Savage Run Read online

  Joe flushed red again.

  “The same warden who had his gun taken off of him by a local outfitter and was suspended for it? The same game warden who shot my good friend Vern Dunnegan in the hip with a shotgun?”

  Joe glared at Finotta but said nothing. He admitted to himself that he was not handling the situation well. He was off balance and defensive.

  “I came here to tell you about your cows,” Joe said, his voice cracking. “The sheriff asked me to come here because he was busy at the crime scene. This doesn’t involve me or the department.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Finotta asked facetiously, sitting back in his leather chair. “It seems to me that a case could be made that because of the policies of both the U.S. Forest Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department we have in our state an overabundance of game animals. And because of that overabundance, there is an exaggerated sense that the ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ creatures are being crowded out of their rightful forage by cattle. Therefore, environmentalists are targeting cattle and ranchers, and poachers are targeting wild game. Which creates a state of affairs where this kind of violence can happen.

  “I think we could win that one before a jury of my peers,” Finotta said, smiling. Finotta’s peers would be local ranchers. This kind of jury stacking had happened before in the county. “And we would be talking about the loss of my cows plus legal expenses plus punitive damages.” He let this sink in. “Or Game and Fish could save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands and simply pay the damage claim. That could happen very cleanly if the local warden made the argument in his report.”

  Joe was flummoxed, angry, and completely off his stride. Joe could see himself taking three quick steps and knocking the smirk off of Finotta’s face. It would give him immediate satisfaction, but would also result in termination and, given Finotta’s obvious penchant for going to court, prosecution.

  It was obvious that Jim Finotta enjoyed this, Joe thought. Finotta reveled in humiliating people he considered below his station. He was good at it. He knew the tricks. Finotta compensated for Joe’s advantage of youth by making him stand there foolishly. He addressed their height difference—Joe was at least six inches taller—by sitting behind his massive desk.

  “Joe, I think you know who I am,” Finotta said, now charming. “I know how much the state pays its employees. Your family would probably appreciate a half a beef come Christmastime. We’re talking about prime steaks, roasts, and hamburger. This is good beef that will never exceed seven percent fat. I’ll need to add you to our gift list.”

  Rather than continue to look at Finotta in a growing rage, Joe focused on the reflection of the mounted elk head in the glass of the hunting print above the laywer’s head. As Joe stared at it, he realized that there was something about the elk mount that bothered him.

  “Do you have any questions, Warden?” Finotta asked gently.

  Joe nodded yes.

  “That elk on your wall . . .” Joe asked, turning and looking at the impressive bull over his shoulder. The antler rack was thick and wide. It was a rare, exceedingly large bull. The kind of bull, and mount, that trophy hunters would pay $15,000 to $20,000 for a chance to get. “That’s quite a prize, isn’t it?”

  Now Finotta was caught off guard. But he recovered very quickly. “Yes it is. He came off of my ranch, in fact.”

  “Seven points one side and nine on the other, that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, I think I’m familiar with this bull elk,” Joe said, rubbing his chin. “I never saw it, but I heard of him. A guide I talked to about a year ago had scouted him out. He said he counted seven tines on one side and nine on the other. He said it was the biggest elk he had ever seen in his life.”

  Finotta studied Joe, clearly wondering where this was going.

  “He had put the word out to some clients that this bull elk existed and would probably be the biggest one taken in the Bighorns in the last twenty years. That guide scouted that bull for an entire year. He knew where the bull grazed, where it slept, even where it drank water in the evening.

  “Then that bull just went away,” Joe said. “Broke that guide’s heart. He reported it to me, and said maybe the big bull got poached since it was still four months until hunting season.”

  Finotta responded evenly. “Maybe it just died. Or maybe it moved. Wild animals will do that, you know.” He paused. “Or maybe it exploded like ten of my cows.”

  Joe grabbed a hardback chair, slid it under the mount and stepped up before Finotta could stop him. He examined the head, then rubbed his hand along the antler. “There’s still some velvet on these antlers,” Joe declared.

  Velvet is the soft feltlike layer that encases antlers of deer, moose, and elk as they grow back each year. Normally, the animals shed their antlers in winter and grow them back—usually larger—in the spring. By fall and hunting season, the velvet has been rubbed off completely and the antler takes on a hardened sheen and strength like polished bone. Joe had seen instances where patches of velvet remained on the antlers through October, but it was rare. Velvet on Finotta’s elk might be suspicious but it was proof of nothing.

  Joe stepped down. “When exactly did you shoot this elk?” he asked.

  Finotta quickly stood up, slapping his palms down on the top of the desk. “Are you accusing me of poaching?”

  Joe shrugged in innocence. “I’m just wondering when and where you shot the elk.”

  Finotta took a deep intake of breath and his eyes became hard. “I got him during hunting season. Last fall. On my ranch.” He hissed the last words out.

  “Okay,” Joe agreed. “That being the case, I’m sure you won’t mind me checking. We found a huge bull carcass up on the forestland last May with the head cut off. We took a DNA sample of the carcass and it’s in my freezer. The poachers hadn’t even taken any of the meat, which personally, to me, is a crime of the first order because it means a headhunter did it. I hate trophy hunters who just take the antlers and leave the rest. Not to mention that it’s illegal as all hell.”

  The room was absolutely silent. Finotta glared at Joe under a bushy frown.

  “So I would like your permission to take a small sample from this trophy.”

  “Forget it,” Finotta cried, appearing offended. “I paid a lot of money for that mount in Jackson Hole. You don’t have my permission to damage it.”

  Joe shrugged. “I won’t damage anything. I’m just talking about a few shavings from the base of the horn, from the back side of it, where no one could ever even see it.”

  “You’ll need a court order,” Finotta said, back on firm footing. “And I don’t think you can get that in Twelve Sleep County.” What Finotta didn’t say was what was well known—that Judge Hardy Pennock was one of Finotta’s closest friends and had a financial interest in Elkhorn Ranches.

  “You might have me there,” Joe conceded. But Finotta was clearly still angry. Veins pulsed on his temples, although his eyes and expression remained serious and steady.

  “This meeting is over,” Finotta declared. “You should be aware that I plan to contact your immediate supervisor as well as the governor you once arrested.”

  Joe shrugged with resignation. That was to be expected. He knew something like this would likely happen if he mentioned the elk, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

  “Or,” Finotta said, this kind of negotiating as natural to him as breathing, “you can consider making the case for damage reimbursement for my dead cattle.”

  Joe was being given one more chance. He knew that the governor was known to micromanage state agencies and also knew of state employees who had been drummed out of a job. He and Marybeth were still literally a paycheck away from poverty, and the house they lived in was state-owned. Joe had gained some political capital since he started out in the Twelve Sleep District following his run-in with Assistant Director Les Etbauer while he was investigating the murder of three local outfitters, but not enough for comfort. Grieva
nce procedures were in place, of course, but the state bureaucracy had time-tested methods of making conditions so miserable that employees, even game wardens, eventually left on their own accord. Sometimes, game wardens who were out of favor were reassigned to areas that no one wanted, like Baggs or Lusk. These locations had become the Wyoming equivalent of the backwater, hellhole location that FBI agents were once sent—Butte, Montana.

  “Let me get back to you on that.” Joe heard himself say, and left the room.

  Ginger had not moved from her place near the tree in the living room. Joe told her good-bye. She said again that if she was a snake that she could have bitten him.

  He left via the subdivision, angrily negotiating wide and empty paved roads, one time screeching his tires when he took a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac, shooting bitter passing looks at new foundations and huge fresh dirt piles, nearly decapitating a hydrant, and wondering what kind of people would choose to buy a three-acre lot and live in Elkhorn Ranches.

  And wondering what he would say when he got back to Jim Finotta.

  Joe pulled off of the highway into a hilly BLM tract hazy with new spring grass. He found a familiar hill, parked on top of it, and for an hour watched three- and four-month-old pronghorn antelope with their herd. He knew that watching the wild herd would soothe him, calm him down, help him, he hoped, put things into perspective. Related biologically to goats, not antelope (despite their name), pronghorn were uniquely evolved to survive and prosper in the arid and mountainous Rocky Mountain west. Yearling pronghorns, often produced as twins, were amazing wild animals, and becoming Joe’s favorites. Young pronghorns didn’t have the soft features, big eyes, and the bumbling cuddliness of most baby animals. Within a few weeks of their birth, they became tiny versions of their parents, with perfectly proportional but miniature long legs, brown and white camouflage coloring, and the ability to accelerate from zero to sixty when they sensed danger, leaving only a rooster tail of dust.

  He watched the antelope, but in his head he replayed his conversation with Jim Finotta. The conversation and the situation had gotten off track quickly and gone in directions Joe hadn’t anticipated. He hadn’t reacted well, either.

  When he thought about the exchange, it wasn’t so much what Finotta had said, or implied. It was what he didn’t ask that unsettled Joe.

  Joe had no experience with notifying a rancher that his cows had exploded, as ridiculous as that sounded when he thought about it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t like notifying the next of kin about a highway accident, or even a hunter’s wife about a terrible accident, which Joe had done and which resulted in several nights of lost sleep afterward. With Finotta, there had been no questions about possible human victims—how they came to die, no queries about whether the dead were local, or even the status of the investigation. Wouldn’t a lawyer, litigious by trade, be at least somewhat interested in whether or not anyone could establish liability?

  Something didn’t sit right.

  Joe’s gaze slowly rose from the antelope in the sagebrush hills toward the blue-gray mountains that dominated the horizon. The Vee Bar U stretched as far as he could see, counting Forest Service leases. The ranch was one of the crown jewels of Twelve Sleep County, sweeping from the highway to up and over those mountains. And somewhere up there, practically inaccessible, was the place called Savage Run.

  The canyon called Savage Run cut a brutal slash through the center of incredibly rugged and almost impenetrable Wyoming mountain wilderness. The Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River, which created the canyon over millions of years of relentless shaving and slicing, was now a trickle due to upstream irrigation. But the results—knife-sharp walls, a terrifying distance from the rim to the narrow canyon floor, virtually no breaks or cracks through the rocks to assure a crossing—was geologically stunning. The canyon was so steep and narrow that sunlight rarely shone on the stream. The canyon cut through eight different geological strata. While the rim was twenty-first century Wyoming in drought, the floor was pre-Jurassic rain forest. The last time the floor was exposed, Tyrannosaurus rex peered through gaping eyes at prey.

  The legend of Savage Run came from the story of a band of a hundred Cheyenne Indians—mainly the elderly, women, and children—who were camped near the eastern rim of the canyon while their men were on an extended buffalo hunt in the Powder River country. The band was unaware of the Pawnee warriors who had been following them for days, and unaware that the Pawnees stayed hidden while the hunting party rode away.

  The Pawnee had planned to attack fast and hard, both to claim their special reward from the U.S. Army of $10 per scalp as well as to gain access to prime Rocky Mountain foothills hunting land when the Indian Wars were finally over. They were also after the large herd of Cheyenne horses.

  Somehow, the band of Cheyenne learned of the impending attack before nightfall. The Pawnees had no idea they had been discovered, and they dry-camped and prepared for a vicious dawn attack.

  Before first light, with weapons drawn and already painted black and white for war, the Pawnees swooped up the draws and flowed toward the Cheyenne camp. When the Pawnees moved in on the camp they found only the tipi rings, still-warm campfire embers from the previous night, and more than a hundred dead horses, their throats slashed. It appeared to the Pawnee that the Cheyenne had literally flown away. The Pawnee knew the logistics of moving all of those people out, and they knew that it should have been impossible for the Cheyenne to get by them at night. There was no way the band of Cheyenne had flown through them, the Pawnees thought, and the only escape had been away from them, toward a canyon that could not be crossed. Furious, they pursued.

  What the Pawnee found when they reached the rim of the canyon was evidence of an otherworldly occurrence. The band of Cheyenne was gone, but there was visible evidence of their flight. Somehow, remarkably, the entire band had descended the sheer cliffs to the bottom and climbed back out on the other side. The evidence, hundreds of feet below, was the number of telltale discarded tipi poles and bits of hair and clothing clinging to spiny brush. The entire Cheyenne band—the aged men and women, their grandchildren and daughters, the few able men in the camp, as the story went—had somehow, one by one, climbed down the canyon side to the Middle Fork, forded the river, and climbed up the other side to their escape. The tipi poles had been discarded sometime during the night, and they now stood, to the Pawnee, as awful proof that the incomprehensible had happened: The Pawnee had lost their advantage of surprise, lost the horses, and lost the Cheyenne.

  The Pawnee chose not to even try to pursue the Cheyenne. They admired the escape and were somewhat awed by the pure determination of the people who had managed such an escape. That the Cheyenne would leave in the middle of the night, risking the lives of all, kill their horses, and succeed was beyond anything the Pawnee had ever encountered. It was that respect, as the story went, that caused the Pawnee to turn their horses around and go home to Fort Laramie. In Pawnee, the roughly translated name they gave the canyon was “Place Where the Cheyenne Ran Away from Us.” Soldiers who heard the story, and who were at war at the time with the Cheyenne (who they regarded as barely human), renamed the geological anomaly “Savage Run,” although none of them ever found the place or really knew where it was. The legend of Savage Run was passed on. Eventually, several white elk hunters claimed they had found the passage. A national historian wrote about it well enough to create interest; thus the move for National Monument designation. But outside of a few American Indian hunting guides and the original elk hunters, few were exactly sure where the passage across the canyon was located.

  Joe looked at Maxine, and the Labrador looked back with her big brown eyes. Labradors forgave everything. Joe wished he could.

  He wished he could get a handle on the uncharacteristic hatred he felt toward hobby rancher/lawyer Jim Finotta. But he sure wanted to get that son of a bitch.

  5

  Three days later, Joe Pickett sat idly sipping coffee and waiting for Marybeth to retur
n with the newspaper from her morning walk. She walked every day, even through horizontal snowstorms in the winter, and was strong enough now that she could pitch fifty-pound bales of hay from the stack in her barn. The exercise, she said, had helped her recover her balance and strength after her shooting injury, and she never missed a morning. She was proud of the fact that she could now handle all of the duties at the stables, where she worked part-time, including tacking up fifteen-hand horses and working them in the round pen. Marybeth often went to her other part-time job at the Twelve Sleep County Municipal Library smelling of horses. It was a good smell, Joe thought, and was pleased that Marybeth wasn’t ashamed of it. The two jobs offered enough flexibility that she was able to see her children off to school in the morning and be there when they returned.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that the man killed in the mountains was Stewie Woods?” Marybeth fired at Joe as she came into the kitchen. The Saddlestring Roundup was clutched in her fist.

  Joe was raising a mug of coffee to his mouth. Sheridan, Lucy, and April were still bleary-eyed, in their pajamas, and were distractedly eating bowls of breakfast cereal. Everyone’s eyes were on Marybeth; Joe thought the girls all looked as if they had been caught in the act of committing a crime.

  “How could you not tell me, Joe Pickett?” she asked angrily, her voice getting louder with each word. Joe had not moved. The coffee cup was still poised for a sip. He knew that whatever he said now would not be the right thing to say.

  “Barnum called and said the victim was named Allan Stewart Woods,” Joe said lamely. “I didn’t make the connection at the time to Stewie Woods.”

  She glared at him with eyes that could melt ice.

  “Besides,” Joe said, “why is it so important?”

  Suddenly, Marybeth gave an angry little cry, threw the newspaper onto a chair, and stormed up the stairs to the bedroom, where she slammed the door and noisily threw the lock.