Savage Run

6

Joe called it “perching.” Perching was patrolling in the break lands in the foothills of the Bighorns, where the sagebrush gave way to pines, driving his truck up rough two-tracks to promontories and buttes where, with his Redfield spotting scope mounted to the driver’s-side window, he could scope flats, meadows, and timber blow-downs for game, hunters, hikers, and fishers. After two years on the job, he was still locating new adequate perches throughout his district, which consisted of 1,500 square miles of high plains steppe, sagebrush flats, craggy break lands, and mountains. These raised vantage points, where he could “sit and glass,” generally had some kind of road to the top that had been established over the years by ranchers, surveyors, or hunters.

Perching is what Joe had done for the past few days, since Marybeth’s outburst. He had left early, stayed late, and filled the hours between with routine patrolling of his district in the strange season between hunting and fishing activity. Even if he patrolled every working hour, Joe knew he could never adequately cover his 1,500-square-mile district. But it was an important part of his job.

At night, he had worked late in his small office near the mudroom at home, updating logs and reports, writing out a comprehensive purchase request from headquarters for the goods and equipment he would need in the coming fiscal year (saddles, tack, new tires, roof repair, etc.) and waiting for Marybeth to come to him and explain what had happened that morning. They still needed to talk and clear the air. Every time he heard her walk by his door, he paused, hoping she would enter and close the door behind her and say “About the other morning. ” He didn’t push her, either, although the incident hung around the house like an unwelcome relative. Several times, he wanted to go to her, but he talked himself out of it. The guilt he felt about her injury, and the subsequent loss of their child, was like a blade, ever poised, near his heart.

That morning, after the girls had left for school and the silence between them seemed to approach white noise, he told her about his encounter with Jim Finotta. She listened, and seemed grateful to be discussing anything except what he wanted to discuss. Her eyes probed his while he talked.

“Joe, are you sure this is something you want to pursue?” she asked.

“He poached an elk. He’s no better than any other criminal. If fact, he’s worse.”

“But you can’t prove it, can you?”

“Not yet.”

She stared at a spot behind Joe’s head. “Joe, we’re within sight of getting our debts paid for the first time since we’ve been married. I’m working two jobs. Is this the time you want to go after a man like Jim Finotta?”

Her question surprised him, although it shouldn’t have, and it momentarily put him off balance. Marybeth was nothing if not a pragmatist, especially when it came to her family.

“I’ve got to check it out,” Joe said, his resolve weakened. “You know that.”

A slow, resigned smile formed on her face. “I know you do, Joe. I just don’t want you to get in trouble again.”

“Me neither.”

And for a moment, he could see in her expression that she wanted to add more. But she didn’t.

It was rare to find many people about in the mountains in the late spring and early summer, when unpredictable squalls could sweep down from the Continental Divide in buffeting waves of wet snow, and when the snowmelt runoff was still too foamy, cloudy, and violent to fish or swim in. Crusty drifts of snow still lay in draws and swales, but had retreated and regrouped from the grass and sagebrush into the safe harbor of thick wooded stands.

Maxine slept on the passenger seat, her head resting on her forepaws, her brow crinkled with concern from whatever peril she was dreaming about.

Hazelton Road, the route to the site of the cow explosion, cut upward through the timber to the west and there was a small streamside campground, empty except for a single vehicle that was partially obscured by trees. Near the vehicle was a light green dome tent. Joe zoomed in on the tent and the campsite with the spotting scope, feeling like a voyeur. Through a shimmer caused by the distance and warmth, he could see people sitting at a picnic table. Two stout women, one with a mass of thick brown hair and the other with short straight hair, sat on opposite sides of the table. Between them, on the tabletop, were pieces of equipment Joe couldn’t identify from this distance. Their heads were bent over whatever they were doing, so Joe could not see the face of either woman.

Joe zoomed out and moved the scope through the rest of the campground. Empty.

Upstream, though, a reed-thin man with a straggly beard and baggy trousers cast a spinning lure into the boiling creek. The man stood bolt upright, with one shoe on shore and the other on a rock in the stream. Joe smiled to himself. No fishing vest, no tackle box, no creel, no waders, no stoop to his back as he sneaked up on a promising pool. This man did not look like a fisherman any more than Joe looked like a cricketeer. The stream was wild and would calm down, clear, and become fishable in about six weeks, in mid-July. Now, it was swelled past the banks with spring runoff, and lures cast into it would rocket down the stream with the fast flow and hang up in streamside willows.

Nevertheless, fishers were required to have both licenses and state habitat stamps, even if it was unlikely that a fish could be caught, as was the case here. Joe’s job was to make sure fishermen had licenses. He zipped the spotting scope in its case, rolled up the window, and started the truck, which woke Maxine from her worrisome adventure.

One of the stout women at the picnic table turned out to be a man wearing thick dreadlocks that cascaded across his shoulders and down his back, but the woman looked vaguely familiar. Both turned to him as he stepped out of his pickup in the campground. They had been reassembling a well-worn white gas camping stove on the table, and the man seemed frustrated by it.

Joe left Maxine in the truck in case the campers had dogs of their own and approached them on a moist, pine-needled path. Their vehicle was a twenty-year-old conversion van with California plates. He introduced himself, and the couple exchanged a furtive glance.

The two were purposely ragged looking. He wore khaki zip-off trousers that were fashionably blousey and stained, and an extra-large open shirt over a T-shirt.

“Raga,” the man said, wiping his hands on his pants and standing. “This is Britney. We can’t get our stove to work.”

“You could use the fire ring instead,” Joe offered, pointing to the circle of fire-blackened rocks. “It’s real early in the year and there are no fire restrictions as yet.”

“We don’t do fires.” The man called Raga snorted. “We don’t do charred flesh. We’re low-impact.” It was said as a kind of challenge, and Joe had no desire to follow it up.

“Raga?” Joe asked.

“It’s short for Ragamuffin,” the woman said abruptly. Her voice was grating and whiney. Joe turned to her, and the sense of familiarity was stronger.

Raga shook his hair and tilted his head back, and looked down his long nose at Joe. “This is Britney Earthshare. It’s not her real name, of course, but it’s the name she goes by. You might have seen her in the press a couple of years ago. She lived in a tree in Northern California to protest the logging of an old-growth forest.”

Yes, Joe thought. She was familiar. He had seen her on television, being interviewed by reporters who raised their microphones into the air alongside the trunk of the tree she had named Duomo. She would answer their questions by shouting down from her platform, which was equipped with thousands of dollars of high-tech equipment and state-of-the-art outdoor gear.

Britney Earthshare glanced at Joe from her place at the table and then looked quickly away. She was already bored with him, he surmised.

“You may not do charred flesh,” Joe said, “but do you know the guy who’s fishing upstream?”

“Tonk?” Raga asked.

“Is he with you?”

Raga nodded yes. “Is he doing something wrong?”

“Probably not. I need to check his license, though.”

Raga crossed his arms and Britney, at the table, rolled her eyes.

“A driver’s license?” Raga asked.

“Fishing license.”

Raga said “Hmmm.”

As he did, Tonk walked into the camp from the stream, pushing his way through the brush. He was talking as he entered, and had obviously not yet seen Joe.

“. Fucking fast water threw my lures all over the place,” he was saying. “Lost two good Mepps and a Rooster Tail and now I got-” Tonk saw Joe and froze in mid-sentence. Joe finished for him: “Now you’ve got a treble hook in your arm.”

Tonk held his arm out and winced painfully and almost comically, like a child will do when an adult points out an injury the child has forgotten. The No. 12 Mepps spinner had bitten deeply into Tonk’s sinewy bicep. All four sets of eyes moved to it.

“It got hung up in a bush and when I pulled it back-look what happened. It came flying straight back at me,” Tonk said, looking a little sheepish. “It hurts.”

Joe advised Tonk to drive into Saddlestring and get the lure removed at the clinic. “If Doc Johnson isn’t in you can get it taken out at the veterinary clinic,” Joe explained. “The vet removes fish hooks from fishermen and their dogs all the time, and it’ll cost you about half of what Doc Johnson charges.”

Tonk nodded dully. He was fascinated by the lure embedded in his flesh. Britney and Raga seemed to be fascinated with it as well.

Sharply, Britney turned. “You said you were the game warden, right?”

Joe nodded.

“I read somewhere that there was a game warden present when the exploding cow was discovered a week ago,” she said. “And that the place where the explosion happened is close to here.”

Raga was suddenly more interested in Joe than in Tonk’s mishap.

“That was me,” Joe said. “I was one of the first on the scene.”

The campsite seemed to have quieted, and Joe was being examined by all three campers with a different level of intensity than just a moment before.

“That’s why we’re here,” Raga declared. “To find the place where they claim Stewie was murdered.”

It took Joe a moment to respond. “Who says he was murdered?”

Raga displayed a self-satisfied smirk. He shook his head as if to say, I’ll never tell you.

“Did you find his body?” Tonk asked, forgetting his own injury for a moment.

“All we found were his shoes,” Joe said. “There wasn’t a body to find.”

“I fucking knew it,” Tonk said, stepping forward to stand abreast of Raga. He spoke with the loopy intensity patented by generations of the drugged and dispossessed: “I fucking knew it, Raga!”

Joe stared back at Britney, who was performing surgery on him with her eyes.

“You found her body, but you didn’t find his, right?” she asked.

“The state investigator’s report concluded that he had an accident with explosives,” Joe said. “The sheriff agreed with that. Accident, not suicide. And definitely not murder.”

Raga laughed derisively. “Yeah, like President Kennedy’s little ‘accident.’ ” Tonk agreed by nodding his head vigorously.

“Stewie Woods is not dead,” Britney Earthshare stated. Joe felt a chill crawl up his spine. Then: “Stewie will never be dead. They can’t kill a man like Stewie.”

Oh, Joe thought. That’s what she meant.

“Just like they couldn’t kill Kurt Cobain, or Martin Luther King, man,” Tonk chimed in.

“I understand,” Joe mumbled, not understanding. These three campers were not much younger than he was, but were so entirely different.

They asked for directions to the crater. Joe saw no reason not to give them. He pointed back toward the Hazelton Road, told them it was about six miles up, and where there was a turnout where they could park.

“I knew we were close,” Britney said to Raga, “I could just feel it, how close we were.”

“That’s why you’re here?” Joe asked.

“Partly,” Raga said. “We’re on our way to Toronto to an antiglobalism rally. Britney’s speaking.”

She nodded.

Joe turned to go.

“The people who did this will be back,” Britney said quite clearly as he walked away. He stopped, and looked over his shoulder.

“They can’t kill Stewie Woods that easily,” she sang.

Joe was back up on his perch before he realized he had forgotten to ask Tonk to show him his fishing license. But he stayed in his truck.

Things were certainly more interesting since Stewie Woods had died in his mountains. Although the official investigation was already all but closed, and obituatries and tributes to Stewie had faded from the news, unofficial speculation continued unabated. That there was a strange, disconnected underground made up of people like Raga, Tonk, and Britney who now came to see the crater was disconcerting. They seemed to know something-or thought they knew something-that the public did not.

He hoped this had been an isolated incident. But he doubted it.