Breaking Point

from Zeller to access the ranch. After checking in at ranch headquarters and having breakfast with Zeller and his four Mexican ranch hands, because the foreman insisted he eat, Joe parked his green Game and Fish pickup and horse trailer two miles below the line of guzzlers near a head gate.
    Still, parking so far from the Forest Service boundary was a pain in the neck, Joe thought, and a fairly recent one. When they’d installed the guzzlers, the two-track ranch road had joined with a Forest Service road on the other side of the fence. They’d been able to bring their gear and equipment close to the fence so they wouldn’t have to carry it across the folding foothills terrain. But two years before, the Forest Service had decided to prohibit through traffic. They’d fortified the gate, chained it, and locked it with a combination lock. Then, behind the gate, on the Forest Service side, they’d brought in a backhoe to scoop a deep hole into the road and use the dirt as a berm to prevent vehicles from using it. The coup de grâce was a small rectangular brown metal sign that read ROAD CLOSED.
    He’d saddled his horse and checked seven of nine guzzlers throughout the day. Number three had required some dirt work, but it didn’t take long, because he’d packed along a shovel with the handle shoved down into his empty saddle scabbard.
    —
    J OE WAS RIDING between the seventh and eighth water guzzlers, through a stand of thigh-high aspen with their still, spadelike leaves, when he saw to his left that the three strands of barbed wire on the fence had been severed. Each wire was now curled back, leaving a gaping hole in the Forest Service fence. He clucked his tongue and turned his horse and rode Toby up through the small trees to the damaged fencing.
    He swung down and grunted when his boots thumped on the ground. His knees ached from being wrapped around Toby’s belly. He tied Toby to a midsize pine tree with enough slack in the rope that his horse could graze, and walked off his aches to the fence.
    As he limped, he resisted saying,
Getting too old for this.
    Joe Pickett wore his red uniform shirt with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department pronghorn patch on the shoulder, thin leather gloves, worn Wranglers, scuffed cowboy boots, and his sweat-stained gray Stetson. His duty belt with his cuffs, pepper spray, and .40 Glock was in the right saddlebag because it was uncomfortable to wear when riding. His radio, citation book, uneaten lunch, and notepad were in the left.
    He thought for a moment that he should retrieve his weapon before checking out the fence, but decided against it. Joe despised his weapon, not because of its properties but because he really couldn’t hit anything with it. If it weren’t for a softhearted range officer, there were several times over the last few years when he shouldn’t have officially qualified. Although he was comfortable and fairly accurate with a rifle and deadly at close range with a shotgun, he considered his Glock more for show and always convinced himself that he’d never pull it again for the rest of his career if he could avoid it.
    The strands of barbed wire had been snipped cleanly and very recently by a sharp tool, probably a pair of wire cutters. The end of the cut was still shiny and the edges sharp. He visualized each strand snapping back as it was severed, and imagined the
pop
and the sound of singing wire.
    Joe let the wire drop back to the grass and looked around. The nearest road was where Joe had parked his truck and trailer, nearly two and a half miles away. There were no other vehicles parked at that location. Whoever had cut the wire had either walked a long way from the highway—probably six to seven miles, he guessed, and across the muddy pastures and serpentine creek—or had come down from the National Forest above. The vandal had been on horseback or on foot because there were no tire tracks. But if he didn’t drive a vehicle through the opening, what was the point of cutting the fence? Joe wondered.
    He photographed the damage with his digital camera and took several close-in shots of the cut tips of the wire, and noted the time and location in his notebook. Then he dug his cell phone out of his breast pocket and opened it, thinking he would call Frank Zeller. Although the fence itself was the property of the U.S. Forest Service, Joe knew from experience it would take them weeks or even months to repair it due to the bureaucracy involved. Reports