C. Box - Savage Run

Back then, Stewie Woods was terribly homely but very charismatic, a gawky teenager turning into a fine but unpredictable athlete, who was already envisioning the building of an environmental terrorist organization that would rock the world. Hayden Powell was handsome, sardonic, and talented and vowed to make Stewie and their joint mission to Save the West famous. Although she never shared their radical passion for environmental causes, Marybeth’s attraction to both rogues was exciting in the same way that it was exciting for other girls her age to hook up with rock stars or rodeo cowboys. Stewie and Hayden were bad boys, smart boys, wild boys, but they had good hearts. They were already wreaking havoc with environmental vandalism. An evening out with them generally involved pulling up survey stakes for a planned pipeline or removing the bolts from bulldozer tread. Although there were several close calls, the three of them never got caught.

And they loved her. Stewie, especially. He was so in love with her that it was as embarrassing as it was flattering. Once, after intercepting a pass for the Winchester Badgers and taking it into the end zone for a touchdown, Stewie had turned to the partisan Saddlestring crowd and spelled out “M-A-R-Y” with his long arms because he knew she was watching the game with her friends.

During the summer, the three of them spent nearly every evening together. They fished, they went to movies, they committed sabotage.

Hayden Powell went on to Iowa State for the writing program. Stewie got a football scholarship to Colorado. Marybeth went south to the University of Wyoming, intending to become a corporate lawyer. Instead, she met Joe Pickett, a gangly, soft-spoken sophomore majoring in wildlife biology.

She had not kept in touch with Stewie Woods or Hayden Powell because they were dangerous. With Joe’s job as a fledgling game warden, they had moved six times in the first nine years and so it had been relatively easy for her to miss the telephone calls, letters, or Christmas cards they might have sent. With her name change and the fact that her mother remarried and moved to Arizona, she knew she would be difficult to track down. But she had read about Stewie’s exploits and seen him on television. The biography had been published six years before, and had garnered minor critical attention but instant cult status. At the time, Joe and Marybeth were in Buffalo, Wyoming, with Joe’s first full-fledged district as game warden. Marybeth was pregnant with Lucy, Joe worked insanely long hours, and Sheridan was a four-year-old. Marybeth couldn’t have been further removed from the environmental derring-do of Stewie Woods or the literary escapades of Hayden Powell if she lived on the moon.

Finally, a year ago, during her breaks while working in the county library, she had read the biography. She had not checked the book out or brought it home. Stewie had mentioned “his first love, Mary Harris” but, thank God, he didn’t know her married name. But she was in there. And she had to admit to herself that when she found the volume the first thing she looked for was her name and what Stewie had said about her.

Marybeth assumed that the reporter had read the same biography, but unlike Stewie, the reporter had located her. And the reporter wanted some comments from her for his story.

She had never told Joe about this short period in her life. It hadn’t seemed necessary; it would have complicated things that didn’t need complicating.

But now, she thought, she needed to talk to her husband. She would do so when he got home that evening. He deserved to know why she was upset at breakfast the week before and he needed to know about the telephone calls from the reporter. It was better she tell him than that he find out when a story was published in a magazine or he heard it some other way. It was time.

Marybeth checked her watch and realized it was time for her to leave for her job at the stables.

As she grabbed her purse and headed out the front door, she could hear the telephone ringing in the kitchen.

Because the snow had finally melted and backwoods mountain roads were opening up to four-wheel-drive vehicles, fishermen were starting to work the streams and spring creeks in the Bighorns and Joe Pickett needed to check licenses and limits. Most of the streams were still high and muddy and wouldn’t clear and level out for another month, but local flyfishing guides were already placing clients at deep pools and beaver ponds. Mayfly hatches, the first sign of summer for flyfishermen, had begun. And if there were fishermen and — women, that meant there were licenses to check. Fishers used the Hazelton Road for access to the streams, which is how Joe found himself once again near the site of the exploding cow. He wanted to see the crater again, for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of.

Joe approached the crater along the same path he had taken two weeks earlier with Sheriff Barnum and Deputy McLanahan. Because of the heavy foot and gurney traffic of the EMTs, forensics teams, state Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) agents, curiosity seekers, and dozens of locals trooping back and forth from the road to the crime scene, the path had become a trail. It was churned up and easy to follow.

He wanted to visit the site again in the daylight and, possibly, resolve the impression he had that night of being watched. As he approached the crater he hoped that something would put that lingering suspicion to rest.

This kind of thing had happened to him before. There had been a turn on the road near the foothills of the mountains that had, for months, given him an uneasy feeling whenever he drove by. There had been something in an aspen grove that troubled him. The evening hours as the sunset lengthened shadows and a certain stillness set in unsettled him. Finally, he had stopped his truck and walked up the grassy draw. As he neared the trees he drew his weapon because the ill feeling, whatever it was, got stronger. Then he saw it and for a brief, terrifying moment, he was face to face with the Devil himself. Within the thick stand of trees stood the gnarled, twisted, coiled black figure of. a single burned tree stump.

The distance to the crater through the trees seemed shorter than it had that night, and he was surprised how quickly he was upon it. Within and around the crater, Joe knew there would be nothing to be found that hadn’t already been examined, tested, or photographed. The official conclusion of the joint report filed by both the Sheriff’s Office and DCI bore out Barnum’s original theory-that Stewie Woods had accidentally set off explosives because he was unfamiliar with them. They also found out that the woman who was with him was actually his wife of three days. A Justice of the Peace in Ennis, Montana, had come forth with the marriage certificate.

He slowly circled the crater. The dead cattle had long been removed. Fallen pine needles had begun to carpet the exposed earth of the hole. A few pale blades of grass were the first soldiers to reclaim the ground. The exposed roots that had looked so white and tender that night had hardened or thrust themselves back into the earth.

If he looked at the trees and branches in the right light Joe could still see dried blood, but rain, insects, birds, and rodents had cleaned nearly all of the bark. Years from now, Joe thought, passing hikers or hunters might remark on the depression in the trail, bypass it when it filled with rain. But there would be nothing remarkable about it.

So far he hadn’t seen anything that could make him forget or explain that feeling he’d had of being watched.

Squinting, Joe tipped his head back. The explosion had cleared a passage in the spruce trees through which he could see the sky and two lone clouds. High in the tree above him was a stout branch that had been stripped of bark. Joe stepped into the crater for a better look. Something about the color of the dead branch didn’t look right. Exposed dead pine turned a cream color. This branch, angled up from the trunk in the shape of a fishhook, was coffee brown. The branch was thick enough to support a big man. Especially if the man were skewered to the tree by the force of an explosion.