C Box - Trophy hunt

There was a pause. "I'll take a look tomorrow," Avery said in a serious tone.

"So there weren't any wildlife deaths reported?" Joe asked again. He sensed that Avery had something to say but was holding back.

"Actually, there were a couple of reports, but they weren't very credible."

"Who made them?" Joe asked.

Avery sighed. "Joe, there was a guy up here, a self-described expert in the paranormal. He just showed up out of the blue with a kind of laboratory-on-wheels. It's a retrofitted RV with all kinds of equipment and shit inside. He claimed to represent some foundation somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico that funds him to do research. His name is Cleve Garrett"-Avery spat the name out as if it were a curse word-"and he practically camped on top of me all last summer. He's got all kinds of theories about how these are alien abductions and how I'm engaged in a governmental conspiracy to keep it all quiet. The fucking dweeb. The moron."

"So you don't like him much?" Joe asked facetiously.

"Hah!"

"Is he the one who reported the wildlife deaths?"

Joe heard Avery take a swallow of something before answering. "He claimed there were hundreds of cases of wildlife mutilations. He said they were all over the place-on the sides of highways, in the timber, all over. He said the reason we didn't know about them was because we never thought to look. He said 25 percent of the deer killed on the highway were actually mutilated and dumped, but no one cared to notice. He loves talking to reporters and stirring this stuff up."

Joe thought about that, his mind racing. How many dead deer, elk, moose, fox, antelope bordered the highways? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Who would think to examine them? They were roadkill.

"He brought in a mule deer carcass once," Avery said. "And yes, it did look like it had been cut on. But the body was too old to determine anything conclusive. Plus, I didn't trust the guy not to have done it himself."

"Is he still up there?" Joe asked.

"You know, I don't think so," Avery said. "I haven't seen him in quite a while. I heard he had a following of like-minded kooks and had taken up with some young girl. He probably took her back to wherever he came from so he could practice alien probes on her or something." Joe didn't know what to ask next. Then he recalled something Avery had said earlier. "Dave, you said there was something about the tissue samples you looked at?" "Oh, yeah. But like I said, don't put too much significance in it." "Yes?" "One thing we found in the cattle that were the freshest-I think they had been dead a week or so-was an above-normal level of a compound called oxindole. Ever heard of it?" "It sounds vaguely familiar," Joe said, searching his memory. "Probably from biology class. Oxindole is a natural chemical that can have a sedative effect. Cattle release it within their own bodies under stress. We found excessive amounts in the tissue samples, especially in the brains and in the eyeballs that hadn't been removed already." "So it probably came from the cow itself?" Joe asked, confused. "Well, probably, yes," Avery said. Unconvincingly, Joe thought. "The older cows, the ones that had been dead longer, did you find oxindole in them?" "Some. But we think it dissipates with age." "So why even mention it?" "Because there was so damned much of it," Avery sighed. "Maybe enough to literally sedate the cow, to knock it out. Much more than we know that a cow is capable of producing." Joe was silent. "Look, you've got to keep it in perspective," Avery cautioned. "We don't know very much about the compound. We don't know, for example, if maybe it doesn't become concentrated, postmortem, in certain organs, and those were the organs we just happened to test. The compound may intensify due to a traumatic or stressful death, or it could be that the presence of it is triggered by a virus or something. We're still researching it, but quite frankly we aren't getting anywhere. We have real work to do up here, as you know. I've got a breakout of pinkeye in our mountain sheep population right now. So we can't be spending too much time or energy on dead cows, especially since the mutilations seem to have stopped."

"They stopped in Montana, anyway," Joe said.

"Now you've got 'em," Avery said, his voice heavy. "Maybe you'll get my friend Cleve Garrett as well."

Joe grunted. "I'm still a little surprised that this is the first I've heard of it. I'd think those ranchers would be demanding some kind of action."

Avery laughed, which Joe thought was an odd response.

"I don't get it," Joe said, annoyed.

"At first, they wanted to call in the National Guard," Avery said. "A couple of 'em were on the phone to the governor right away. Then they realized how it looked."

"What do you mean?"

"Cattle prices were at record lows at the time. Most of these ranchers barely scrape by as it is. They're one bank payment away from losing their ranches. So they're either trying to sell their spreads for big bucks to Hollywood celebrities, or selling their beef for a few pennies in profit. If word got out that the cattle are dying unnatural deaths, those landowners are shit out of luck. When they realized that, they pressured the governor not to do anything."

"So, Dave, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"What do you think this is? Not a scientific explanation, or your professional opinion. What does your gut tell you?"

Joe heard Avery take another sip of his drink. He heard another Chris LeDoux rodeo song.

"Joe, I don't know what the fuck it is," Avery said, his voice dropping, "but for a while there I was scared as hell."

Joe asked Avery to contact him if he found anything unusual in the tissue samples. They talked for a few moments about game-management issues, and Avery reported what was happening in Montana with whirling disease in the rivers. Joe told Avery about confirmed findings of chronic wasting disease in mule deer in southern Wyoming. They agreed to keep in better touch.

Then Joe cradled the telephone and sat back.

He was still sitting there when Marybeth rapped on the door and opened it. She was in her nightgown; the short, black one he liked.

"Are you coming to bed?" she asked. Joe looked at his wristwatch, surprised to see that it was 11:30.

"I didn't kiss the girls good night," he said, alarmed.

"What have you been doing in here?"

"Work. I talked to Dave Avery."

Marybeth smiled, rolling her eyes.

"I remember Dave being sober on his wedding day," she said. "I realized I didn't even know him. He was drunk almost all of college."

"He's a good biologist, though," Joe said, "and a good friend."

"What did he say about the moose?" Joe looked away, then back. "We may have a problem."

"What do you mean?"

"Are the horses in the barn or in the corral tonight?" Joe asked.

Marybeth frowned. "They're in the corral, why?"

"I think we need to start putting them in the barn at night," Joe said, standing up and clamping on his hat.

Sheridan Pickett stepped out of the shadowed gnarl of river-bottom cottonwoods. She looked up and searched the dull, gray sky in silence until she saw what she was looking for. She felt a small shiver of excitement, and dread. They were up there, all right.

As she had been instructed, she went no farther into the clearing. Behind her, on the other side of the thick old trees, was the Twelve Sleep River. The river was placid and low, the water in it clear and nearly still this late in the season. A rusted metal bridge spanned the river but was blocked off to vehicles, because it was old and unsafe. She had walked across it a half hour before, trying not to look down at the gaps between the wood planks where she could see the water. Her footfalls on the bridge seemed unnaturally loud as they crossed. Her breath came in puffs of condensation. It was a cold fall day, and the clouds that had pulled a blind over the wide-open sky looked like they could bring rain or even snow.