CONTENTS
Title Page
About the Author
Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Messenger
First Chapter of A Serpent’s Tooth (Book 9 in the Walt Longmire Mystery Series)
Craig Johnson is the author of eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813, and Kindness Goes Unpunished, the third in the series, has also been published in France. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award winner and the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick and Hell Is Empty was a New York Times bestseller. The eighth novel in the series, As the Crow Flies, was a New York Times bestseller and an Indie Next Pick. All are available from Penguin. Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels have now been adapted for television in the hit series Longmire on A&E. His next novel, A Serpent’s Tooth, will be available from Viking in June 2013. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.
Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series
“Like the greatest crime novelists, Johnson is a student of human nature. Walt Longmire is strong but fallible, a man whose devil-may-care stoicism masks a heightened sensitivity to the horrors he’s witnessed. Unlike traditional genre novelists who obsess mainly over every hairpin plot turn, Johnson’s books are also preoccupied with the mystery of his characters’ psyches.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Johnson knows the territory, both fictive and geographical, and tells us about it in prose that crackles.”
—Robert B. Parker
“The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence.”
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The New York Times
“[Walt Longmire] is an easy man to like. . . . Johnson evokes the rugged landscape with reverential prose, lending a heady atmosphere to his story.”
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The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Stepping into Walt’s world is like slipping on a favorite pair of slippers, and it’s where those slippers lead that provides a thrill. Johnson pens a series that should become a ‘must’ read, so curl up, get comfortable, and enjoy the ride.”
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The Denver Post
“A winning piece of work . . . There’s a convincing feel to the whole package: a sense that you’re viewing this territory through the eyes of someone who knows it as adoring lover and skeptical onlooker at the same time.”
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The Washington Post
“Johnson’s pacing is tight and his dialogue snaps.”
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Entertainment Weekly
“Truly great. Reading Craig Johnson is a treat. . . . [He] tells great stories, casts wonderful characters and writes in a style that compels the reader forward.”
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Wyoming Tribune Eagle
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com
Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
ISBN 978-1-101-63654-1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Lola, our Shoshone Rose
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Messenger is another one of those stories that I like to refer to as a connecting tissue between my Walt Longmire novels—little stories that aren’t so much of a mystery but are more revealing of character. There are things I count on in the books and in the stories, characters that I depend on to bring a certain energy to the scenes and two of the big ones are Henry and Vic; I always know that when they join Walt, things seem to happen—sometimes crazy things.
A portion of the proceeds of this story goes to the Teton Raptor Center in Jackson, Wyoming, in hopes that they will extend their efforts in saving owls in the Bighorn Mountains. If you’d like to make a further donation, they can be reached below.
Teton Raptor Center
P.O. Box 1805
Wilson, Wyoming 83014
Phone: 307.203.2551
E-maiclass="underline" raptors@tetonraptorcenter.org
I’d like to thank the Teton Raptor Center for the information I gleaned from them along with Marcus Red Thunder for the Cheyenne owl lore. And where would I be on the hanging road if not for Gail “Goshawk” Hochman, Marianne “Merlin” Merola, Kathryn “Great Horned Owl” Court, Tara “Snowy Owl” Singh, Barbara “Gyr Falcon” Campo, Scott “European Eagle Owl” Cohen, Carolyn “Crested Owl” Coleburn, Maureen “Crowned Eagle” Donnelly, Ben “Bald Eagle” Petrone, and Angie “Screech Owl” Messina—and as always, my little Burrowing Owl, Judy.
The crow wished everything was black, the owl, that everything was white.
—William Blake
Messenger
It was one of those late summer days that sometimes showed up in early October after a killing frost—warm, dry, and hazy; Indian summer. The term is over two hundred years old and was first coined by the French American writer John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1778, describing the warm calm before the winter storm.
Boy howdy.
If one of these miraculous days happened to appear on an autumn Saturday in north central Wyoming, Henry Standing Bear and I would head up into the Bighorn Mountains, a sister range to the Rockies, conveniently located between the Black Hills of South Dakota and Yellowstone National Park. No place in the area offers a more diverse landscape, from lush grasslands to alpine meadows, from crystal-clear lakes to rushing streams, and from rolling hills to sheer mountain walls—or so read the national forest travel brochure and map I had unfolded in my lap.
The Bear had been my best friend since grade school, and we always headed for those crystal-clear lakes or rushing streams in pursuit of rainbow, brown, brook, and cutthroat trout. We were returning from one of those trips on a late afternoon with a cooler of fish, the aspens having turned a shimmering gold, which provided a counterpoint to the dense verdant green of the conifers. The made-for-my-life VistaVision effect was ruined by only one thing; due to the road conditions leading in and out from one of our favorite spots along Baby Wagon Creek, relatively unknown to the greater fishing population, I was forced to accompany Henry in his truck, Rezdawg, a vehicle I hated beyond all others.