Shots Fired Page 18

  But a live situation trumped a cold one.

  “Are there any injuries?” Joe asked the dispatcher, knowing the conversation was likely being monitored by other game wardens across the State of Wyoming as well as law enforcement and nosy neighbors throughout Twelve Sleep County.

  “Negative,” the female dispatcher said. “The party reports bullet holes in the sidewall of his truck, but they didn’t hit anybody.”

  “Yikes.”

  “I’ll ask the RP to stay out of the line of fire but remain at the scene until you get there.”

  “Do you have a name for the RP?” Joe asked, flipping open his spiral notebook to a fresh page while driving down the rough road, then uncapping a pen with his teeth.

  The name was Burton Hanks of Casper. While Joe bumped up and down in the cab, he scrawled the name and Hanks’s cell phone number on the pad. His two-year-old yellow Labrador, Daisy, fixated on the wavery pen strokes as if she desperately wanted to snatch the pen out of his grip and chew it into oblivion, which she would if she got the chance.

  “Did you run the name?” Joe asked the dispatcher.

  “Affirmative. He’s got a general license deer tag and said he is attempting to scout Area 25.”

  Joe nodded to himself. Area 25 was a massive and mountainous hunting area that included mountains, breaklands, and huge grassy swales. The official opening day was October 15, a few weeks away. Meaning Hanks was likely a trophy hunter out on a scout to identify the habitat of the biggest buck deer. Locals would literally wait until the opener to go up there, but serious trophy hunters would be out well in advance to mark their territory.

  Joe had mixed feelings when it came to serious trophy hunters, but he put them aside.

  As he motored down the washboarded county road, leaving a plume of dust behind him, the issue wasn’t scouting or trophy hunting or the ethics of trophy hunters. The issue was contained in two words: shots fired.

  • • •

  BEFORE HE REACHED the foothills to begin his climb into the timber and out the other side to Indian Paintbrush Basin, a herd of seventy to eighty pronghorn antelope looked up and watched him pass from where they grazed among the sagebrush. A herd that big—all does and fawns—meant there would be a bruiser of a buck somewhere watching over his harem, keeping them in line. Joe saw the buck over the next small hill. The animal was heavy-bodied and alert, with impressive curled horns with ivory tips and an alpha-male strut to his step.

  Over the next hill, five young bachelor bucks, like pimply-faced adolescents with too much time on their hands and testosterone in their blood, milled about in a tight circle butting heads and, Joe assumed, plotting a coup attempt against the big buck to take charge of the harem. The bachelors strutted and butted at each other, and watched Joe go by with what looked like lopsided sneers.

  Joe checked his wristwatch as he nosed his pickup through a steep-sided notch in the hill that would narrow ahead before the road climbed the last rise. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. He was expected home by six so he and his wife, Marybeth, could attend his daughter Lucy’s musical at the Saddlestring High School. She was a costar in a politically correct production he’d never heard of and was scheduled to sing a song called “Diversity.” He didn’t want to miss it, yet he did. Nevertheless, he hoped the shots-fired incident could be resolved quickly enough that he could make it home on time.

  As the road got rougher and he pitched about within the cab, Daisy placed both her paws on the dashboard for balance and stared through the front windshield as if to provide navigation support.

  “Almost there,” Joe said to her, shifting into four-wheel-drive low to climb the rise. The surface of the old two-track was dry and loose. He liked the idea of coming onto the scene from an unexpected direction. The sudden appearance of a green Game and Fish vehicle sometimes froze the parties in a dispute and gave him time to assess the situation on his own before confronting them or figuring out what to do. Most of all, it allowed him to see a situation with his own eyes before the involved parties weighed in.

  • • •

  HE BROKE OVER THE RIDGE and the vista to the east was clear and stunning: the foothills gave way to a huge bowl of grass miles across in every direction. The bowl—called Indian Paintbrush Swale, after the state’s official flower—was rimmed on three sides by timbered mountains either dark with pine in shadow or bright green if fused with afternoon sun. Between the swale and where Joe cleared the ridge top was a late-model maroon Chevy Avalanche faux pickup parked just off the county road. Two men stood with their backs to him at first, then wheeled around, obviously surprised that he’d come from behind.

  One of the men, standing near the front of the Avalanche, was tall and heavy with a long mustache that dropped to his jawline around both sides of his mouth. He wore a battered brown cowboy hat with a high crown and had a deeply creased and weathered face that indicated he either worked outside or spent a lot of his hours outdoors. The second man looked to be around the same age—fifty-five to sixty—but was clean-shaven and softer in features. He was hatless but wore a starched chamois shirt and new jeans that looked hours out of the box.

  The man in the hat waved Joe over. The second man was obviously subordinate to the large man and hung back to stay out of the way and observe.

  Joe put his pickup into park and let Daisy out. The dog followed him a few inches from his boot heels and kept her head down, sniffing the grass and sagebrush along the way.

  The man in the cowboy hat, Burton Hanks, said he was a little surprised Joe didn’t know of him.

  “I’m the guy who broke the Boone and Crockett record for a mule deer in Wyoming last fall,” Hanks said. “Scored 201 and three-eighths overall. Six points on the right side and five on the left. The inside spread was twenty-eight and a quarter,” he said proudly.

  “No offense,” Joe said, “but I don’t pay much attention to records. I’m here because someone reported shots fired. I assume you’re the reporting party.”

  Hanks was chastened, but said, “That’s me.”

  “So,” Joe said, “who was shooting at whom?”

  “Some third-world asshole shot at us!” Hanks bellowed, gesturing toward his pickup. “All we were doing was starting to cross that basin down there. Come look at this if you don’t believe me.”

  Joe followed Hanks around the Avalanche.

  “Here’s the evidence,” Hanks said, pointing at the small bullet hole in the metal sheeting of the rear bumper guard.

  “Yup,” Joe said, leaning close to the bumper. The hole was clean and the bullet was likely lodged somewhere in the sidewall of the bed. “Eight inches lower and it would have hit the tire,” Joe said.

  “And five inches higher and it might have punctured the fuel line and blown us to kingdom come,” Hanks added. “Here, there’s another one,” he said, pressing his index finger against a second hole in the sidewall a few feet in back of the cab. The bullet had pierced the outside sheet metal and exited on the top rail of the pickup bed, leaving angry sharp tongues of steel. Which meant the shot had been fired from a lower elevation than the truck at the time, Joe thought.

  “Let me get a couple of pictures,” Joe said, returning to his own truck for his digital camera. “Did you get a look at who did the shooting?”

  “Hell yes,” Hanks said. “And you can put away that camera, Warden. I can point you at who shot at us and you can go down there and arrest him right now.”

  Joe said, “You mean he’s still there?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. You can borrow my binocs and I’ll point him out to you.”

  Joe was surprised. Previously, a series of likely scenarios had circled around in the back of his mind: the shooter was also a trophy hunter intending to spook the competition; the shooter was zeroing in his rifle when the Avalanche got in the way; the shooter was poaching elk and was surprised by the
intrusion. It didn’t occur to him that the shooter would still be in the basin twenty minutes later.

  He frowned. The last thing he needed—or wanted—was a situation where a man with a rifle was hidden away in isolated terrain. A whole new set of scenarios—more dangerous than the first set—began to emerge. Joe knew that by the time the sheriff’s department arrived, the shooter could either escape or bunker in for a long standoff.

  Hanks handed Joe a pair of Zeiss Victory 8×42 binoculars and arched his eyebrows in anticipation of a compliment. The binoculars were known to be the best, and were among the most expensive optics available, at over $2,000 a pair. Joe took them and refrained from commenting on them. But looking through them was like being transported into a clearer and sharper world than what was available to the naked eye.

  Joe swept the grassy basin and the lenses filled with the backs of hundreds of sheep he hadn’t noticed before. The herd was so large it had melded into the scenery of the basin but now it was obvious. The sheep were moving only a few inches at a time as they grazed on the grass, heads down, like a huge cumulus cloud barely moving across the sky. Unlike cattle, sheep snipped the grass close to the surface and left the range with the appearance of a manicured golf green. Which is one of the primary reasons sheepmen and cattlemen had gone to war over a century before.

  “All I see is sheep,” Joe said to Hanks.

  “Keep going,” Hanks said. “Look right square in the middle of that basin.”

  Joe found a distant structure of some kind and focused in.

  “The sheep wagon?” Joe said.

  The ancient wagon was parked in the middle of the giant swale. It had a rounded sheet metal top painted white that fit like a muffin top on a squared-off frame. Sheep wagons were hitched to vehicles and towed to where the herds were and left, sometimes for weeks. They had long tongues for towing, water barrels cinched to the sides, small windows on the sides of the metal cover skin, and narrow double doors on the front. The black snout of a chimney pipe poked through the roof.

  There wasn’t a pickup parked beside the wagon but a saddled horse was tied to a picket pin, as well as a black-and-white blue heeler dog.

  “That’s where the shots came from,” Hanks said.

  “And all you were doing was going down the road minding your own business?”

  “I don’t like the insinuation,” Hanks said haughtily. “We were driving on a county road through private land, legal as hell. When I drove the Avalanche down there from up here, I heard the first bullet hit before I even heard a shot. Then the second one hit. I stopped the truck and glassed the basin and saw that sheep wagon. The guy who shot at us had the top door open on the wagon and I could see a rifle barrel sticking out. I never saw him clearly. He didn’t close the door until we hightailed it back up here and called 911.”

  Joe lowered the binoculars and handed them back. “You’re sure you didn’t do anything to provoke him?” he asked. “Were you spooking his sheep?”

  “I goddamned told you exactly what happened,” Hanks said, turning to his friend. “Isn’t that right, Bill? I didn’t leave anything out, did I?”

  Bill said, “Nope. All we were doing was driving along the road and that nut down there started popping off at us. We didn’t threaten him or nothing. And we weren’t even close to his sheep yet.”

  “Why are you even asking these questions?” Hanks said to Joe. “Don’t you believe us? You saw the bullet holes.”

  “I did. But this is the first time I ever heard of him getting aggressive and shooting at somebody.”

  “You know him?” Hanks asked, incredulous.

  “His name is Ander Esti. I recognize his horse. He’s been around this country for a long time—before I ever got here. He’s not the type to just shoot at somebody.”

  “Well, this time he did, Warden,” Hanks said.

  Joe nodded. He could detect no discrepancies in their story, although he couldn’t yet be sure.

  “Where are you boys staying in town?” Joe asked.

  Hanks said the Holiday Inn.

  “Why don’t you go on back there for now. I’ll drive down and talk to Ander and I’ll bring him in to the county jail. I’ll stop by the Holiday Inn on my way home and let you know where things stand.”

  Hanks and Bill looked at each other, obviously a little suspicious of the methodology Joe had suggested.

  “Go back, relax, have a beer,” Joe said. “There’s no reason for the three of us to go charging down there. Ander Esti is . . . well . . . a unique individual. He can get a little excitable—”

  “That’s fucking obvious,” Hanks huffed.

  “There’s no need to spook him,” Joe continued. “I think I can handle this best on my own and I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  Hanks turned somber. “Are you sure you don’t want me to cover you? I have my .308 Winchester Mag along with me,” he said, chinning toward the Avalanche. “Bill brought along his AR-15.”

  Joe hardened his expression and said, “If you stick around here much longer, I’ll need to start asking you two why you brought your hunting rifle along a month before the season opens.”

  Hanks and Bill looked at each other, and that seemed to settle it. Joe guessed Hanks to be one of those trophy hunters who maybe just couldn’t pass up a record-setting buck even if it was before the season opened. They agreed to meet Joe later and climbed into their Avalanche and started the slow, four-wheel-drive trek back to the highway.

  When the Avalanche was out of view, Joe said to Daisy, “There’s something wrong here.”

  • • •

  THE FIRST TIME Joe met Ander Esti was on a similarly warm September day eight years before. Joe was assisting an exploration survey crew hired by the state to confirm corner posts and benchmarks that had been established in the 1890s, when the state was first mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey. The crew needed to reestablish property lines in the Pumpkin Buttes area for a new plat of the ownership of private and state lands. Because Joe was the warden for the district and knew the territory as well as most of the local landowners, he was asked to be on call if there were access issues for the survey crew, who had flown in from Virginia and were completely new to the vast and empty terrain.

  When one of the surveyors did his triangulation of a possible benchmark from a hilltop, he determined that the ground they needed to stake happened to fall right in the middle of a sheep wagon that had been parked in a semi-arid mountain valley. The surveyor was uncomfortable approaching the wagon—he’d never seen such a thing in his life—and told Joe he’d witnessed a man wading through a herd of sheep with a rifle resting on his shoulder. So Joe volunteered to approach the sheepherder and suggest that together they could roll the wagon a few feet forward or back so a survey stake could be driven into the ground.

  Joe knew at the time that the best way to approach sheepherders—who were often left with the herds for weeks at a time—was head-on and as obvious as possible. The men employed by ranchers to tend the massive herds were often Basque and some barely spoke English. Fresh water and food was delivered to them every ten days to two weeks by the rancher who employed the Basques. Because of their lack of human interaction, they could become isolated and jumpy, especially when coyotes or eagles were preying on the stock. Rarely was a sheepherder in a situation where his rifle wasn’t within reach.

  So Joe drove slowly and deliberately toward the wagon, letting the stock part out of the way in front of his truck. As he neared the wagon he got out and shut his pickup door with a bang and called out. Although there was a saddled horse tied to the side of the wagon and a curl of smoke from the chimney pipe, the door didn’t open and the curtains inside didn’t rustle, even though it was the middle of the day.

  He walked up to the wagon with his right hand on the grip of his weapon, but removed it when he reached the door. If the sheepherder looked o
ut and saw him standing there with his hand on his gun, he didn’t want to appear to provoke him. As he reached up to knock on the door, he heard a pair of voices coming from inside. Joe paused.

  They were speaking in Spanish, Basque Spanish. It was obvious from the back-and-forth cadence that one man was telling the other a series of jokes. The second man found the jokes hilariously funny, and snorted when he laughed. He laughed so hard the wagon rocked.

  Two herders in one wagon was unusual, Joe thought, but not unprecedented. The inside of a sheep wagon was spartan and simple—a table with a bench seat on each side, a compact pantry and cupboard at floor level, a small woodstove for cooking, and a raised bunk at the back for sleeping—perhaps the earliest version of a camper trailer. Two normal-sized men inside would likely find the situation suffocating.

  Joe knocked on the door and instantly the joking stopped.

  He waited a beat, and knocked again and identified himself.

  Finally, there was a scuff of boots on the plank-wood floor inside and the top door swung open to reveal a dark and compact man in a snap-button cowboy shirt, a loose silk bandanna hanging from his neck, and black eyes so small and intense that Joe stepped back.

  It was Ander Esti, and he was alone and it was obvious he was just finishing up his lunch. He’d been telling jokes to himself. And laughing.

  After they’d rolled the wagon ten feet back, Joe asked Ander if he often told jokes to himself. Esti gestured that he didn’t understand the question, and Joe let it drop.

  • • •

  LATER, DURING THE WINTER, Joe spotted Ander in the front row of their church during services. The man sat alone wearing a clean but ancient snap-button western shirt and he appeared to listen intently to the minister. He left after services, before Joe could talk to him, and he showed up again seven weeks later.

  Joe asked the minister about the man, and the reverend chuckled and said Ander attended a different church every week in Saddlestring and was on his second rotation of the winter. He was generous with his donation in the plate but had no interest in joining. And he wouldn’t show up again once the snows melted and the ranchers were hiring.