Breaking Point

would have to be made and sent through channels, requests for proposal for repair of the fence would be published, bids would be taken or not from private contractors, and in the end a small army of federal employees would make their way up the mountain with newly requisitioned coils of barbed wire—probably as the first winter storm hit.
    Rather, he would tell Frank Zeller, and Frank would send up his crew before nightfall so the cattle and horses belonging to the Big Stream wouldn’t wander through the hole into the public forest. Frank could sort out the repercussions later, Joe thought.
    But there was no cell-phone signal, which wasn’t unusual this far out. He closed the phone and dug out his handheld radio from the saddlebag. The static over the air made it impossible to establish communication with the dispatcher in Cheyenne 310 miles away. He squelched it down but still couldn’t find a clear channel. There were squawks and snippets of conversation going on, but he couldn’t determine the subject matter or the agencies of the law enforcement personnel doing the talking. He sighed and turned off the unit. He vowed to replace the batteries when he got home and request a new radio that worked better. This one, he thought, was shot.
    —
    H E WAS LATER ASKED why he hadn’t simply ridden down the mountain to his pickup and used the radio inside the cab to report the fence and request assistance. But at the time, he hadn’t even considered it because he couldn’t have known with foresight what he’d find. Cutting a fence was a nuisance and a misdemeanor but not a major crime requiring backup. Plus, he was a Wyoming game warden, one of fifty-four in the entire huge state. He patrolled his five-thousand-square-mile district alone, and it was normal to be so far away from other law enforcement that it was pointless to call them. He was used to dealing with armed citizens in the outback on his own, and he routinely handled situations that would require backup procedure in urban settings.
    What he said when asked was, “It was just a cut fence.”
    —
    S O HE WALKED Toby through the middle of the gap into the timber, from private land into public land, with Daisy trailing.
    The lodgepole pine forest was close, and the trunks closely packed. The canopy was open only in spots where there was rampant pine-beetle kill and the needles had dried, curled, and dropped from the branches to create a three-inch cushion of rust-colored carpet on the forest floor. The pine-beetle infestation had occurred slowly and predictably over the past fifteen years, sweeping from north to south along the Rocky Mountains. From New Mexico to British Columbia, the tiny insects burrowed into lodgepoles and deposited the larva and fungus that eventually killed the trees while they stood. Joe had read estimates that more than three million acres of trees in Wyoming were infested, and he’d seen entire mountainsides colored burnished red from dead standing timber. The only way to stop the invasion, he’d heard, was if the temperature dropped to thirty or forty below for several days in a row during the winter, which would kill the larvae. Either that or spraying the trees with insecticide when they began to show signs of infestation. The weather hadn’t cooperated, and forestry officials had been too paralyzed by budgets and bureaucracy to seriously mount a defense. Now it was too late, and there were tens of millions of acres of dead standing trees like so many unlit cigarettes . . . just waiting for a match.
    Joe didn’t even want to think of what it would be like when the fires started. When they did, the Forest Service would be blamed for letting it happen. Joe didn’t think that was entirely fair, even though he was jaded enough to know that even if the service was blamed there would likely be no firings of employees or officials, because that rarely ever happened in the federal system. Nature was nature, he thought, and it was bigger than any regional forester or forest supervisor, even if he wasn’t sure they’d agree with that assessment.
    As he was contemplating Armageddon as the result of fires stretching from Canada to Mexico, he smelled wood smoke. It hung thin and acrid in the mountain air.
    Joe turned Toby’s head slightly to the northeast in the direction of the breath of wind that carried the smoke. The smoke was too thin and close to be from a forest fire, he thought. Daisy had noted it, too, and Joe assumed by the