C. Box - Force of Nature

Joe Pickett and the county attorney climbed out of the first truck. Joe wasn’t armored up and didn’t carry a long gun of any kind. Nate watched as Joe fitted his gray Stetson on his head. Even from that distance, and through undulating waves of condensation from the still-moist earth, Nate could tell that Joe had a pained expression on his face.

“Sorry, my friend,” Nate whispered.

As the deputies cautiously approached the smoldering structure and the sheriff walked around uselessly behind them, Nate kept his binoculars on Joe. He watched as his friend ordered another Game and Fish employee to lead Schalk away from the open to cover behind the SUVs.

Then he shifted back to Joe, as the game warden kicked through the remains of the falcon mews, then walked down to the river and gazed into the water. On the bank, he leaned back and scanned the horizon on top of the high bluff. Apparently, the sheriff shouted something at him-probably for walking around in the open without a long gun in his red uniform shirt-but Joe waved him off.

Joe walked over to the side of the stone walls of the house where Nate parked his Jeep, and bent over to look at the ground. Then he walked a distance downriver, surveying ahead of him in the mud and sand. What was he following? Nate’s tracks?

The game warden stopped suddenly near the old river cottonwoods as if jerked on a leash. He stared at the tree trunks, then cautiously looked over his shoulder toward the SUVs and the assault team.

With a feeling like a slight electric shock through his bowels, Nate realized what Joe was looking at. He’d made three mistakes.

“Uh-oh,” Nate whispered. The arrow he’d been hit with was still embedded in the bark of the tree. An arrow likely covered with dried blood and his DNA. If the arrow was analyzed, the investigators would know that Nate had not only been there, but he’d been wounded. And so would The Five.

Nate said, “What are you going to do, Joe?” He felt for his friend. Joe was straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty that had gotten him into trouble many times. It was something Nate admired about Joe, and a trait he’d shared many years before it had been destroyed.

He watched as Joe checked again to make sure no one was looking, then reached up quickly and wrenched the arrow from the tree. Then he ambled down to the river with the shaft hidden tight against the length of his leg and he flipped it into the fast current.

Nate closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Thank you.”

Later, after the assault team had finally left and the sun was slipping behind the western mountains, Nate freed the jesses and unhooded both birds. With his good right hand, he raised the prairie falcon and released him to the sky. He lifted the peregrine, and she cocked her head and stared at him with her black eyes.

“Go,” he said, prompting her by lifting her up and down. She gripped his hand, and her talons tightened painfully through the glove.

“Really,” he said. “Go.”

Although she was likely hungry and there were ducks and geese cruising the river to find a place to settle for the night, she didn’t spread her wings.

“I mean it,” he said. “It’s been good. You were a great hunter, but we both need to be free right now. We’ll meet again in this world or the next. Now go.”

As he flung her into the air, his wounded shoulder bit him like a jackal and the pain nearly took him to his knees.

The peregrine shot out her wings and beat them until she grasped the air. He watched her climb, but she didn’t seem to be concentrating on the river, the ducks, or the geese. She rose almost reluctantly, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he told himself. When a falconer and falcon parted, it was supposed to be the falcon’s idea.

But she was still up there, a dot against the evening clouds, when he hiked down the other side of the rise to where he’d hidden his Jeep in a tangle of junipers.

It was unnaturally dark on the wide, rutted roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation because, Nate guessed, someone had once again decided to drive around and shoot out all the overhead lights. He confirmed his suspicion when he heard the crunching of broken glass from the shattered bulbs beneath the tires of the Jeep as he slowly cruised down Norkok Street toward Fort Washakie. Despite the chill of the evening, he kept his windows down so all his senses could be engaged. Dried leaves rattled in the canopy of old trees and skittered across the road. The last sigh of the evening sun painted a bold red slash on the square top of Crowheart Butte in his rearview mirror.

In the 1860s, Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone tribe ended a war with the encroaching Crow by fighting one-on-one with Chief Big Robber, the Crow leader. Washakie killed Big Robber and cut his heart out and stuck it on the end of his war lance in tribute to the fallen enemy. Hence the name of the butte. The reservation itself was huge, 2.2 million acres-the same size as Yellowstone Park. It was home to 2,500 Eastern Shoshone and 5,000 Northern Arapaho. In the old cemetery Nate drove past the last shard of sun glinting off rusted metal headboards and footboards that reached up out of the ground. Because the Indians interred their dead on scaffolds and the Jesuits insisted on burial, a compromise was reached: the bodies had been buried in their deathbeds.

Nate felt a sudden dark pang as he looked over the cemetery when he thought of Alisha, his lover. He had left her body on scaffolding of his own construction just two months before. He hadn’t been back to the canyon where she’d been killed. He’d never go back.

All that remained of her except for his memories was the braided strand of her hair tied to the barrel of his. 500 Wyoming Express revolver.

As Nate slid down the roads in the dark, he glanced at still-life scenes of the residents through their windows. For some reason, the Indians seldom closed their curtains. He saw families gathered for dinner, people watching television, and in the lit-up opening of a single-car garage, a pair of young men in bloodied camo skinning a mule deer.

Alice Thunder’s faded white bungalow was located just off Black Coal Road, and Nate cruised by it without slowing. Muted lights were on inside, and her GMC Envoy was parked under a carport on the side of her house. She lived alone there, and it appeared she didn’t have company.

He did a three-point turn in the road and came back and turned onto a weedy two-track behind her house and parked where his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the road.

Nate padded up the broken concrete walk to her back entrance and tapped on the metal screen door. Dogs inside yipped and howled, but through the sound he could feel her heavy footfalls approach. She didn’t turn on the porch light but stood behind the storm door and squinted at him. Small mixed-breed dogs boiled around and through her stout legs.

“Is that you, Nate Romanowski?” she asked.

He nodded and leaned his head against the peeling doorframe. His legs felt suddenly weak from his injury.

“If I invite you in this house, am I committing a federal crime?”

“Maybe,” Nate said.

She yelled at her dogs to get away from the door, then cracked it open. He smelled a waft of warm air mixed with the smell of baking bread and wet dog hair.

“Get in here before someone sees you,” she said. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, letting her lead him into the kitchen. Four or five dogs sniffed at his pants and boots. Alice Thunder was not a hugger or a smiler or an open enthusiast.

“Do you want to sit?” she asked, gesturing toward the table. She’d not yet set it for her evening meal.