seemed to trust Nate, or they never would have okayed the lessons. After all, Nate was unmarried and solitary, and Sheridan was twelve. She knew there was something different about Nate, something serious. He was not like anybody she had ever met, certainly not like anyone her parents hung around with, like the Logues.

  Nevertheless, her dad seemed oddly comfortable with Nate, like they shared some kind of old experience together, while at the same time she saw her father eyeing Nate coolly when he thought no one was looking. It was as if he were trying to decide something. Her mother, on the other hand, made special meals on Fridays, including salads and desserts. While this hadn’t meant much at first, it did now, since her mom had become so busy with her new business that regular sit-down dinners had become more infrequent. Sheridan had noticed an expression on her mother’s face at times when Nate was at their table. It was a look Sheridan had rarely seen before. It was a kind of a glow, the kind of look her mother sometimes had when she and Dad were going out somewhere—dinner or a movie—at night. The look reminded Sheridan just how attractive her mother was to some men. The expression didn’t last long but it made Sheridan uncomfortable and made her want to act out. Sometimes, Sheridan knew, she acted like a brat at the table when this happened, like picking on Lucy or demanding a second helping of something that was no longer there. She didn’t know why she did this, other than to divert attention. But there was something about the way her mom looked at Nate. Maybe that was why her dad acted so differently when Nate was around. There was something adult going on, Sheridan knew, but she wasn’t sure what it was. But she didn’t want to ask about it, or say anything. She didn’t want to give them a reason to question the propriety of the falconry lessons.

  Not that the lessons were anything special so far. The first few months it seemed like all she did with the falcons was clean the mews where they lived and help feed them. The feeding was kind of gross, with the way Nate pulled freshly killed rabbits and pigeons apart to give to the birds. She was fascinated by the way the falcons ate—they finished off not only the flesh but the fur, feathers, and bone—but wondered when they would ever actually do some falconry. Nate had shown her the tools of the sport, such as leather hoods, jesses (strips of leather attached to their talons so he could hold them upright in his hand without them flying away), and lures made of duck wings or leather, which could be swung in a circle by a string to draw the birds’ interest. He had given her old books to read about the ancient sport, mostly written by dead Scotsmen. Some of the books had old black-and-white photos in them. What got Sheridan, though, was that in the old photos the only thing that looked authentic and real were the birds themselves. The falconers in the pictures were from another age. The men (she had yet to see a photo of a woman falconer) wore silly hats with short brims, and baggy knee-length pa
nts, and they were smoking huge, drooping pipes that made her want to laugh out loud. They reminded her of Sherlock Holmes, except fatter. Luckily, Nate looked nothing like that.

  She stood dutifully still, as Nate had instructed, and waited for him to break from the opposite tree line as he had said he would. He said he would come out once the birds had been successfully released to the sky and after they had climbed to the right altitude.

  It had been six days since the mutilated cattle had been discovered on the Hawkins Ranch, and Sheridan noticed how something that had been a family thing—the dead moose in the meadow—had now become the subject of discussion not only in town but also in school. Her sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Morris, had even asked her to remain in her desk after school so he could ask her about it. Since she had thought his request was related to a history research paper she had practically copied off of the Internet, she had been relieved to find out he was only interested in the moose and the cows.

  Sheridan had thought it was cool that her teachers asked her about things like this; things that her dad was in the middle of. She told Mr. Morris about finding the moose, and what the animal looked like. He asked about the cows, and she was coy, as if she knew more than she was telling, which she didn’t. She wished she had paid more attention to her mom and dad when they had been discussing it at dinner, but she didn’t say anything to Mr. Morris about that.

  She heard the sharp snap of branches breaking, and looked around. Nate Romanowski emerged from the dense trees on the other side of the opening. Sheridan studied him. Nate’s movements were liquid and rangy and had a cautious, feline quality about them, as if he were ready to pounce on something or somebody in an instant if he had to. He was tall, with wide shoulders, and had a long, blond ponytail. His sharp, green eyes engaged hers. She had never encountered a stare like Nate’s. He was strange in that when he looked at her, his eyes never wavered. He was so direct. Sometimes, he unnerved her with his stare and she looked away. She had learned that he meant nothing by it. That was just the way he was.

  For some reason, he was slowly shaking his head.

  “Do you want me to go?” she asked, thinking that perhaps she had done something wrong.

  “No.”

  She noticed that he had tilted his face skyward. She followed and looked up. As she watched, the once-distant black specks were becoming more pronounced. The two peregrines he had released where diving back down.

  “Why are they coming down?” Sheridan asked, thinking—hoping—that the birds were diving toward unseen prey.

  Nate shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Did I do anything wrong?”

  Nate looked across the clearing at Sheridan. His voice dropped apologetically. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were perfect.”

  “Then why are they coming down?”

  Nate took another step into the clearing.

  Nate said, “I’ve never seen this happen before.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “No,” he said so softly that she barely heard him. “I’ve had them take off when they saw a rabbit or something in a different clearing, or I’ve had birds fly away forever. But I’ve never seen peregrines just take themselves out of the hunt altogether.”

  The falcons dropped as if they were about to strike targets—wings tucked, talons out and balled—but they suddenly flared at treetop level. She could hear the urgent whispering sound as their wings shot out and caught the air to slow them down. Seconds later, both birds flapped noisily and their feet outstretched before descending into the tall grass. She watched as Nate approached them. When he bent and lowered his thick, leather welder’s glove, the birds refused to mount it, and stayed hunkered down in the grass.

  Nate said, “This is not normal.”

  “Why don’t they come to the fist?” Sheridan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nate said. “It’s like they’re afraid to show themselves.”

  Sheridan walked slowly across the opening, toward where the birds had landed.

  “Feel it?” Nate asked, his eyes narrowed. “There’s something in the air. Low pressure or something.”

  Sheridan stopped again. Her heart was beating fast, and she did feel it, although she couldn’t describe what it was. It was like pressure being applied from above, from the sky. In a fog, she watched Nate bend over and physically place one of the peregrines on his fist. Usually, they were eager to hop up on it. He straightened up with the falcon on his arm, only to have the bird release its grip and drop to the side. The leather jesses that were tied to its talons were grasped in his fist, and the bird flopped upside down, shrieking and flapping violently. Sheridan felt a puff of air from them as the falcon beat its wings.

  “Shit,” Nate cursed, lowering the bird to the ground. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

  “Be careful with him.”

  “I will, and sorry about saying shit.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Nate met her eyes, then slowly looked up at the sky.

  Sheridan also looked up, but could see nothing in the clouds. She felt the pressure on her face, a kind of gravity pull on her skin as if she were on a fast ride at the county fair.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Nate said, his voice thin. “It’s like there is something up there the birds are afraid of. They refuse to fly.”

  9

  AN HOUR LATER and twenty miles away, a man named Tuff Montegue clucked his tongue to get his horse moving and pointed the gelding north, toward the timber. It was nearly dusk, and Tuff had the blues. He sang “Night Riders’ Lament,” his favorite cowboy song:

  While I was out a-ridin’

  The graveyard shift midnight till dawn,

  The moon was as bright as a reading light

  For a letter from an old friend back home. . . .

  Despite his current profession, which was ranch hand for the Longbrake Ranch, Tuff despised riding horses. He had nothing against them personally, and enjoyed singing and listening to songs about them, but he preferred tooling around in a ranch pickup. Nevertheless, he was a cowboy. A real one. In his mid-fifties, he looked the part, because he was the real number. Droopy mustache that curled to jawline, sharp nose, weathered face, sweat-stained Gus McCrae hat, Wranglers that bunched on his boottops and stayed up as if by a trick of magic over his nonexistent butt.

  He liked to tell people, especially tourists who bought him a whiskey in the Stockman’s Bar, that he was the only bona-fide cowboy left in the Bighorns that spoke American. It was sort of true, since most of the ranchers couldn’t find cowboys anymore except from Mexico, South America, or wannabes from former East Germany and the Czech Republic. Even when he left the profession, as he often did, he found himself coming back. Between stints at five different ranches in Park, Teton, and Twelve Sleep Counties, Tuff had been a satellite-dish salesman, a mechanic, a surveyor’s assistant, a cellular-phone customer-service representative, and a mountain man in a chuck-wagon dinner theater in Jackson Hole, where his job, every night, was to ride a horse into the tent where the tourists were and select a “wife” and toss her over his shoulder. This had resulted in a back injury when he stupidly selected a young mother the size of a heifer (she was one of those women who looked slim sitting down but had beer-keg thighs hidden under the table) and he had crashed beneath her weight. The injury had been a stroke of luck, because up until recently he had collected disability payments and didn’t have to ride horses or do much of anything except occupy a barstool at the Stockman’s. But the damned chuck-wagon dinner show, owned by a large family of Mormons, was disputing his injury. Apparently one of the owners had reported that he had seen him riding a mechanical bull in a saloon in Cody. Which was sort of true also, although Tuff wanted to know what a good Mormon had been doing in a bar in the first place. Until the matter was resolved, he had to once again seek employment.

  But that was only part of the reason why Tuff had the blues. Another big contributing factor was that it was Friday ni
ght and he was stuck on the ranch and couldn’t go into town. Since his DUI arrest the previous week—his third in two years—his driving privileges had been revoked. The only other Longbrake employee, a Mexican national named Eduardo, was laid up in the bunkhouse with a broken leg from falling off a damned horse. Therefore, Tuff had no ride. That, and the fact that Bud Longbrake, the peckerhead, followed the letter of the law and refused to let Tuff use a ranch vehicle even within the ranch itself, where no law enforcement would ever see him. Tuff knew that if Bud Longbrake wanted to make a case about allowing him to drive only on his private roads, Sheriff Barnum and the highway patrol wouldn’t object. But Bud Longbrake, who seemed to care a hell of a lot more about the needs and wants of his fiancée, Missy, than the operation of his own place, had not made meeting with the sheriff a priority.

  Shit.

  Despite his predicament, Tuff smiled to himself. The weekend before had been something. It had almost been worth the DUI on the way home. The barmaid at the Stockman’s, Evelyn Wolters, had set up a threesome after the bar closed. Tuff, Evelyn, and Jim Beam in one bed. What a night that had been. He wished he could remember certain parts of it more clearly. It had been at her apartment, a studio over the VFW, within walking distance of the Stockman’s. Evelyn had been doing something besides alcohol, but he wasn’t sure what. Whatever it was, it was fine by him, because she had been a tigress. She was no looker—his age, skinny legs that were just skinny, not shapely, pendulous breasts that hung down and swung back and forth like oranges in tube socks—but she had been wild. It had been her idea to use the neck of the bottle that way once it was empty.

  He had left Evelyn promising to be back in a week, and she had told him she was already looking forward to it. Tuff had said he was, too, but the truth was he was tired and drunk as hell. It would be several days before he had his energy, and his urges, back. He kept wondering if some of the things he recalled she had done—and let him do to her—were more a result of his delirium and fantasy than what had actually taken place. But the more he thought about it, and he thought about it often, the more he convinced himself that the acts had actually happened. It was the first time he had done some of those things since he’d been on shore leave in the navy. And then he had to pay for them. Evelyn, though, seemed to enjoy it. Which made him think: woo-hoo!