Charlie preferred helicopters to horses.
"Not far," Phil replied.
Kerney nodded.
"That's good."
Phil took the lead across the grasslands. There was something familiar about Kerney that he couldn't pin down. He was left with the feeling that he knew the man.
PJ Cox had his father's eyes and the same dimple on his chin. He cradled a varmint rifle in his arm.
Lean and deeply tanned, the boy wore a battered cowboy hat pulled down tight on his head. Phil introduced Kerney, and PJ stuck out his hand.
"Glad to meet you, sir," he said politely.
"Same here," Kerney replied, shaking PJ's hand.
"Thanks for looking after things while your dad went to fetch me."
PJ glanced up at Kerney, pleased with the expression of gratitude.
"No problem," he said.
The carcass was twenty feet away. Kerney took a long look at it.
"When do you think the bear was killed?" he asked PJ.
"Yesterday," PJ answered promptly.
"It hasn't even started to smell bad yet."
Kerney nodded in agreement.
"Did you take a close look at it?"
"No, sir." PJ glanced at his father.
"My dad said to leave it just the way we found it."
"That was good advice," Kerney replied with a smile.
He gathered up some twigs and walked an ever tightening circle around the bear, staking each track and sign that he saw. He could feel Phil and PJ watching him as he worked. Ten feet from the carcass he found the discarded, eviscerated bowels of the animal. Close by were tracks of bear cub prints and the imprint of a boot heel in soft sand. He finished the circle, returned to the horses, got two cameras from the day pack, and started taking pictures. Phil Cox and PJ remained quiet as he shot Polaroid and thirty-five-millimeter photographs of everything he had staked as evidence. Finished with the perimeter search, he walked to the carcass.
The black bear, a female, had been skinned and beheaded, and all four paws had been cut off.
Coyotes had been at her, ripping into the soft underbelly, but the animal had not been fully gutted.
The ground, swept clean with the branch of a cedar tree to remove footprints, was stained with the juices and blood from the coyote feeding. Kerney took more pictures, gathered some hair samples, and scraped dried blood out of the cavity into a plastic bag before returning to Phil and PJ, who were perched on a boulder. Both stood up when he walked over.
"What do you think?" Phil asked.
"Trophy hunter," Kerney speculated.
"Knew what he was doing, from the looks of it. Took out the bladder and bowel before he started skinning. One clean entry hole through the chest from a highpowered rifle. Minimum damage to the pelt. Have you seen anything like this before?"
"Heard about it," Phil replied.
"It happens every now and then. A royal elk or a buck deer with a good set of antlers gets taken, or a cougar or a bear like this. Charlie can tell you more about it."
"What would Charlie tell me?" Kerney prodded.
"That some people pay big money to hang a bearskin on their wall," Phil answered.
"Like who?"
"Nobody I know," Phil replied shortly.
"There isn't a rancher in the county who would kill a bear that's mothering cubs unless it was marauding."
"You saw the cubs?"
Phil shook his head.
"Just the tracks. That's my boot print you took a picture of."
"How long have you and PJ been up here?"
"We camped down at the old cabin last night and came up before dawn looking for strays. When we found the bear I called for Charlie on my cellular phone."
"Have you lost any stock?"
"Not that I know of," Phil replied.
"I wouldn't shoot the damn bear and call the Forest Service to come and fetch it, if that's what you're getting at.
That would be pretty stupid."
"That would be stupid," Kerney agreed.
"Have you seen anyone in the area?"
Phil answered with a tight shake of his head.
"Did you hear any shooting?"
"No."
"Did you pass anyone on the road when you came in?"
"No." Phil stiffened and his eyes narrowed.
"I already told you I didn't shoot the bear."
"I'm not accusing you, Mr. Cox," Kerney replied.
"It sounds that way to me."
"Maybe we should back up and start this conversation over again," Kerney proposed.
Phil gave Kerney a slight shrug of his shoulders.
"Hell, I'm sorry I sound so gruff. It's not you. I guess I've got a knee-jerk reaction to anything that smacks of criticism. Nowadays it seems like us ranchers get blamed for everything that goes wrong in the national forest. At least you're not giving me a Charlie Perry lecture about how my cattle are destroying the forest."
"Is Charlie a hard-core environmentalist?" Kerney asked.
"And then some. He's one of those back-east, urban conservationists. A big-city fellah who wants to save us from ourselves. I take it you haven't met him."
"I haven't had the pleasure." "Well, you're in for a treat," Phil said sourly.
Kerney nodded vaguely, his eyes studying the mesa. From what he could see, the tabletop mesa fell off sharply on all sides. It was a rock-strewn piece of ground, no more than half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, with wide beaches of shale broken by clearings of grass, wildflowers, and clumps of pinon and cedar trees.
"Is the trail the only way in?" he asked.
"Unless you're a mountain goat," Phil answered.
Kerney smiled in agreement, took the hand-held radio from his pack, made contact with the Glenwood office, and gave a brief report. He was told to stand by until relieved.
"Charlie's on his way," Phil predicted.
"You think so?"
"Bet on it."
"While we're waiting for Charlie, would you and PJ like to lend a hand and help me look for the cubs?"
Phil found himself liking the ranger's manner.
"Might as well," he replied with a smile.
They searched the mesa in sectors. Phil and PJ were good trackers. The boy found recent claw marks on a pinon tree near a cow path, and Phil found fresh bear scat by a rotten log. They fanned out, working between the trees, and Kerney discovered a shooter's nest behind a cedar tree.
In the spongy, needle-covered soil a small blind had been constructed of branches and dirt, just large enough to conceal a prone rifleman. There were tracks of a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle in a sandy hollow off to one side.
PJ called out in an excited voice just as Kerney finished photographing the tire tracks. Kerney jogged to catch up with the boy and his father, who stood looking down into a rock crevice. A bear cub, huddled behind the dead body of a sibling, whimpered as PJ bent over with his hands on his knees for a closer look.
Phil turned to Kerney and said something that was lost in the sound of an arriving helicopter.
"What did you say?" Kerney shouted.
"I said it's a damn shame," Phil Cox shouted, as they walked to where the chopper landed.
The pilot shut down the engine as a man disembarked and ran, head lowered, through the dust cloud kicked up by the rotor wash. He nodded at Phil Cox and turned his attention immediately to Kerney.
"You're Kerney," he snapped. He was a man in his early thirties, with a serious face and sharp brown eyes. Sand-colored hair flapped over his forehead.
He wore a yellow fire lighter jumpsuit and hiking boots.
"That's right," Kerney replied.
"Charlie Perry," he said, brushing his hair back into place. A strand fluttered back down his forehead.
"I sure hope you haven't fucked everything up."
The helicopter blades slowed to a dull thudding sound.
"That would be embarrassing," Kerney replied.
Charlie's eyes narrowed at the sarcasm.