C. Box - Savage Run

Joe had seen female elk fight; they sat back on their haunches and lurched forward, striking with their hooves. The power of their strikes could crush the skull of a badger or break the back of a coyote. The mother elk had connected with at least one wolf from the pack, hence the fur in the grass.

Britney broke down. She covered her face with her hands.

“You’ve got to do something,” Britney sobbed. “It’s horrible.”

Joe scanned the trees that surrounded the clearing. The wolves were there, he was sure, but he couldn’t see them. They were in the shadows, or hunkered down and still in the brush. He could feel their eyes on him.

“Do something,” she begged, her voice wracked.

“Shoot that poor elk so she won’t have to suffer,” Stewie murmured.

“No,” Joe sighed. “A gunshot will give our position away.”

“Who cares about that?” Britney cried, her voice raising to an emotional pitch. “Who cares about that? Do something! ”

Joe turned toward her, his face a tight mask. His glare was so intense that she involuntarily stepped behind Stewie for protection.

“Look away,” he hissed, his voice coldly furious. He strode toward the cow elk and unsheathed his Leatherman tool, pulling out the blade. The mother elk turned her head away, but did not have the strength to run or strike out, and he reached out and grabbed her ear to steady her while he cut her throat.

Stewie stood with an ashen face, watching, while Britney buried her head in his back. As Joe walked back to them, he heard the cow elk gurgle and settle into the grass on top of her calf.

“This is what wolves do,” Joe said, his voice calm, a betrayal of what he felt. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t be here, but this is what they do. They’re wolves. I know it sounds real nice to say they’re magical and beautiful and they balance nature and restore an ecosystem-and it’s true, they do that. But this is how they do it. They go after the weakest first. When the mother stays back, the wolves open a hole in her belly and pull out her entrails. Then they wait until she doesn’t have the strength to protect herself, then they’ll move in and tear her throat out.”

Joe slid the sticky Leatherman back into its case and wiped hot blood on his pants from his hand and sleeve.

“You people just like the idea of things, like bringing the wolves back. It makes you feel better.” He looked from Britney to Stewie, both of whom averted their eyes. “I agree that it is a beneficial thing overall. But you don’t like to see what really happens out here when those grand ideas become real, do you?”

They followed the elk trail to the bottom of the mountain, through another small stream swelling with icy runoff. They drank, and continued up the next mountain through twisted black timber, crawling in and out of scalpel-cut ravines.

The terrain finally flattened as they rose, and the walking became easier. Joe was drenched in sweat, and light-headed from lack of food. The water sloshed in his empty stomach as he hiked. The incident with the elk had dampened the enthusiasm and frequency of Stewie’s monologues, and Britney was still so angry with him that she didn’t talk-which was fine with Joe.

Trees thinned in number but the ones they hiked through became thicker and taller. Joe felt as if they had entered a land of giants, their bodies becoming specks on the forest floor as they trudged on. He thought about Marybeth, and Sheridan, Lucy, and April. At times, the thought of them almost overwhelmed him.

The trees cleared enough that he could now see the mountain behind them. As Britney and Stewie rested, he glassed the forest with his binoculars, guessing where the elk trail switchbacked down the mountain, and followed it all the way to the top with his binoculars. He saw no movement.

Then, far to the right on the shoulder of the mountain, a flock of spruce grouse rose out of the trees. They glided over the treetops, veered, and settled back into the timber out of view. Something, or someone, had spooked them.

“The elk trail threw him off,” Joe said, keeping his voice low. “He’s way over there to the right coming down through the trees. Probably trying to pick up our track.”

“Shit,” Stewie hissed, angrily throwing a pinecone away from him. “How far?”

Joe tried to estimate the distance between the flock of pine grouse and where they now stood. Charlie Tibbs was closing in on them.

“An hour. Maybe an hour and a half.”

“We can’t keep running,” Britney said, more to Stewie than Joe. “We’re exhausted, and we keep getting deeper into the wilderness. Maybe we can just talk to him. That’s something we haven’t tried.”

“You can stay and talk with him if you want,” Stewie grunted, as he pulled himself back to his feet. “This is the same guy that blew up my bride and shot his friend’s face off a foot away from me.”

Like tributaries feeding a great river, small individual tracks started to peel away from the elk trail. Joe noticed it first, how the once-prominent trail was diminishing as they walked.

He felt a sensation ahead of him that at first he couldn’t comprehend. It was a sense of vastness, of openness, that belied the dark woods.

He pushed through a thick wall of Rocky Mountain juniper. The branches were so full and tough that it seemed they were trying to throw him back. Stewie and Britney complained behind him that they were having trouble figuring out which way he went. Britney cried out as a branch whipped back from Stewie and hit her flush in the face.

The juniper was sharp smelling and acrid, and the dusty clustered berries that fell to the ground looked like rabbit pellets. Joe ducked his head forward so the brush wouldn’t knock his hat off.

With a hard push he cleared the brush wall and stumbled into the open and gasped.

One more clumsy step and he would have plunged seven hundred feet to the floor of the canyon known as Savage Run.

Savage Run was sheer, sharp, beautiful, and, to Joe, virtually uncrossable, so they followed a game path that skirted the rim. Periodically, Joe would near the edge and look down. The Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River was a thin gray ribbon of water on the shadowed canyon bottom. Occasionally, he could see a twiggy falcon nest blooming out from the rock face below them.

The canyon was as unique a geographic phenomenon as Joe had heard it was. Instead of tapering down from an elevation, it was a sharp slice that cleanly halved the mountain range. The other rim was no more than two hundred yards away and it, like the side they were on, was brushy with juniper and old-growth spruce. Joe could clearly see the layers of geological strata that made up the mountain on the face of the opposite canyon wall. It looked as if the mountain had been pulled apart recently, instead of millions of years before. The undergrowth and exposed roots that snaked out from below the two canyon rims seemed to be reaching for their counterparts on the other side.

Beyond the other rim and two slump-shouldered mountains, the range descended into the Twelve Sleep Valley ranch land and, eventually, to the highway and on to the town of Saddlestring.

Joe knew what kind of trouble they were in. Now that they had found the canyon, they could only go either east or west, and it wouldn’t be difficult for Charlie Tibbs to figure out which way they’d gone. Joe knew that an offshoot canyon intersected Savage Run a mile to the east and would have cut off progress in that direction. If they went that way, they would have, in effect, trapped themselves. So their only choice was a westerly route.

From where he had seen the birds rise from the forest and signal what he thought was Charlie Tibbs’s location, Joe tried to determine where Tibbs was headed. Tibbs would either follow their track to the rim and ride up on the trail behind them or ride ahead and try to intercept them. Joe wished he knew more about Tibbs-how Tibbs acted and thought, his past tendencies-so he might have a better inclination of what Tibbs would do next. Professionals like Charlie Tibbs didn’t just make things up as they went along. They stuck to procedures and maneuvers that had worked for them in the past. And whatever happened next, it seemed to Joe, a confrontation was inevitable. He wished he could be more prepared for it when it came.