Savage Run

4

Morning sunlight poured over the jagged horizon as Joe Pickett turned his pickup off of the state highway onto the Vee Bar U Ranch’s gravel road, which led to Jim Finotta’s house. Maxine, the Pickett’s yellow Labrador, sat in the passenger seat looking alert, as if helping Joe to navigate the turns. Joe drove the truck beneath the ancient elk antler arches and wound through hundred-year-old cottonwoods. This was the first time Joe had ever had a reason to visit. He wished the reason for the call wasn’t to tell Mr. Finotta that ten of his cattle had been found dead and at least one of them had been blown up.

Finotta’s ranch, the Vee Bar U, was, by all standards, huge. Counting both deeded and leased land, it stretched from the highway all the way to the top of the distant Bighorn Mountains. The ranch held the second water right on the Twelve Sleep River, and leased more than forty thousand acres of spectacularly scenic and remote national forest land, including a geological wonder of a canyon known as Savage Run.

Joe had heard a couple of stories about how local lawyer Jim Finotta acquired the ranch, and he wasn’t certain which one was true. One version was that Mac “Rowdy” McBride, a fourth generation McBride, was a notorious drinker and carouser and had simply run the ranch into the ground. McBride could still be found from noon on perched on his corner stool at the Stockman Bar, or the booth closest to the bar at the Rustic Tavern. Finotta, fresh off of a string of personal injury cases with multimillion-dollar settlements, had purchased the ranch at a time when cattle prices were low and Rowdy McBride was too. But there was another theory on how Finotta had come to own and control the Vee Bar U.

The other version, which Joe had had whispered to him by an inebriated fishing guide at the Stockman Bar, was much more sinister. According to the fishing guide, Finotta had represented Rowdy McBride in a dispute when environmentalists were trying to persuade the federal government to proclaim the rugged, spectacular, and remote Savage Run canyon as a national monument. McBride, of course, was against it. Finotta persuaded McBride to take his claim all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though virtually all legal scholars who studied the case opined that he had no case, and Rowdy McBride had already lost on state and district levels. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, which left McBride with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills at a time when beef prices had plummeted to record lows.

Finotta settled for the ranch in payment, and the suspicion of the fishing guide and his friends was that obtaining the historic ranch was Finotta’s plan all along-that Finotta had fueled McBride’s anger at the Feds and confidently assured the rancher of an eventual win or settlement, knowing all along that it was virtually impossible. Once he had taken over the ranch, Finotta had used his personal political contacts (of which he had many) to stall the canyon’s national monument designation, which was finally forgotten by a new administration.

Ranching to Finotta, according to the fishing guide, was a hobby and a means of dispensing power and influence in a state where ranchers occupied an exalted status. When moneyed entrepreneurs sought the ultimate cocktail-party aside, they now talked about their ranches in Wyoming, Montana, or Idaho.

Joe didn’t know Finotta well, although they nodded at each other when they happened to see each other, usually at the courthouse or occasionally at the post office. Finotta was a man known for his personal and political connections and for not being humble about them. He was a personal friend of the governor and was listed among the largest in-state contributors to the U.S. senators and the lone congressman for Wyoming. He treated local law enforcement officials well, and had half and quarter beefs sent to their homes at Christmas. Sheriff Barnum often had morning coffee with Finotta, as did the county attorney and chief of police.

So when Jim Finotta decided to create a subdivision-officially renamed Elkhorn Ranches-he had no trouble financing it or having it approved by the county. Elkhorn Ranches was a topic of conversation among the local coffee drinkers in the morning and the beer drinkers at night-a land scheme involving three-acre lots on three hundred acres of Finotta’s property nearest to the highway. The streets, curbs, gutters, and cul-de-sacs were already surveyed and poured in concrete. The sales effort was international. Three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar homes were being constructed on the prime lots, usually on the top of every hill. Only a few homes had been completed and purchased.

The trees parted, and the huge gabled stone house came into view, and so did a ranch hand on a four-wheel ATV who was racing up the road as if intent on having a head-on collision with Joe’s pickup.

Joe braked to a stop and the ranch hand swung around the grill of the pickup and slammed on his brakes adjacent to Joe’s door, a roll of dust following and settling over them both.

The ranch hand was wiry and dark with a pockmarked and deeply tanned face. He wore a T-shirt that said “I Know Jack Shit” and a feed store cap turned backward. He squinted against the roll of dust and the bright morning sun and rose in his seat with his fists on the handlebars until he could look Joe square in the eye.

“Name’s Buster,” the ranch hand said. “State your business.” Only then did Joe notice the holster and sidearm that was tucked into Buster’s jeans.

“I’m Joe Pickett. I’m here on business to see Mr. Finotta. I’m with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.”

“I can see that from your truck and your shirt,” Buster said, raising himself a little more so he could see into the cab of Joe’s truck. Maxine, always kind to strangers, lolled out her tongue and panted.

“What do you need to see Mr. Finotta about?”

Joe masked his irritation. No need to antagonize a hand. He said simply, “Ten dead cows.”

This concerned the ranch hand. “Were they ours?”

“Yup,” Joe said, and offered no more.

Buster was puzzled in thought for a moment. Then he told Joe to wait in his truck while he went to tell Mr. Finotta.

Joe winced at the racketing sound of the ATV as Buster revved it and spun around the back of Joe’s pickup and on to the house. Disobeying Buster, Joe drove toward the house and parked against a hitching rack next to Finotta’s black Suburban.

The house was impressive and daunting. It looked to be constructed at a time when ranchers thought of themselves as feudal lords of a wild new land, and built accordingly. There were three sharp gables on the red slate roof and a two-story stone turret on the front corner. The building was constructed of massive rounded stones, probably from the bottom of the river, in the days when dredging didn’t require a permit. Huge windows made up of hundreds of tiny panes looked out over the ranch yard and beyond to the mountains.

When Buster opened the front door, Joe half expected the hand to bow and say something like “Mr. Finotta will see you now.” Instead, Buster nodded toward the interior of the house and told Joe to go inside. Which he did.

The foyer was decorated in pure mid-fifties ranch gothic. The chairs and couches were upholstered with dark Hereford red-and-white hides. The chandelier, suspended from the high ceiling by a thick logging chain, was a wagon wheel with 50-watt bulbs on each spoke. The dominating wall was covered with the brands of local ranches burned into the barnwood paneling, with tiny brass plaques under each brand naming the ranch.

Joe stopped here. He was taken aback by the fact that he had surveyed the room without taking notice of a small seated figure in the corner of it, shaded from the window by a bushy Asian evergreen tree.

“Can I get you something?” Her voice was scratchy and high. Now Joe could see her clearly. He was embarrassed by the fact that he had missed her when he entered because she was so still and he was so unobservant. She was bent and small and still, seated in a wheelchair. Her back was curved so that it thrust her head forward, chin out. She held her face at a forty-five degree angle, her eyes large but blank, her airy light-brown hair molded into a helmet shape by spray. One stunted arm lay along the armrest of her chair like a strand of rope and the other was curled on her lap out of view. He guessed her age as at least seventy, but it was hard to tell.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see you there.” Joe said, removing his hat. “Thanks for the offer but I’m fine.”

“You thought I was a piece of furniture, didn’t you?” she asked in a high voice.

Joe knew he flushed red. That’s exactly what he was thinking.

“Don’t deny it,” she chided, letting out a bubble of laughter like a hiccup. “If I were a snake I could have bitten you.”

Joe introduced himself. She said her name was Ginger. Joe had hoped for more than a name. He couldn’t be sure whether Ginger was Jim Finotta’s wife or mother. Or someone else. And he didn’t know how to ask.

Jim Finotta, a small man, appeared in the foyer. Finotta wore casual pleated slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt. Finotta was slight and dark, his full head of hair moussed back from his high forehead. His face was dour and pinched, foreshadowing the tendency of his mouth to curl downward into an expression that said “no.” Finotta carried himself with an air of impatient self-importance.

His $800 ostrich-skin boots glided over the hardwood flooring, but he stopped at the opposite wall under what appeared to be an original Charles Russell painting and spoke without meeting Joe’s eye. He nodded kindly to Ginger and asked her if she minded if he met with the “local game warden” for a minute in his office. Ginger hummed her assent, and Finotta smiled at her. With a nod of his head he indicated for Joe to follow him.

Finotta’s office was a manly classic English den with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled primarily with legal volumes. A framed fox hunting print hung behind the massive mahogany desk and a green-shaded lamp provided most of the light. A massive bull elk head was mounted on the wall in the shadows above the door. Finotta walked briskly around the desk and sat in his chair, clasped his small hands together, and looked up expectantly at Joe. He did not offer Joe a seat.

“You run cattle in the Bighorns near Hazelton Road?” Joe asked, feeling awkward and out of place in Finotta’s study.

“I run two thousand head practically the entire length of the Bighorns in both Twelve Sleep and Johnson County.” Finotta answered crisply. “We also feed another eleven hundred on our pastures for the summer months. Now how can I help you?” Finotta made no attempt to hide the impatience that colored his voice.

“Well,” Joe said his voice sounding weak even to himself, “there are at least ten of them dead. And there may be a human victim as well.”

Finotta showed no reaction except to arch his eyebrows in a “tell me more” look. Joe quickly explained what they had found the evening before.

When he was done, Finotta spoke with a forced smile. “The cows are mine but we aren’t missing any employees, so I can’t help you there. As for the cattle, those are-were-first generation baldy heifers worth at least $1,200 each. So I guess someone owes me $12,000. Would that be the Wyoming Game and Fish Department?”

Finotta’s question caught Joe by complete surprise. He hadn’t known how Finotta would react to the news that ten of his cows exploded-anger, confusion maybe-but Joe would never have guessed he’d respond this way. The state did pay ranchers for damages to property and livestock if those losses were the result of wild game, such as elk herds eating haystacks meant for cattle or moose crashing through fences. But he could not see how the department would be liable for the loss of ten cows in a freak explosion.

As Joe stood there, trying to think of a way to explain this, Finotta was drumming his fingers on his desk. The sound both irritated and distracted Joe.

“Joe Pickett. ” Finotta said, as if searching his mind for more information. “I’ve heard your name. Aren’t you the same fellow who arrested the governor a couple of years ago for fishing without a license?”

Joe flushed red again.

“The same warden who had his gun taken off of him by a local outfitter and was suspended for it? The same game warden who shot my good friend Vern Dunnegan in the hip with a shotgun?”

Joe glared at Finotta but said nothing. He admitted to himself that he was not handling the situation well. He was off balance and defensive.

“I came here to tell you about your cows,” Joe said, his voice cracking. “The sheriff asked me to come here because he was busy at the crime scene. This doesn’t involve me or the department.”

“Doesn’t it?” Finotta asked facetiously, sitting back in his leather chair. “It seems to me that a case could be made that because of the policies of both the U.S. Forest Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department we have in our state an overabundance of game animals. And because of that overabundance, there is an exaggerated sense that the ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ creatures are being crowded out of their rightful forage by cattle. Therefore, environmentalists are targeting cattle and ranchers, and poachers are targeting wild game. Which creates a state of affairs where this kind of violence can happen.

“I think we could win that one before a jury of my peers,” Finotta said, smiling. Finotta’s peers would be local ranchers. This kind of jury stacking had happened before in the county. “And we would be talking about the loss of my cows plus legal expenses plus punitive damages.” He let this sink in. “Or Game and Fish could save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands and simply pay the damage claim. That could happen very cleanly if the local warden made the argument in his report.”

Joe was flummoxed, angry, and completely off his stride. Joe could see himself taking three quick steps and knocking the smirk off of Finotta’s face. It would give him immediate satisfaction, but would also result in termination and, given Finotta’s obvious penchant for going to court, prosecution.

It was obvious that Jim Finotta enjoyed this, Joe thought. Finotta reveled in humiliating people he considered below his station. He was good at it. He knew the tricks. Finotta compensated for Joe’s advantage of youth by making him stand there foolishly. He addressed their height difference-Joe was at least six inches taller-by sitting behind his massive desk.

“Joe, I think you know who I am,” Finotta said, now charming. “I know how much the state pays its employees. Your family would probably appreciate a half a beef come Christmastime. We’re talking about prime steaks, roasts, and hamburger. This is good beef that will never exceed seven percent fat. I’ll need to add you to our gift list.”

Rather than continue to look at Finotta in a growing rage, Joe focused on the reflection of the mounted elk head in the glass of the hunting print above the laywer’s head. As Joe stared at it, he realized that there was something about the elk mount that bothered him.

“Do you have any questions, Warden?” Finotta asked gently.

Joe nodded yes.

“That elk on your wall. ” Joe asked, turning and looking at the impressive bull over his shoulder. The antler rack was thick and wide. It was a rare, exceedingly large bull. The kind of bull, and mount, that trophy hunters would pay $15,000 to $20,000 for a chance to get. “That’s quite a prize, isn’t it?”

Now Finotta was caught off guard. But he recovered very quickly. “Yes it is. He came off of my ranch, in fact.”

“Seven points one side and nine on the other, that right?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I think I’m familiar with this bull elk,” Joe said, rubbing his chin. “I never saw it, but I heard of him. A guide I talked to about a year ago had scouted him out. He said he counted seven tines on one side and nine on the other. He said it was the biggest elk he had ever seen in his life.”

Finotta studied Joe, clearly wondering where this was going.

“He had put the word out to some clients that this bull elk existed and would probably be the biggest one taken in the Bighorns in the last twenty years. That guide scouted that bull for an entire year. He knew where the bull grazed, where it slept, even where it drank water in the evening.

“Then that bull just went away,” Joe said. “Broke that guide’s heart. He reported it to me, and said maybe the big bull got poached since it was still four months until hunting season.”

Finotta responded evenly. “Maybe it just died. Or maybe it moved. Wild animals will do that, you know.” He paused. “Or maybe it exploded like ten of my cows.”

Joe grabbed a hardback chair, slid it under the mount and stepped up before Finotta could stop him. He examined the head, then rubbed his hand along the antler. “There’s still some velvet on these antlers,” Joe declared.

Velvet is the soft feltlike layer that encases antlers of deer, moose, and elk as they grow back each year. Normally, the animals shed their antlers in winter and grow them back-usually larger-in the spring. By fall and hunting season, the velvet has been rubbed off completely and the antler takes on a hardened sheen and strength like polished bone. Joe had seen instances where patches of velvet remained on the antlers through October, but it was rare. Velvet on Finotta’s elk might be suspicious but it was proof of nothing.

Joe stepped down. “When exactly did you shoot this elk?” he asked.

Finotta quickly stood up, slapping his palms down on the top of the desk. “Are you accusing me of poaching?”

Joe shrugged in innocence. “I’m just wondering when and where you shot the elk.”

Finotta took a deep intake of breath and his eyes became hard. “I got him during hunting season. Last fall. On my ranch.” He hissed the last words out.

“Okay,” Joe agreed. “That being the case, I’m sure you won’t mind me checking. We found a huge bull carcass up on the forestland last May with the head cut off. We took a DNA sample of the carcass and it’s in my freezer. The poachers hadn’t even taken any of the meat, which personally, to me, is a crime of the first order because it means a headhunter did it. I hate trophy hunters who just take the antlers and leave the rest. Not to mention that it’s illegal as all hell.”

The room was absolutely silent. Finotta glared at Joe under a bushy frown.

“So I would like your permission to take a small sample from this trophy.”

“Forget it,” Finotta cried, appearing offended. “I paid a lot of money for that mount in Jackson Hole. You don’t have my permission to damage it.”

Joe shrugged. “I won’t damage anything. I’m just talking about a few shavings from the base of the horn, from the back side of it, where no one could ever even see it.”

“You’ll need a court order,” Finotta said, back on firm footing. “And I don’t think you can get that in Twelve Sleep County.” What Finotta didn’t say was what was well known-that Judge Hardy Pennock was one of Finotta’s closest friends and had a financial interest in Elkhorn Ranches.

“You might have me there,” Joe conceded. But Finotta was clearly still angry. Veins pulsed on his temples, although his eyes and expression remained serious and steady.

“This meeting is over,” Finotta declared. “You should be aware that I plan to contact your immediate supervisor as well as the governor you once arrested.”

Joe shrugged with resignation. That was to be expected. He knew something like this would likely happen if he mentioned the elk, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Or,” Finotta said, this kind of negotiating as natural to him as breathing, “you can consider making the case for damage reimbursement for my dead cattle.”

Joe was being given one more chance. He knew that the governor was known to micromanage state agencies and also knew of state employees who had been drummed out of a job. He and Marybeth were still literally a paycheck away from poverty, and the house they lived in was state-owned. Joe had gained some political capital since he started out in the Twelve Sleep District following his run-in with Assistant Director Les Etbauer while he was investigating the murder of three local outfitters, but not enough for comfort. Grievance procedures were in place, of course, but the state bureaucracy had time-tested methods of making conditions so miserable that employees, even game wardens, eventually left on their own accord. Sometimes, game wardens who were out of favor were reassigned to areas that no one wanted, like Baggs or Lusk. These locations had become the Wyoming equivalent of the backwater, hellhole location that FBI agents were once sent-Butte, Montana.

“Let me get back to you on that.” Joe heard himself say, and left the room.

Ginger had not moved from her place near the tree in the living room. Joe told her good-bye. She said again that if she was a snake that she could have bitten him.

He left via the subdivision, angrily negotiating wide and empty paved roads, one time screeching his tires when he took a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac, shooting bitter passing looks at new foundations and huge fresh dirt piles, nearly decapitating a hydrant, and wondering what kind of people would choose to buy a three-acre lot and live in Elkhorn Ranches.

And wondering what he would say when he got back to Jim Finotta.

Joe pulled off of the highway into a hilly BLM tract hazy with new spring grass. He found a familiar hill, parked on top of it, and for an hour watched three- and four-month-old pronghorn antelope with their herd. He knew that watching the wild herd would soothe him, calm him down, help him, he hoped, put things into perspective. Related biologically to goats, not antelope (despite their name), pronghorn were uniquely evolved to survive and prosper in the arid and mountainous Rocky Mountain west. Yearling pronghorns, often produced as twins, were amazing wild animals, and becoming Joe’s favorites. Young pronghorns didn’t have the soft features, big eyes, and the bumbling cuddliness of most baby animals. Within a few weeks of their birth, they became tiny versions of their parents, with perfectly proportional but miniature long legs, brown and white camouflage coloring, and the ability to accelerate from zero to sixty when they sensed danger, leaving only a rooster tail of dust.

He watched the antelope, but in his head he replayed his conversation with Jim Finotta. The conversation and the situation had gotten off track quickly and gone in directions Joe hadn’t anticipated. He hadn’t reacted well, either.

When he thought about the exchange, it wasn’t so much what Finotta had said, or implied. It was what he didn’t ask that unsettled Joe.

Joe had no experience with notifying a rancher that his cows had exploded, as ridiculous as that sounded when he thought about it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t like notifying the next of kin about a highway accident, or even a hunter’s wife about a terrible accident, which Joe had done and which resulted in several nights of lost sleep afterward. With Finotta, there had been no questions about possible human victims-how they came to die, no queries about whether the dead were local, or even the status of the investigation. Wouldn’t a lawyer, litigious by trade, be at least somewhat interested in whether or not anyone could establish liability?

Something didn’t sit right.

Joe’s gaze slowly rose from the antelope in the sagebrush hills toward the blue-gray mountains that dominated the horizon. The Vee Bar U stretched as far as he could see, counting Forest Service leases. The ranch was one of the crown jewels of Twelve Sleep County, sweeping from the highway to up and over those mountains. And somewhere up there, practically inaccessible, was the place called Savage Run.

The canyon called Savage Run cut a brutal slash through the center of incredibly rugged and almost impenetrable Wyoming mountain wilderness. The Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River, which created the canyon over millions of years of relentless shaving and slicing, was now a trickle due to upstream irrigation. But the results-knife-sharp walls, a terrifying distance from the rim to the narrow canyon floor, virtually no breaks or cracks through the rocks to assure a crossing-was geologically stunning. The canyon was so steep and narrow that sunlight rarely shone on the stream. The canyon cut through eight different geological strata. While the rim was twenty-first century Wyoming in drought, the floor was pre-Jurassic rain forest. The last time the floor was exposed, Tyrannosaurus rex peered through gaping eyes at prey.

The legend of Savage Run came from the story of a band of a hundred Cheyenne Indians-mainly the elderly, women, and children-who were camped near the eastern rim of the canyon while their men were on an extended buffalo hunt in the Powder River country. The band was unaware of the Pawnee warriors who had been following them for days, and unaware that the Pawnees stayed hidden while the hunting party rode away.

The Pawnee had planned to attack fast and hard, both to claim their special reward from the U.S. Army of $10 per scalp as well as to gain access to prime Rocky Mountain foothills hunting land when the Indian Wars were finally over. They were also after the large herd of Cheyenne horses.

Somehow, the band of Cheyenne learned of the impending attack before nightfall. The Pawnees had no idea they had been discovered, and they dry-camped and prepared for a vicious dawn attack.

Before first light, with weapons drawn and already painted black and white for war, the Pawnees swooped up the draws and flowed toward the Cheyenne camp. When the Pawnees moved in on the camp they found only the tipi rings, still-warm campfire embers from the previous night, and more than a hundred dead horses, their throats slashed. It appeared to the Pawnee that the Cheyenne had literally flown away. The Pawnee knew the logistics of moving all of those people out, and they knew that it should have been impossible for the Cheyenne to get by them at night. There was no way the band of Cheyenne had flown through them, the Pawnees thought, and the only escape had been away from them, toward a canyon that could not be crossed. Furious, they pursued.

What the Pawnee found when they reached the rim of the canyon was evidence of an otherworldly occurrence. The band of Cheyenne was gone, but there was visible evidence of their flight. Somehow, remarkably, the entire band had descended the sheer cliffs to the bottom and climbed back out on the other side. The evidence, hundreds of feet below, was the number of telltale discarded tipi poles and bits of hair and clothing clinging to spiny brush. The entire Cheyenne band-the aged men and women, their grandchildren and daughters, the few able men in the camp, as the story went-had somehow, one by one, climbed down the canyon side to the Middle Fork, forded the river, and climbed up the other side to their escape. The tipi poles had been discarded sometime during the night, and they now stood, to the Pawnee, as awful proof that the incomprehensible had happened: The Pawnee had lost their advantage of surprise, lost the horses, and lost the Cheyenne.

The Pawnee chose not to even try to pursue the Cheyenne. They admired the escape and were somewhat awed by the pure determination of the people who had managed such an escape. That the Cheyenne would leave in the middle of the night, risking the lives of all, kill their horses, and succeed was beyond anything the Pawnee had ever encountered. It was that respect, as the story went, that caused the Pawnee to turn their horses around and go home to Fort Laramie. In Pawnee, the roughly translated name they gave the canyon was “Place Where the Cheyenne Ran Away from Us.” Soldiers who heard the story, and who were at war at the time with the Cheyenne (who they regarded as barely human), renamed the geological anomaly “Savage Run,” although none of them ever found the place or really knew where it was. The legend of Savage Run was passed on. Eventually, several white elk hunters claimed they had found the passage. A national historian wrote about it well enough to create interest; thus the move for National Monument designation. But outside of a few American Indian hunting guides and the original elk hunters, few were exactly sure where the passage across the canyon was located.

Joe looked at Maxine, and the Labrador looked back with her big brown eyes. Labradors forgave everything. Joe wished he could.

He wished he could get a handle on the uncharacteristic hatred he felt toward hobby rancher/lawyer Jim Finotta. But he sure wanted to get that son of a bitch.