Spaced at irregular intervals around the fen were the headless carcasses of half a dozen Rocky Mountain sheep in various stages of decay. All the creatures had been in their prime before they’d been killed. Their broad chests, humped above the grass, gave way to brawny hindquarters of large, muscular rams, not smaller ewes. So powerfully built were the rams’ collapsed forms that they appeared capable, even in death, of leaping without effort from one rocky crag to another.
The slaughtered animals’ fur was intact, legs and torsos lying as they’d been left, uncut by any butchering to make use of their meat.
Chuck stepped forward and turned a slow circle in the center of the clearing, taking shallow breaths of the fetid air. Rage boiled inside him. The sheep had been slaughtered in some sort of a perverted rampage. Who had killed these magnificent creatures, and why?
He clamped his nose between his finger and thumb and studied the carcasses. All the rams had suffered the same fate: their heads cut and carried off, their bodies left to rot.
Chuck considered what he knew about Rocky Mountain bighorn rams. While some remained with their herds of ewes and lambs throughout the year, others, in spring and summer, ran in all-male groups, grazing high above tree level where their keen eyesight and unrivaled sense of smell protected them from predators—save a high-powered bullet fired by a poacher from afar.
It was easy to surmise what had transpired on Mount Landen over the course of the summer. After the first among them was killed and dragged down the mountainside, the remaining rams had continued to frequent the high alpine tundra of the mountain’s north face. And why wouldn’t they? The slope had proven safe for generations; nothing in their evolutionary makeup warned them away after the death of the first among them, or the second, or third.
Based on the size of the carcasses, whoever had killed the rams had harvested the most trophy-worthy of the bighorns that roamed Mount Landen. But with just the rams’ heads removed, Chuck knew it wasn’t trophies for fireplace mantels the poacher was after. It was their horns, the bigger the better.
For many years, Chinese men had believed that ingesting ground-up rhinoceros horn acted as an aphrodisiac, which had led to the decimation of the world’s wild-rhino population by poachers. As powdered rhino horn became increasingly unattainable on the black market, a rumor started up on the internet that the horns of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep held the same magical sexual powers as rhino horns. The demand wasn’t going anywhere, so somebody came up with a new way to supply it—and here in front of Chuck was the clear result of the latest aphrodisiac craze.
Also clear, because the carcasses were still here, rotting in the forest, was the fact that no one yet knew what had taken place.
That, at least, was about to change.
Chuck retraced his route out of the trees and back up and over the ridge.
“About time,” said Kirina when he returned to the mine site. “We’ve refilled the excavation units. We’re ready to put the logs back in place.”
Chuck cast an approving eye at the site of the collapsed cabin—now a flat patch of dirt and rock where the excavation had taken place.
“Leave no trace,” he said, quoting the ethic of wilderness travel that was equally applicable to archaeological work.
He helped Kirina, Clarence, and the students return the logs to their original, collapsed positions, studying “before” pictures on Kirina’s tablet computer for accuracy as they worked. When they finished, the site of the collapsed cabin looked as it had at the beginning of the summer—a jumble of protruding logs at the edge of the plateau—as required by Professor Sartore’s contract with the park service.
The contract required that the floor in the mine tunnel be returned to its original, intact condition as well. In the wake of the floor collapse, however, Chuck decided that part of the contract was null and void.
He pointed at the picks, shovels, boxes of gear, and unused rain shelters stacked beside the collapsed cabin. “Shouldn’t be a problem carrying everything back to the van in one go,” he told the students. “Take a good look around. We won’t be coming back.”
“Good riddance,” muttered Jeremy.
“We’re giving it back to the ghosts,” Sheila said to him.
“To your skinwalkers, you mean,” Jeremy replied.
“Not skinwalkers. Ghosts,” Sheila asserted. “They haunt the Stanley, down in town, and they’re up here, too.”
“Your skinwalkers are afraid to leave the rez?”
Sheila stuck out her tongue at him. “They’re not afraid of anything. They just like to stay close to home.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Chuck said before Jeremy could direct another dig at Sheila.
Back at Trail Ridge Road, Chuck joined Clarence and Kirina in stacking and strapping the tools and gear bins in the van’s rooftop luggage basket as the students climbed inside and dug into their sack lunches. He checked the time as he turned the van around and headed toward town. Just past noon. Three hours before they were due back at Raven House for their police interviews. Plenty of time for what he had in mind.