Chapter Seventeen

The road forked. To the right it circled past the alkali flat at the foot of the Buckskins and climbed across the valley to the white scar on the bare slope that had been a copper town and railroad terminus until the 1940s. It seemed like every year some tourist or dirt biker exploring that place discovered an old mineshaft the hard way.

We took the left fork into the Pine Nuts. At the BLM sign I geared down as the washboardy road began a climb across open flats with clumps of green Mormon tea and yellow sulfur flower scattered among the sage. Another half mile and the road folded into a canyon, climbing high as the canyon grew steep. Big cottonwoods along the trickle of creek below us reached overhead and spread shade on the road. Along the trickle were willow and bitterbrush and the pink of wild peach, and Nevada elms with fire-black trunks, their dead branches poking up through new leaves. When we got some altitude, I could see the hills that had burned the fall before, where incinerated piñon left charcoal sketch lines outlining the edges of every ridge and the contours of every rise and gully. I’d been in the hospital in Bethesda when it happened, the fourth fire in that range in three years, with the cause split pretty equal between lightning and idiots.

I looked over at Sarah. She was staring out the window with no expression. The road turned, spanning the narrow watercourse under a single elm. The water was clear, and willows grew below the crossing with patches of green at the water’s edge. Beyond the creek, tan cheatgrass with purplish tips grew up the slope.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

I’d been wondering again if maybe her dad had been dead since that first morning she found him gone, or if Kip had kept him alive for some water-fraud scheme. “Just wondering how many pair you’re running up here.”

“Only a hundred and ten,” she said. “They cut back the allotment after the fires.”

“Letting the range heal?”

“Something like that.”

The road now was reddish clay, deep ruts dried solid after hard rain, then climbing through juniper growing from sandy ground. Ahead we saw open country. We came to a cattle guard where the road passed through the drift fence that marked the edge of Dave’s grazing allotment. Beyond the fence all the piñon and juniper were gone. Not thinned out, but totally vanished. On either side of the road there were piles of brush. Dead piñon limbs and trunks lay white from the sun, and pine boughs dry and rust-red were spread in clumps into the distance. When we cleared the cattle guard, I stopped the truck and we got out.

“The hell?”

“Wildlife mitigation,” Sarah said. “Part of the BLM’s new conditions on the permit. Dad hired those two weightlifters of Kip’s last fall to come out here with chain saws and cut down the trees for sage grouse habitat.” She sounded pissed just thinking about it.

I looked at the mounds of dead trees. Then I scanned the open sage and bare ridges. “Not bad.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “This is horrid.”

“I was just thinking that for us, this ain’t so terrible. No cover. Not for amateurs, anyway.”

She looked like she was sorry she ever asked me home. We got back in the truck. The road climbed for another treeless quarter mile. The fires hadn’t burned this far, so the next trees we came to were healthy and thick. Piñon gray as sage against darker junipers, short trees so close together we couldn’t see around the next bend. I drove slow, then stopped altogether. Sarah watched me lay the Remington across my lap with the muzzle out the open window. She slipped her 9mm out of its holster on the seat between us. I started up again, just creeping along in second. Finally, the road straightened and the trees fell away at the top of the rise and we could see the pipe corral and loading chute, and the back of the cabin. The morning was warming up. We were at Dave’s cowcamp.

Sage had overgrown the corral. The steel was rusty and the chute looked dicey. There was a lodgepole round corral next to the log cabin and wooden sorting pens below it in the center of a sandy flat. Scattered in the brush, I saw bits of scrap and rolls of wire and rusted steel drums. There was a water pump on its side no longer connected to anything and new galvanized stock tanks in the pens. A tarp covered a ton of hay stacked in one of the pens beyond the reach of grazing cattle.

There was an outhouse and shed and wood pile behind the cabin and a ratty Ford flatbed parked next to them. The camp was set on a rise in an open spot where the dirt road forked. The left fork disappeared into the trees. Beyond them I could see small meadows under burned hills. The right fork skirted the pens into open country.

It took us an hour to unload the truck and trailer. The cabin was low ceilinged, with two iron bunks with rolled mattresses and folded blankets stacked on bare springs, a cast-iron cook stove with a full woodbox next to it, an icebox, a table and wooden chairs, and shelves for tin goods. It was no different than the thousands just like it that used to be scattered across the West, except maybe a bit bigger. Dave left it unlocked, as was the custom in an earlier age. Those who used it—hunters, four-wheelers, and souvenir scavengers today, drifting cowboys, prospectors, and mustangers in his dad’s generation—were expected to leave the place as unmolested as they found it and the woodbox full.

Sarah unrolled the larger of the two mattresses and I set my bedroll on it and unrolled that. She peeled back the canvas tarp and aired out the bedding inside. Neither of us commented that the last time the bedroll had been used a couple of years before was the first night she and I had ever been together. We got busy and set the fridge in a likely spot. I hooked up the propane tank and Sarah stocked the fridge with what Harvey always called the basics—eggs, beef, bacon, butter, and beer. The cabin had two small windows cut into the logs, and I kept checking them, trying the latches and studying how much terrain I could see from inside. I caught Sarah watching me.

“We probably don’t want to get cornered in here,” she said.

“No. We’ll keep moving. Get him to show himself.”

“Do you think there’s a chance the law might catch him before he follows us out here?” she said.

“There’s always that chance.”

The cabin was squared away, and we went outside and checked the fencing in the pen where we’d turned out the horses. It was in rough shape, with missing boards and exposed nails. The day was starting to get hot. In the morning we would ride out together, then separate, staying close enough to signal but looking as lonesome and vulnerable as could be. Maybe not my best plan, but I was counting on Kip and whatever crew he’d bring to get lost in all that country. After a day or so of searching, he’d try to hit us at the cowcamp, not far out in the open where they didn’t know exactly where the hell we’d be. Then he’d be easier to take. Plus, we’d let those cows and their calves run interference for us. In a normal year, they’d be coming down toward the camp anyway when the feed further back got poor. They were used to getting herded out of the canyon to a ranch in the valley that belonged to Becky’s brother. But this wasn’t like every other year.

We heard a vehicle coming and scampered back to Sarah’s Silverado. We picked up our long guns, then spread out and went back to nailing up loose boards—or pretending to. The driver was only some BLM lady that Sarah and Dave knew. Sarah leaned her shotgun against a post and walked over to the government truck, stopping for gulps from her water bottle. They talked for three or four minutes, then the lady gave me a hell of a nasty look and drove off. Sarah walked back to me with sweat on her forehead and blood in her eye.

“What a bitch,” she said.

“What happened?”

“She was hard-assing me about the permit,” Sarah said. “All whiney that Dad had put out the salt too close to the tanks and the cattle hadn’t spread out enough across the winter, and now they’re spread out too much, and one of the floats on a tank was broken and the wild critters had no water. Jesus.” She stared right into me. “Basically she was wondering what I was doing camped up here with a man who wasn’t my husband.”

“So what’d you tell her?”

“I told her to go screw herself.”

I watched her pick up the shotgun and head for the cabin. She looked about ready to load the horses and head out of there. I went back to nailing up boards.

I finished a while later. She’d set up kindling and wood in the stove, but the day was too hot to light it until we had to. I got a beer from the fridge and sat at the table.

“What’s in the shed out back?”

“Some salt blocks, some wire,” she said. “A beat-up old pack rig Dad used to haul the salt. Stuff like that.”

“Is it locked?”

“Should be,” she said. “Why?”

“One less place for somebody to hide. You have the key?”

“Yeap.”

“And the key to that old Ford?”

“That too,” she said.

I started fiddling with a Coleman, fueling it from a red can, pumping it up and lighting the mantles and adjusting the flame. When I got the lantern set up I shut it down till dusk. I saw a couple of regular kerosene lamps on the shelf and took those down too, filled them and trimmed the wicks. Most guys would have a generator for electric lights, but not Dave. I hoped the familiar routine took Sarah’s mind off things.

At sunset I went out to feed the horses while Sarah packed a stuffsack with a couple days worth of food. When I came back she’d lit the lamps and the stove and started dinner, frying up a mess of sirloin and potatoes, the smell of the kerosene mixing with the good smell of onion and garlic in the hot beef fat. I asked her if I could help and she shook her head. She watched me pull Becky’s old gun rig out and set it on the table, then fill the belt loops with the .45s from the green and yellow box.

Dinner was spicy and good. We ate and drank red wine like Basco sheepherders and didn’t say much. When we did, we talked about the country we would be riding in the morning and all the old stuff that had happened on this range—mostly mining and boomer camps, but railroads and the Pony Express and Piute wars too. After I cleared the plates and put a bucket on the stove for the dishes, we took our guns and went outside. She held my hand like we were an old couple. The air was cooling and the sky was clear. It was a good while since the sun slipped behind the ridge, but a last bit of its light skimmed the peaks to the east. We walked the perimeter and went inside.

Later, with the lanterns blown out, the woodstove put an orange light inside the cabin. I slipped out of the bedroll and jammed more stove wood into the firebox, but for now we both were hot and not sleepy. When Sarah pulled away the sheet to let me back into the bedroll, her hair was tangled and her skin glistened in the orange light and I covered her with the sheet and she wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Will he come for us tonight, you think?” she said.

“No. He’s probably just found out we’re here, and he won’t have a plan yet or the means even if he did.”

She squeezed my neck and started to cry, then stopped herself just as quick.

“Tell me again how we’ll find him,” she said.

“We get out alone in these empty hills tomorrow like we’re gathering that stock, he’ll find us. Or think he has. He’ll chase us till we catch him.”

We would ride that country hard from dark to dark. Each night we would tend our horses and cook our food with not many words, but each one simple and kind and well chosen, like it was our own language. Then we would get into that big bedroll and be as close as the first two humans on earth. She was so sweet I hated every man she had ever been with and shared that sweetness with, and hated myself for any time of ours I might have wasted. I knew that time was always short. Then she would look at me in the dark, or the orange glow of the fire, just tangled gypsy hair and the shape of her face and those eyes reflecting the dying coals, and then she would wrap her arms around my neck and draw me in and that was all there was and all that mattered, except for the man out there in the dark we’d come to kill.