C. Box: Breaking Point

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.

Joe 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 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.

He 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.”

So 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 string of drool from her mouth to the pine needle carpet that there must be an accompanying food smell too faint for him to notice.