Breaking Point

unearned. As he rode the Forest Service boundary, which was marked by a three-strand fence line of barbed wire, Joe had to keep reminding himself he had nothing to feel guilty about. He told himself he should just enjoy the moment because they came so few and far between. It was sunny, dry, warm, cloudless, and
calm
. After all, there he was in the Bighorn Mountains on a sunny day with his horse and his dog, and he was doing the job he loved in the place he loved. The opening days for hunting seasons in his district were weeks away, and he’d spent the summer recuperating his left hand from when he’d broken it pulling it out of his own handcuffs the October before. Except for the shot-up body of a pronghorn antelope found south of Winchester, he had no other pending investigations. The crime bothered him for its viciousness, though: the buck had been practically cut in two by the number of bullets, and whoever had done it had also fired several close-range shots to the head after the animal was obviously down. That kind of bloodthirsty crime was a window into the soul of the perpetrator, and Joe wanted to find whoever had done it and jack him up as much as possible. There was little to go on, though. Several rounds had been caught beneath the tough hide, and he’d sent the bullets in for analysis. But there were no shell casings, footprints, or citizen’s reports of the crime. Joe could only hope whoever had done it would talk and word would get back to him.
    Additionally, he had time to do preliminary elk counts in the mountains, verify the licenses of fishermen, check the water guzzlers, and actually be home for dinner with his wife, Marybeth, and his three girls. It was as if he were a character in a movie and the scene was being shot in soft focus.
    Despite the setting, he found himself scanning the horizon for the ferocious snouts of thunderheads and sweeping his eyes over the ocean of trees for gusts or one-hundred-mile-an-hour microbursts or some other kind of trouble.
    He thought later he should have gone with his premonition that something was coming and it wouldn’t be good.
    —
    B EFORE HE RAN into Butch Roberson, he rode parallel to the western border of Big Stream Ranch, which was owned by a longtime local named Frank Zeller. It was one of the few of the big historic ranches in northern Wyoming still owned by the original family. Frank Zeller was a solid if taciturn man who managed the ranch with care. He ran huge herds of Angus cattle and pastured hundreds of saddle horses for guest ranches throughout Wyoming and Montana. He’d convinced the owners to allow the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to install water guzzlers near the forest boundary to help sustain the elk and mule deer herds not only because he cared for the wildlife, but also because he feared the spread of the brucella bacteria from the wildlife to the cattle if they mixed too much near the big creek on the valley floor.
    Water guzzlers were shallow depressions in the ground covered with polyethylene fabric that captured rainwater and surface runoff—as much as five hundred to eight hundred gallons in each guzzler. The money for the guzzlers had come from an EPA grant Joe had applied for several years before, and the agency had sent an engineer up from Denver to help Joe design them. The guzzlers seemed to work. Parched herds from the mountains came down during drought years to drink, and pronghorns and mourning doves came up from the valley as well. His work, once a year, was to ride along the series of guzzlers to make sure the fabric was still intact and hadn’t been blown into shreds by the vicious winter winds, and to check that the depressions hadn’t been filled in with dirt or fouled by decaying carcasses.
    Because water itself was rare and precious in a state that averaged less than thirteen inches of precipitation in a year—mostly snow—the wildlife literally flocked to it. As he approached each guzzler, he anticipated an explosion of doves and grouse that got Daisy excited, as well as deer bounding away through the sagebrush and elk crashing up into the timber. Once, the year before, he’d startled a black bear feeding on a deer carcass. The bear woofed at him and caused Toby to crow-hop and nearly dump Joe out of the saddle. But by the time he’d wheeled Toby around with a one-rein stop, the bear had run into the trees with startling speed and power, and it hadn’t come back.
    —
    H E’D RECEIVED PERMISSION