C. Box - Force of Nature

The logging road Joe was on paralleled the South Fork Trail but on the other side of the mountain, and the two roads never crossed the water and intersected.

Joe thought of the conversation he’d had with Luke Brueggemann that first day when he showed the trainee the locations for the camps. Ten were occupied by familiar local outfitter names, he told Brueggemann. One was unfamiliar.

Because the permits for the camps were issued through the local office of the U.S. Forest Service and not Joe’s agency, there was no way for Joe to look up the names of the permittees. Although the USFS was supposed to forward the list of outfitters every year, a combination of bureaucracy, other priorities, and general malaise that formed between state and federal agencies usually delayed the arrival of the list until well after hunting season, when it did Joe no good. But he wished he could see the list now. Especially the new permittee who had obtained Camp Five.

Joe realized he’d misread Brueggemann’s reticent reaction to inspecting the camps that morning, assuming it had to do with riding horses up to them. But now Joe understood, or thought he did. Because it had to do with who had set up in Camp Five. Brueggemann, Joe guessed, was wary because he was taken by surprise by the plan and wanted to alert the occupant, but it would be difficult to do on horseback with Joe there, not to mention they’d be in and out of cell phone coverage. How relieved Brueggemann had been that morning when the ride got called off, Joe recalled. Now it made sense, and it had nothing to do with his horses.

The trees closed in on the old road the higher Joe climbed his pickup. Boughs heavy with snow dumped their loads on the cab of his pickup as he brushed under them. He picked his way slowly and cautiously up the road to avoid getting stuck or hitting a fallen tree obscured by the snow, but also to keep the engine whine of his pickup as low as possible.

He had no radio or cell phone reception so deep in the timber, and he checked both periodically. On top, he knew, he would break through the thick trees and emerge above the timberline, where he might catch a signal before plunging back down the other side.

He took a slow blind corner to the left through the trees and was surprised to see four massive bull elk barreling straight toward him down the road, their antlers catching glints of morning sun, their nostrils firing spouts of condensation, their eyes white and wild. He stomped on his brake pedal as one of the bulls nearly crashed into his grille but spun to the right at the last second and crashed headlong through the brush and timber on the side of the old road. The three others-a magnificent six-by-six, a five-by-five, and a young spike-all followed. Even with his windows closed to prevent snow from coming inside the cab, Joe could hear the sharp cracking of branches as the bulls barreled down the mountainside, kicking up pine needles and clumps of dark mulch in their wake.

Just as suddenly as the appearance of the elk, a red ATV-the vehicle that had gone up the road before him-and two hunters roared around a blind corner ahead in pursuit of the elk. The driver was bent over the handlebars and the passenger behind him had his rifle out and pointed forward as if his plan had been to shoot from the moving vehicle. When the driver looked up and saw the green pickup, his mouth dropped open, but he stopped quickly and started a long skid in the mud and snow that came to a halt a few feet from Joe’s front bumper.

For a moment, Joe glared through his windshield at the driver and the shooter. The driver, a thick and wide dark-haired man with a weeklong hunting beard, flushed red with anger and trepidation. The shooter, who looked to be a younger and hairier version of the driver, was simply peeved.

Because the trees on each side of the road were so thick and close, neither vehicle could proceed without the other getting out of the way.

Joe sighed and opened his door and climbed out. He clamped his Stetson tight on his head and indicated for the driver to kill his motor, which burbled loudly like a Harley-Davidson wannabe.

The driver reached down and turned the key, and suddenly the forest was still, except for the distant sound of branches snapping and breaking as the elk thundered farther and farther away down the hillside.

He could hear the shooter growl a colorful stream of curses.

“How’s it going, guys?” Joe asked.

“Just great,” the driver sighed, “until you showed up. We’ve been up here busting our ass looking for elk for seven days without seeing a goddamn one, and then last night it snows and we ride right into them.”

“Yup, I saw ’em,” Joe said, indicating the churned-up path in the snow where the elk bolted into the timber.

“Then you showed up and fucked it up,” the shooter said, sitting back and propping the rifle on his thigh, the barrel in the air.

Joe nodded. He’d found over the years that his silence often produced confessions and was more effective than talking.

After a few beats of Joe simply looking at them, the driver said, “I guess we were acting kind of stupid chasing them like that.”

Joe nodded.

“And I guess my son here shouldn’t be trying to pop them from the back of a four-wheeler.”

“Nope.”

“And I think we’re still in our hunting area,” the driver said, raising his palms in an exaggerated way. “At least I hope so. It’s harder than hell to tell sometimes. I mean, it ain’t like you guys mark where one area ends and the other one starts.”

The shooter got quiet when he finally realized they might be in trouble.

Joe said, “Chasing wildlife is a violation; so is hunting them from a moving vehicle. And if you think you’re still in Area Thirty-four, well, you left it about a mile back.”

The driver took a deep breath as if to challenge Joe, then thought better of it and said, “Well, we’re damned sorry if we fucked up.” He thought better of his language and said, “I mean, screwed up.”

Joe said, “Yup.”

The father sighed. “You gonna write us up?”

Joe didn’t answer directly. He asked, “How far did you two go up the road this morning?”

The father looked worried, as if he was trying to figure out if they’d committed additional violations that morning. Finally, he said, “Just a couple miles. That’s where we jumped the elk. They took off running down this road and we followed their tracks.”

Joe nodded. “You didn’t go up far enough to get to the top? To see over into the river valley on the other side of the mountain? Where the outfitter camps are located?”

“Not today,” the shooter said quickly.

Joe thought he said it in a way that implied there was more to the story. “But you’ve been up that far this week?”

The father and son exchanged glances.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Joe asked amiably.

After a beat, the father turned back around and said, “Up until yesterday, we was hunting with my brother-in-law Richie. He said he had to go back last night to do some stuff at home. Richie is kind of a pain in the ass, but he knows this country up here like nobody else.”

“Anyway…” Joe prompted.

“Richie likes to hunt alone,” the father said. “He knows of some old miner cabin up there, and he likes to go up there by it and sit and glass the meadows with binoculars to see elk. He sits for hours up there, just looking around. He usually gets a nice bull that way. But something happened the last time he went up there. When he came back down, he looked fucking spooked. We asked him what happened or what he saw, but he just made up some bullshit about having to get home. He just packed up his gear and left us up here. We never could get him to tell us what happened.”