Breaking Point

the sky was blue and clear as far as he could see.

15
    “THERE HE IS, THE SON OF A BITCH,” JIMMY SOLLIS SAID quietly with a sense of awe as he leaned forward into his rifle scope.
    Dave Farkus snapped his head up from where he’d been trying to steal a few moments for a nap. His body ached. Kyle McLanahan scrambled up from where he sat and joined Sollis with his binoculars.
    No one expected Butch Roberson to enter the camp so soon after they’d set up.
    “Damn,” McLanahan said, drawing the word out. “Looks like we guessed right. He must have been on the move all night.”
    —
    I T WAS NEARLY THREE in the afternoon when the riders reached the eastern rim of the huge canyon. In all honesty—Farkus knew but didn’t say aloud—they’d found the canyon and the confluence of Otter and Trapper Creeks more by accident than design. Until they peered over the granite rim, he’d been convinced the giant swale they were looking for was one canyon over to the south. But they found it after all, and they’d dismounted and set up an observation point in a three-foot crack of the wall that overlooked the canyon. Sollis had methodically attached a high-tech bipod with telescoping legs to the stock of his long-range rifle and hunkered down on the floor of the opening with a range finder. When he bent down to look through the scope and study the terrain, Farkus and McLanahan had backed out of the crack into the boulders and found pools of cool shadow to sit in and wait.
    Earlier in the afternoon, Farkus had been thrown when Dreadnaught had walked deliberately underneath an overhanging branch. The branch had caught Farkus in the sternum, and he’d tumbled backward and fallen on his head and shoulders, which ached. Although he’d not broken any bones, the fall knocked the wind out of him and gave him the resolve never to trust the horse again, and to keep alert.
    While they secured the horses to picket pins and tree trunks in a grove of wide-spaced aspen trees, Farkus had looked Dreadnaught square in his dead black eyes and said, “Do that again, and they’ll be eating you in France.”
    —
    F ARKUS FOLLOWED M C L ANAHAN into the crack after Sollis had spoken. The shooter was on his belly, his legs splayed out in a long V, his boots hooked inward against football-sized rocks he’d rolled into place for stability. He bent into the rear lens and gently adjusted the sharpness of the image with a knob on the left side of the Zeiss Conquest scope. As Farkus lowered himself into the crack, he bumped Sollis’s leg and Sollis cursed.
    “Don’t fuckin’ touch me again,” Sollis hissed without looking back. “I can’t keep a bead on this guy if you’re jostling me around.”
    “Sorry,” Farkus said. Then, to McLanahan, who was adjusting the focus on his big-barreled binoculars: “Is it really him?”
    “Can’t tell yet,” the ex-sheriff whispered. “He’s a long ways away.”
    “My range finder says eighteen hundred yards,” Sollis said. “A little over a mile. It’s almost out of my comfort zone.”
    “Show me where he is,” McLanahan said.
    Sollis described the terrain, and Farkus followed along with his sight.
    The canyon had sharp sides, knuckled with striated granite on the rims, and was timbered on both sides. The trees thinned as they reached the valley floor and the slopes became grassy. A small stream serpentined through the meadow, looking like a readout from a heart monitor, Farkus thought. He wondered, as he always did, if there were fish in it. Brook trout maybe, he thought.
    “Follow that stream all the way up the valley,” Sollis said softly to McLanahan, “to where it comes out of the trees. Can you see it?”
    “Yeah, I’m following,” McLanahan said, slowly swinging the binoculars from right to left.
    “Right at the top in the shadows, where a little creek comes out from the south and must meet up with the spring creek coming out of the trees. That’s where I saw him.”
    “Shit,” McLanahan said, mostly to himself. “I’m having trouble . . .” He paused. Then: “Bingo. I see it. There’s a cross-pole up in the trees for hanging elk.”
    “That’s it,” Sollis said.
    “So where’s our man? I don’t see anyone.”
    Without binoculars of his own, Farkus saw absolutely no one, and not even the cross-pole. But the valley floor looked familiar from when he’d been hunting with Butch. In fact, Butch had passed up a shot at a five-point bull that was grazing near the