THE NEXT DAY, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was feeling all of his fifty-one years when he received a call from Clay Hutmacher, the foreman of the Double Diamond Ranch.
At that moment, he was working his way down the side of a steep mountain on foot, wearing a daypack filled with optics and gear. As he descended, he concentrated on not tripping over a sagebrush or dislodging a rock that would send him ass over teakettle down the slope to where his truck was parked.
Although it wasn’t yet noon, Joe was tired. He’d been up since before dawn, and since it was October he’d spent the entire morning in the breaklands and mountains checking hunters in the field. For the last two hours, he’d been glassing hunters and hunting camps through his spotting scope, as well as a herd of elk, a small band of mule deer, and a contingent of pronghorn antelope out on the plains.
He was exhausted, but pleasantly so, and the morning had gone smoothly. He’d witnessed no violations and issued no warnings or tickets and made no arrests. The camps he’d visited were generally clean and the hunters he’d met were friendly and ethical. Their food was hung from trees to discourage bears and no one had reported any large carnivore or wolf sightings. He was still a little surprised by the four young men he’d met early on in his rounds: hipsters from Jackson Hole with long beards and blaze-orange porkpie hats, who were hunting elk not for trophy racks but to fill their freezers for the winter. It was good to meet younger hunters keeping the local traditions alive, he thought. It encouraged him to keep doing what he was doing and knowing it was right.
Since the many elk seasons in his district had expanded over the years, legal hunting was now allowed from archery season in mid-September to limited cow/calf seasons as late as January 31. Joe was busy every day and he’d learned to pace himself. He wasn’t getting any younger.
*
THE DAY BEFORE had been more challenging. He’d encountered three elk hunters from Pennsylvania camped on Bureau of Land Management land a stone’s throw from the boundary fence of a big ranch known to locals as the Double D. The Pennsylvania hunters had made it clear to him that they intended to “corner-cross” from the parcel they were on to an adjacent public parcel by means of a ladder they had built specially for the purpose and brought with them to Wyoming. The plan, they explained, was to move across the checkerboard of public lands without stepping foot on private. The hunters showed Joe the extremely accurate GPS mapping apps they’d put on their phones to make sure they stayed legal.
Joe had warned them that corner-crossing was a complicated issue, and a newly contentious one. There were laws that allowed citizens to access all public lands, as well as laws that said that even entering the airspace of private land was trespassing. Since there was no way for the hunters to climb the ladder from corner to corner and not prevent any part of their bodies from passing over a tiny slice of private land on the way, they were risking trespassing charges from the county sheriff.
The Pennsylvania hunters were well aware of the dilemma, they told Joe, but they were willing to risk it. It was their land as much as anyone’s, they said. Joe had told them as long as they broke no Game and Fish regulations, he’d let them be. But he could do nothing to prevent their arrest by the county sheriff if that office decided to pursue it.
Joe could see both sides of the issue. Legal hunters did have the right to access public land, even if the way they did it was legally dubious. At the same time, local landowners owned huge, and hugely expensive, tracts of “private” acreage that contained squares of public land inside of it. If just anyone could access those inholdings at any time, was the private property actually private?
“Corner-locked” public land was a big issue in the West, where so much territory was owned by the federal government. There were 2.4 million acres of corner-locked land in Wyoming alone, the same size as Yellowstone Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation. That was twice as much land as Rhode Island, and it was bigger than the landmass of the state of Connecticut.
Someday, Joe hoped, the legal system would rule one way or another in a definitive way. In the meantime, corner-crossing would remain a thorny issue that pitted sportsmen against landowners. And it put him and other game wardens in the middle of the dispute.
When he left their camp, Joe wasn’t sure he’d convinced them not to try it.
*
SO WHEN CLAY Hutmacher’s name appeared on his cell phone screen, Joe fully expected to hear the foreman sound off about the three hunters who had trespassed onto the Double D.
Instead, Hutmacher said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Joe, but I’m trying to track down my son. Have you seen or heard from him in the last twenty-four hours?”
Joe paused for breath and leaned against the stout mottled trunk of an ancient ponderosa pine tree. Daisy, his aging yellow Labrador, used the opportunity to rest as well and quickly collapsed near his feet.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t seen much of anyone this morning except elk hunters. I’m on the south side of Wolf Mountain right now.”
“Well, damn,” Hutmacher said. “I’ve been calling his phone since last night and he hasn’t picked up. That’s not like him.”
“Is there an emergency?” Joe asked.
“Naw, nothing like that. He’s way too old for me to be checking up on him, but he has the only spare set of keys to one of our flatbed trucks that we need today. Plus, it doesn’t look like he slept in his room last night.”
Joe thought about that, considering the implications. Clay Junior was seeing his oldest daughter, Sheridan, and the relationship seemed to be getting much more serious than Joe wanted to accept or acknowledge. Sheridan had her own apartment in town, so he and Marybeth didn’t always know what was going on with her.
If Clay Junior hadn’t slept in his own bed …
“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Joe said. “I’ll check with Sheridan as well.”
That was what Clay was asking, Joe knew.
“I appreciate that,” the foreman said.
“On another subject, I met three Pennsylvania hunters yesterday who showed me the ladder they intended to use to access your public land.”
“Corner-crossers?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You didn’t arrest them?” Hutmacher asked.
“Nope,” Joe said. “We’ve had this discussion, Clay.”
“Goddamn them. If I catch them on the ranch, they better hope their health insurance is up-to-date.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Joe said.
“The boss has had it with them, you know,” Hutmacher said, referring to the wealthy owner of the ranch, Michael Thompson, who lived most of the year in Atlanta, where his telecom firm was headquartered. Thompson and his young wife, Brandy, visited the ranch only a couple of times a year to hunt trophy elk and tour it during the summer months, but when they did he always made sure to harangue Joe about keeping trespassers off his ranch.
“I know,” Joe said.
“Where were they?”
Joe described where the Pennsylvanians had camped on the northern border of the Double D, about six miles from the highway.
“I’m going to send a couple of my guys out there on ATVs,” Hutmacher said. “If we catch ’em, we’ll hold them in place until the sheriff arrives to arrest the bastards.”
Joe sighed. It wasn’t really necessary to say that the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department might not respond with their best—or at all. Since Sheriff Scott Tibbs had retired seven months before, the office was in turmoil. Two of their best deputies, Ryan Steck and Justin Woods, had resigned and left the state for new law enforcement jobs. An interim sheriff had been selected by the county commissioners: a woman named Elaine Beveridge, a former county commissioner. Unfortunately, Beveridge had made it a habit never to answer her phone or leave her desk. A new election was coming up, and Judge Hewitt had hand-selected a candidate named Jackson Bishop, and he was backing Bishop publicly and financially. At the moment, however, the office was completely and totally adrift.
Joe didn’t know Bishop at all. His past relationships with local sheriffs had been … rocky. Joe and the rest of the locals were grateful there had been no county-wide crime spree in the interim.
“I gotta go,” Hutmacher said.
“I’ll keep an eye out for your son,” Joe said.
*
TWO HOURS LATER, after Joe had eaten his sack lunch of cold fried chicken and orange slices in his pickup and had fed Daisy her ration of dried dog food out of a tin bowl, Hutmacher called back. He was in tears.
“Oh my God, Joe,” Hutmacher cried. “You need to get out here.”
Joe sat up in his seat. He’d never heard his friend so distraught. “What’s going on?”
“I found Clay Junior down by the river. Or I should say, I found part of him.”
“What?”
“I found his leg. I think he got attacked by a bear or a wolf or a mountain lion. I don’t know what the hell happened, but it’s awful. Get here as fast as you can,” Hutmacher said through a choking sob. “It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Did you call Sheriff Beveridge?”
“That bitch won’t pick up,” Hutmacher said bitterly.
“I’m twenty minutes away,” Joe said.
*
ALTHOUGH HE RARELY activated either his siren or the wigwag lights mounted on the top of the cab of his green Ford pickup, Joe turned on both of them when he fishtailed from the county road onto the interstate highway.
“Hold on,” he told Daisy as he rocketed past a passenger car from Montana and an oil-field truck from Casper. The turnoff for the Double D was ten miles south on I-25.
He plucked the radio transmitter from its cradle on the dashboard while he drove and was instantly connected to a dispatcher in Cheyenne.
“This is GF-14,” he said, referencing the number that corresponded to his badge number. His warden number had recently changed from nineteen to fourteen on account of two more senior game wardens retiring and three leaving the agency in the last year. “I’m responding to a call from the foreman of the Double D Ranch, who reported a possible large-predator attack on his property.”
“Oh God,” the female dispatcher said. “Not again. Please, not again.”
Joe understood the reason for her breach of protocol. There had been four bear attacks on humans in the last month in Wyoming, more than ever before. Three had occurred just outside the boundaries of Yellowstone Park, but one had happened a hundred and fifty miles straight south of the park. This, if it turned out to be a bear attack, would be the first one in the Bighorn Mountains of north-central Wyoming.
There weren’t supposed to be grizzly bears in the Bighorns.
“Please notify the Predator Attack Team to stand by,” Joe said. “I’ll check in with you when I get there.”
“Affirmative. What is your twenty?” she asked.
“Eight miles north of the scene.”
*
THE PREDATOR ATTACK Team consisted of five armed wardens from around the state who were called to respond immediately to large-carnivore attacks. They were a kind of SWAT team, except trained to confront wild animals instead of human perpetrators. Members of the PAT were equipped with tactical gear, high-end optics and communications equipment, armor, bear spray, and semiautomatic rifles. Joe was an alternate member of the team and was called upon if the team was a man down or if one of them was unavailable on a moment’s notice.
He didn’t relish the assignment because he didn’t like the idea of hunting down and murdering a bear.
That, and he was terrified of them.
*
GOING OFF WHAT little Hutmacher had told him, Joe drove straight through the ranch yard of the Double D to a two-track road that led down to the Twelve Sleep River. The headquarters complex of the ranch was impressive, with a magnificent gabled home built of local sandstone nestled into the side of a hill, surrounded by outbuildings and quarters for ranch employees. The foreman’s home was a two-story log structure set down and to the side of the owner’s house, but with the same expansive view of the river bottom and the mountains beyond. Joe noticed as he drove by that Hutmacher’s pickup wasn’t parked in its usual place.
Joe plunged down the hillside on the two-track into a shimmering grove of aspen. Mule deer skittered out from the trees to his right, and three scrappy whitetails came out to his left. He slowed as the two-track made several tight turns in the woods before it flattened out onto a large hayfield and the road dispersed into nothing.
He drove carefully across the hayfield, knowing small irrigation ditches wound their way through it. The ditches were hard to see, and he didn’t want to drop his tires into one and get stuck. Ranchers instinctively knew how to navigate their hayfields without roads or markers, but Joe didn’t.
Halfway across the wide field toward the river, Joe saw two sets of tire tracks pressed into the dried grass. One set was narrow, the other wide. He used the tracks to lead him across the field toward the high wall of river cottonwoods that tangled the banks. A steep rocky slope rose and dominated the view to the east on the other side of the river. He could catch glimpses of the water through the trunks of the trees.
Two vehicles were parked on the edge of the field next to a barbed-wire fence that kept cattle from trampling the river itself. One was Clay’s Ford F-350 pickup with the Double D logo painted on the front doors. The other was an open two-seat Polaris Ranger ATV mounted with a fly rod carrier to its roll cage. Twenty feet from the vehicles was an open wire gate that led to the river through the brush on the other side of the fence.
Joe pulled in behind the F-350 and shut off the engine.
“Stay here,” he told Daisy as he drew his shotgun out from behind the seat and loaded it with alternating slug and buckshot rounds.
He closed the door and took a long breath of air that was tinged with cut hay and freestone river. A slight breeze rattled through the drying leaves of the trees and provided a soundtrack like ghostly distant hand percussion shakers.
Joe touched the grip of his .40 Glock as well as the handle and nozzle of the bear spray canister on his belt to make sure they were there. He closed his eyes and visualized drawing the spray, arming the canister, and firing it.
He debated what he would do if he had a close encounter with a bear. Would he deploy his bear spray or start blasting with his shotgun?
Then he called out, “Clay? It’s Joe Pickett.”
*
THERE WAS NO response. Joe hoped that the reason for Clay’s not answering was because the breeze and the sound from the river had drowned out his query.
He touched the plastic hood of the Ranger as he passed it. Cold. He touched the hood of Clay’s F-350. Warm.
Joe racked a slug into the receiver of the shotgun and approached the open gate. It was a three-strand barbed-wire gate and it had been flung to the side. Joe stepped through the opening with his senses on high.
The brush near the river was thick, and the only way to push through it was to use a series of game trails that wound through the eight-foot-tall willows. As he did, the brush closed around him and he felt slightly claustrophobic. He could see nothing beyond a few feet, and he knew that a predator could be tucked away in the tangle and he wouldn’t see it until it was too late.
Joe used his left hand to push branches away as he approached the river. He held his shotgun tight to his body with his right so the barrel wouldn’t catch on the brush and be jerked aside.
When he cleared the willows and the river opened up before him, Joe stopped and surveyed the scene carefully. There was so much color in the trees and the sun’s dappled reflection off the water that, for a moment, it was hard to concentrate. The impressionistic tableau in front of him was like a pulsating, neon Monet painting.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw Clay sitting on a rock on the bank of the river with his back to him. Clay was hunched over, his head in his hands, his cowboy hat upside down near his boots. A large-caliber handgun was poised on a flat rock next to him, near the bottom half of a human leg, still wearing a fishing boot and Gore-Tex waders slashed jaggedly at the knee.
“Clay?”
This time, the man heard him. Clay looked over his shoulder. His face was swollen and his eyes were haunted.
Clay was a big man with ginger hair, dark blue eyes, and a square-cut jaw that gave him a look of authority. That jaw trembled when he said, “He’s gone, Joe. Torn apart. A bear must have got him.”
As he said it, he gestured upstream with a wave of his hand, indicating that Joe should follow.
“Is the bear still around?”
Clay shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. But Clay Junior is over there, or what’s left of him.”
Joe couldn’t yet see the body, but he nodded and picked his way over the jumble of smooth river rocks upstream. Twenty yards away from where Clay sat, Joe paused before a finger of dark mud that sat exposed between the rocks. The bear track was massive—at least nine inches long and over five inches wide. There was a large kidney-shaped impression from the pad of its foot, five toe impressions each the size of a quarter, and five claw marks in front of the toes that looked narrow and deep, like repeated stabs of a knife. All of the impressions had filled with water from their proximity to the river.
There was no doubt to Joe that it had been a grizzly, not a black bear. A black bear track was roughly half this size and was distinguishable by the curved inside digit nearest the body of the animal. Grizzly tracks went straight from the pad of the foot.
The track was aimed at a loose mound of dirt filled with debris—small broken branches, mulch, rotting scabs of bark, and short lengths of pale tree roots that looked like entrails. The mound was about seven feet long and two feet high. It looked like a hastily dug grave and was set against the trunks of the cottonwood trees. Unnatural glimpses of color showed in the soft dirt.
As Joe approached the pile, the wind shifted slightly and he caught a whiff of a musky, rotten odor. It made the hair on the back of his neck and forearms prick.
He scanned the row of trees ahead of him and followed them up- and downstream. If the bear was still there it was hunkered down. Was it watching him?
There were more tracks near the pile. The bear had been heavy enough that it pressed several river rocks into the loose dirt around it. Joe noticed that when he stepped on the same rocks with his boot, they didn’t sink farther.
He saw where Clay had dug at the mound earlier, revealing Clay Junior’s mutilated face and head. The skin was pure white and mottled gray, his eyes wide open. There was a row of large round punctures across his forehead and beneath his chin, and more gaping holes on the sides of his head around the temples. There was no doubt he was dead.
Joe reached down and touched the collar of Clay Junior’s shirt. It was soaked.
Joe stood up and breathed in. His heart beat fast. Death, he thought, must have been almost instantaneous. There was no blood on Clay Junior’s face or on the ground around him, so he hadn’t bled out in that location. His skull had been crushed by the tremendous force of closing jaws.
Drag marks and bear tracks in the mud leading from the river indicated the body had been pulled from the water and buried in an excavated pit. That would explain the wet clothing.
Joe had never heard of a bear attack taking place on a river and the body cached along the bank. Both were unusual circumstances. Was that what really happened?
If so, did that mean the bear was coming back to feed on the victim? Or at least hanging around?
Joe turned quickly and made his way back to Clay on the riverbank. As he skittered across the river rocks, he shot glances over his shoulders in every direction, looking for movement. Leaves rattled in the breeze and the river flowed with muscle. He felt incredibly vulnerable in the open.
He thrust his hand beneath Clay’s armpit and helped him to his feet. Joe pointedly didn’t look at the severed leg.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to your vehicle. The bear might still be around here watching us.”
Dazed, the foreman reached down for the foot and Joe pulled on Clay to prevent it.
“Leave it, Clay. I know it’s tough, but I need to get you out of here.”
Clay stared at Joe with incomprehension. He was in shock.
“The bear cached the body for a reason,” Joe said. “Bears do that when they plan to come back. I don’t want you sitting here when he does.”
“I’ve got to kill that bear for what he did to my boy,” Clay said. “He’s my only son.”
“I know,” Joe said, pulling Clay toward the willows and the open gate beyond them. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“He served honorably for his country in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Clay said, as they wound through the brush. “He led men and he came back. How can he go through all that and get killed by a fucking bear here at home?” Clay’s voice cracked.
Joe had no answer for that.
“We’ll get the bear,” Joe said. “I’ve already called in backup. We’ll get the bear.”
“He was going to be your son-in-law,” Clay said.
*
JOE CONVINCED CLAY to go back to his house while he called the sheriff. They’d need armed backup, as well as the evidence tech and county coroner on the scene, if possible.
“I’ll have to tell Mrs. Wheatridge,” Clay said. “I’m not looking forward to that.”
Clay had been widowed for years and he had raised his son on the ranch with his full-time housekeeper, Mrs. Wheatridge. The woman not only shared Clay’s bed from time to time but she’d also been a surrogate mother to Clay Junior.
“She always said I’d get him killed somehow,” Clay said. “Now I gotta tell her she was right.”
“You didn’t get him killed.”
“She’ll say, ‘If you’d let him go and didn’t insist on him following in your footsteps, a bear wouldn’t have attacked him.’”
Joe had no response to that.
*
WHEN CLAY WAS gone, Joe leaned against the grille of his pickup with his cell phone in his hand. He’d placed his shotgun within reach across the hood. Inside the cab, Daisy stared at him with her head cocked to the side as if to ask what was going on out there.
He speed-dialed his wife, Marybeth, and she answered from her office in the back of the county library that she managed.
“I’ve got some very bad news,” Joe said.
“What happened?” she asked. It was far from the first time he’d called her with that message, nor the first time she’d asked for details.
“Grizzly bear attack on the Twelve Sleep River,” Joe said. “The victim is Clay Junior.”
Marybeth let out a gasp. “Is he …”
“Yup.”
“My God, does Sheridan know?”
“Nope. We just found his body.”
“This is horrible, Joe. Just horrible. Did you destroy the bear?”
He surveyed the wall of trees near the river and the rocky slope beyond and said, “No. The bear is on the loose.”
As he spoke, he received an incoming call from Game and Fish headquarters in Cheyenne. No doubt, he thought, the word of his earlier call to dispatch had made the rounds. “I’ve got to take this,” he said to Marybeth.
“Call me later when you can,” she said. “I mean, Sheridan’s coming over for dinner tonight with Nate and Liv. Clay Junior was supposed to come over later, too,” she said, her voice rising with the implication of that statement.
“I’ll be in touch,” Joe said. “Don’t wait for me to have dinner. It’s going to be a late one.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. I’m worried about our daughter.”
“So am I, but we know she’s tough.”
“Yup.”
“Be careful, Joe.”
“Of course,” he said. While punching off, Clay’s words echoed in his head:
“He was going to be your son-in-law.”