Open Season
C.J. Box
Prologue
When a high-powered rifle bullet hits living flesh makes a distinctive-- pow WHOP sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance. There is rarely an echo or fading reverberation or the tailing rumbling hum that is the sound of a miss. The guttural boom rolls over the terrain but stops sharply in a close-ended way, as if jerked back. A hit is blunt and solid like an airborne grunt. When the sound is heard and identified, it isn't easily forgotten.
When Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett heard the sound, he was building a seven-foot elk fence on the perimeter of a rancher's haystack. He paused, his fencing pliers frozen in mid-twirl. Then he stepped back, lowered his head, and listened. He slipped the pliers into the back pocket of his jeans and took off his straw cowboy hat to wipe his forehead with a bandanna. His red uniform shirt stuck to his chest, and he felt a single, warm trickle of sweat crawl down his spine into his Wranglers.
He waited. He had learned over the years that it was easy to be fooled by sounds of any kind outside, away from town. A single, sharp crack heard at a distance could be a rifle shot, yes, but it could also be a tree falling, a branch snapping, a cow breaking through a sheet of ice in the winter, or the backfire of a motor.
"Don't confirm the first gunshot until you hear the second" was a basic tenet of the outdoors. Good poachers knew that, too. It tended to improve their aim.
In a way, Joe hoped he wouldn't hear a second shot. The fence wasn't done, and if someone was shooting, it was his duty to investigate. Joe had been on the job for a only a week, and he was hopelessly backlogged with work that had accumulated since the legendary Warden Vern Dunnegan had retired three months before. It was the state's responsibility to keep the elk herds out of private hay, and the pile of work orders on his desk for elk fence was nearly an inch high. Even if he built fence from dawn to dusk, he didn't see how he could possibly get it all done before hunting season started.
There was nothing really unusual about gunshots ringing out at any time of day or night or at any time of the year in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming. Everybody owned guns. A rancher could be shooting at a coyote, or some of the boys from town could be our sighting in their rifles on a target.
Pow-WHOP.
Joe's eyes swung northwest toward the direction of the second shot, toward the foothills of the mountains where outstretched fingers of timber reached down into the high sage that reflected blue in the heat. The shot had come from a long way, three to five miles.
Maxine, Joe's eight-year-old yellow Labrador, also heard the shot, and bounded from her pool of shadow under Joe's green Ford pickup. She knew it was time to go to work. Joe opened the passenger door with the Wyoming Game and Fish logo on it, and she leaped in. Before he closed the door, he unsheathed his Winchester .270 rifle and scope from its scabbard case behind the seat and fitted the rifle into the gun rack across the back window. His gun belt was coiled in a pile on the floorboard of the truck, so he picked it up and he buckled it on. Even though regulations dictated that he wear his sidearm at all times, Joe hated driving with his holster on because the heavy pistol jabbed him in the back.
As he climbed into the pickup, there were two more quick shots, one after the other. The first shot wafted across the brush and hay. The second was definitely another hit. Joe thought it was likely that at least two--and possibly three--animals were down.
Joe shoved the pickup into four-wheel drive and headed west toward the mountains, driving as fast as he could without losing control of the wheel.
There were no established roads, so he kept the left tires in a cow track while the right wheels bounced through knee-high, then thigh-high, sagebrush. Maxine leaned into the windshield with both of her large paws on the dashboard, balancing against the violent pitching of the terrain. Her tongue swung from side to side and spattered the dashboard with dog spit.
"Get ready," Joe told her--although for what he didn't know.
They plunged into a dry wash and ground up out of it, the tires independently grabbing dirt and shooting plumes of dust into the air. Joe nearly lost his grip on the steering wheel as it wrenched hard to the right and left, then he regained control and powered up a brushy slope. His mouth was dry, and he was, quite frankly, very scared.
A game Warden in the field rarely encountered anyone who wasn't armed. Hunters, of course, had rifles, shotguns, and sidearms. Hikers, fishers, and campers all too often were packing. Even archery hunters had bows capable of rocketing a razor-sharp broad-head arrow through his pickup door. But that was during hunting season. This was the middle of summer, and there were no seasons open. The only kind of people who would be knocking down big animals now would be poachers or cattle rustlers, and either could be desperate and dangerous if caught in the act.
Joe Pickett topped the small hill and quickly sized up the situation: three large buck mule deer were dead, lying on their sides, on the bottom of the saddle slope. Their throats had been cut to bleed them, but they hadn't been opened up yet to field dress. A bearded man wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a King Ropes cap straddled the largest of the bucks. He was a big man, built solidly with thick arms and a barrel chest. His T-shirt read happiness Is A warm gut pile. He outweighed Joe by at least 40 pounds, but he didn't seem menacing, only very upset with the fact that he had been caught. He held a dripping knife in his hand. His rifle was propped up in a tall sagebrush about 50 feet away from him. He appeared not to have a sidearm. His pickup, a battered three quarter-ton GMC, nosed out of the timber on the opposite slope.
He squinted up at Joe's pickup and his face fell open.
"Oh, fuck me," the man said, loud enough for Joe to hear over the whine of the engine.
Joe drove quickly down the hill and positioned his Ford between the man and the rifle so the poacher couldn't lunge for it. Joe got out, told Maxine to stay, and approached the man and the downed deer.
"Please drop the knife," Joe asked, sizing up the deer and the poacher. The poacher tossed the knife aside into the grass. Joe saw no reason to draw his revolver. Joe rarely found a reason to draw his weapon, and even if he did, he doubted he could hit anything with it. Joe was a notoriously bad pistol shot at any range, the worst in his class.
"You're about four months early for deer season, you know," Joe said. He now recognized the man, a local outfitter named Ote Keeley. Joe had seen his photo and a reference request for an outfitter's license on his desk his first day on the job.
Ote sighed. "Meat for the pot, warden. Just meat for the pot. Some of us got a family to feed." Ote had a deep Southern accent. Joe couldn't identify the state.
Joe squatted over the nearest and largest buck deer and ran his fingers over the soft velvet that still covered the antlers.
"Seems to me you didn't have to kill the only trophies in the herd just to fill your freezer." He looked up at Ote Keeley, his eyes hard. "A meat hunter would have probably been happy with a big dry doe or two."
Joe knew there was a black market for antlers in velvet, and that racks this size would command thousands of dollars in Asia where they were thought to possess healing powers as well as serve as an aphrodisiac when ground up and ingested.
"I'm going to have to write you up. Ote Keeley, isn't it?"
Ote was genuinely surprised. His face flushed red. "You're gosh-darned kidding me, right?" Ote asked, as if avoiding an additional ticket for cursing.
Joe stood and pulled his ticket book out of his back pocket and flipped it open.
"No, I'm not kidding."
Ote stepped toward Joe over the downed deer he was straddling.
"Hey--I know you. You're the brand-new game warden, ain't you?"