Breaking Point

close and found the confluence of Otter and Trapper Creeks. To the north of the confluence was a series of sawbladelike peaks. He was pretty sure he remembered them.
    “This is where we camped,” Farkus said, jabbing the location with his fingertip.
    McLanahan marked it with a pencil stroke and said, “That’s where we’re going to be. If Butch is familiar with the camp, it’s odds-on likely where he goes.”
    Farkus nodded.
    “I don’t see any roads going up there,” McLanahan said.
    “There were no roads. Butch likes to hunt in the wilderness, not in places you can drive to. He’s crazy that way, like I told you.”
    As they were going over the map, Farkus kept stealing looks toward Sollis, who had jacked a cartridge into his rifle and was now at the rear of the pickup. He’d rested his rifle on the top of the corner of the bed walls and was leaning down, looking through his scope at something in the distance.
    “So I think we’re set,” McLanahan had said, rolling up the topo map and sliding a rubber band over the roll.
    As Farkus opened his mouth to speak, the air was split by the heavy boom of Sollis’s rifle. Farkus jumped and looked up. In the sandy hills past the municipal dump, a plume of dirt rose in the air, leaving two black spots.
    “What did you shoot at?” Farkus asked Sollis, alarmed.
    “A black cat,” Sollis said, ejecting the spent brass. “Eight hundred yards. Cut it right in two.”
    “That was
my
cat,” Farkus had said.
    “Not anymore,” Sollis said, fitting the rifle back into its case.
    —
    T HE HUGE DARK western slope of the Bighorns filled the front window of the pickup as they got closer, and the road got worse. Farkus leaned over and pressed his mouth to the gap in the open window so he could breathe fresh air and fight against the nausea he felt from being jounced around in the backseat. When he closed his eyes, he tried to picture the rough country he’d hunted with Butch Roberson the year before, but from the other direction. McLanahan seemed to think it was easy, but it wasn’t. There were granite ridges and seas of black timber, and he remembered at times trying to look up through the trees to see something—anything—he recognized. A unique-shaped peak, a rock wall, a meadow, or a natural park—anything that stood out so he’d know where he was. He remembered stumbling back into the elk camp at the confluence of the creeks one night near midnight, four hours late, because he’d been turned around in a box canyon, and although he had a compass and GPS, he’d convinced himself that the instruments were wrong but he was right. Butch Roberson had been happy to see him, but concerned about the possibility of him getting lost again.
    From that night on, they’d hunted together, which was a nice gesture on Butch’s part, Farkus thought.
    And now he was back. If it weren’t for that substantial federal reward money . . .
    —
    M C L ANAHAN APPARENTLY figured out how to make Jimmy Sollis open up, Farkus thought drearily: ask him about his rifle.
    “It’s a custom 6.5x284,” Sollis said, “equipped with a Zeiss Z-800 4.5x14 Conquest scope . . .”
    Jimmy Sollis was over six-feet-four, Farkus guessed, two hundred twenty pounds. He had olive-colored skin, black hair, a smooth almost Asian face with small, black wide-set eyes and a flattened nose. He spoke in a flat tone with no animation at all, and he enunciated every word clearly, as if he were transcribing them on stone.
    “I shoot a 140-grain Berger bullet at just over three-thousand-feet-per-second muzzle velocity,” Sollis said. “I’ve taken the eye out of a target at fourteen hundred yards, and I can hit a man shape at eighteen hundred. I prefer a bench-rest, of course, but I’ve got a bipod setup that cuts down on the distance in favor of portability . . .”
    Farkus tuned out. He’d never enjoyed the weaponry talk so many men loved, and it was Greek to him. If the conversation was about dry flies, streamers, or nymphs, Farkus was all over that. But gun porn? It made him tired.
    Nevertheless, Farkus tried not to think of Butch Roberson at the other end of that Zeiss Conquest scope. And he thought about his stray black cat, cut in half, eviscerated, bleeding out in the sand.
    —
    T HE SMELL OF HORSES and leather combined with the pine dust and dried mulch from the forest floor as McLanahan, Jimmy Sollis, and Farkus rode from where they’d parked the horse trailer at the trailhead into the