Kirk Russell: Night Game

Marquez slipped a day pack on, crossed the road, and picked up the Rockbound Trail. He liked the early cold, the fall bite to the air, the light, almost weightless feel of the pack. Within an hour he was on open granite in sunlight looking up at the V-shaped pass and the dark blue sky above. He stopped and studied the rock up ahead, figured out it was where Petroni said to break from the trail.

A jumble of dark-stained granite marked where the stream running from Coldwater Canyon tumbled down in the runoff months. He climbed alongside the stained rock, brown and orange lichen powdering under his fingers. He free-climbed the final forty feet where the stream cascaded as falls in late May, slipping once near the top, thick fingers gripping hard as his legs dangled. Then he pulled himself over the lip and rested. It was the kind of short climb he wouldn’t have thought twice about twenty years ago.

He ate a candy bar and drank from a water bottle. Below, the forests of the Crystal Basin were dark blue-green in late morning light. Toward the southwest, the sky had whitened with high cirrus; the afternoon would cool down. He thought about Katherine and Maria, missing them this morning.

When he put the pack on again and turned he saw a tiny lake gleaming like a polished stone beneath the granite face at the far end of the canyon. More a pond than a lake and probably no real fish in it, the type of lake fishermen bragged about because it showed they knew the hard-to-get-to places. He hiked toward it, following the rocky, dry streambed. Juniper trees grew sporadically along both sides of the narrow canyon, pine in scraggly bunches near the stream. There was little here that would attract bear, and it was difficult to believe a sow with cubs would forage this high late in the season when elderberry, gooseberry, acorns, and apples were all at a lower elevation.

As a crow flies he wasn’t far from where Jed Vandemere’s body had been found, and he decided when he finished here he’d hike out that direction. Kendall’s speculating that Vandemere’s murder might be connected to the man they were looking for had gotten his attention. He hiked on into the canyon, caught the odor of something dead, and knew as he did that the backpacker who’d called CalTIP had been genuine. It made him melancholy, took away the brightness of the early morning.

People trafficking in animal parts preferred to do so quietly. With bear there was a steady flow of gallbladders and paws to the markets. Thousand-pound adult grizzlies got slaughtered in Siberia solely for their gallbladders. He’d seen similar abuse here too many times to accept the rationalizations and calls for patience, for more time to allow for cultural change.

The last wild animals had their backs to the abyss. It was really that simple.

He found the sow bear at the base of a pine and guessed that she’d been killed within the last four or five days. Wasn’t skinned but her paws were missing, abdomen cut open, gallbladder no doubt gone. He moved her and looked for bullet wounds and found one he could chase. Then working a circle outward from her carcass he found what was left of two cubs, fur and small pieces of bone.

He returned to the sow, took off his pack, brushed flies away from the camcorder lens, and videotaped the dead bear. He picked up a piece of dental floss lying between two rocks and knew it likely was used to tie off the bile ducts after the gallbladder had been removed. Then he pulled a tool from his pack, a piece of heavy-gauge wire with a blunt end that he pushed into the wound to try to establish the direction of the bullet track before cutting into her.

After slicing through several inches of putrefying fat he had to back away from the smell, his eyes watering, drawing several deep breaths of clean piney air before continuing. Had she been killed near a road her carcass could have been transported to the Fish and Game facility in Rancho Cordova where X-ray equipment would locate the bullet. Instead, he forced himself to overcome the smell and dig for it as flies swarmed around him. He cut deeper and then got luckier than it was fair to hope for, felt metal scrape metal and dug out a bullet lodged against a rib. He turned it in his palm before bagging it. It wasn’t badly deformed, and he would call his friend at the DOJ lab in Sacramento when he got back to his truck. He’d drop off the bullet tomorrow before meeting with Bell.

He wiped the knife and probe clean, dropped them in a plastic bag, peeled off the latex gloves, then wrote his notes. Estimated the bear’s weight at two-fifty, her age at four years, the cubs born last spring. He packed up and started toward the lake, still searching for what had drawn the bears here. Not far from the water he found his answer. Partially hidden by bushes was a bait pile composed of what looked like restaurant garbage. On a nearby rock he found oats mixed with honey. He gathered what clues he could, a fragment of brown paper bag with the letter R in red, crusts of bread that had fallen between rocks.

Now, climbing out the back of the canyon he looked down across a long slide of talus at Barrett Lake, small and windblown. He followed the directions Kendall had given him, hiked over a secondary ridge out of view of the lake, and spotted the fluorescent orange spray paint marking the boulder where Vandemere’s remains were found.

He stood on the rock near a black-red bloodstain, keeping his boots away from it. Kendall had told him Forest Service rangers would clean the rock next week, removing both paint and blood. He studied a dark stand of pine well down the slope, trees corresponding to Kendall’s photos. Kendall was right, took a marksman from there, not an easy shot, and he understood Kendall zeroing in on hunters. Vandemere up here working on his geology thesis- standing on this rock when the bullet hit him, did he even realize what had happened? Marquez knelt, touched the bloodstain, and remembered Kendall’s mincing, almost angry acknowledgment that Vandemere’s father had gone to his son’s grad school adviser and gotten enough information to create a map of where Jed had been exploring. He’d made a grid to search and worked it with volunteers, friends of Jed’s and family.

By the time he walked back toward Barrett Lake the sky had milked over completely and the granite peaks had dulled to flat gray. He took out binoculars and scanned the vehicles in the camping area at the far end of the lake below, saw a CJ5 jeep, yellow and tired looking; a Ford Explorer; and a third truck, an ancient Dodge pickup he recognized.

“Bobby, are you here?” he asked and swept the binoculars along the campsites.

Bobby Broussard’s presence might explain the bait piles, and Marquez knew he’d have to get a hold of Petroni after he hiked out. He scanned the campsites, spotted a man sitting on a log near a small campfire, head tipped down as he poked at coals and laid meat on the grill, face hidden by the brim of a hat. When he finally looked up, Marquez recognized the leathered features of Troy Broussard, patriarch of the local poacher. Wisps of blue smoke rose from the fire and Troy looked his way again. The last time Marquez had seen him was in court four years ago when Troy had been sentenced to eighteen months for commercial trafficking in bear.

Marquez had given his testimony in the judge’s chambers and listened to the trial from the judge’s door. In court, Troy had acted as his own lawyer, making a statement to the jury that animals had been put here by God for the benefit of man. He’d stared into the eyes of the jurors until they’d had to look away. After he’d gone to prison there had been a spurt of anonymous threats against Fish and Game, messages left on the hotline, and naturally Troy’s name had come up after the recent CD.