Trophy Hunt (3 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
,
MONDAY
, Joe hiked up the Crazy Woman Creek drainage with his necropsy kit to discover that the grinning moose was no longer there. The absence of the dead moose in the meadow stopped him outright, and he stood still for a moment, surveying the crushed grass. He was thinking about Sheridan’s dream, which made him uncomfortable. Joe refused to believe in aliens or creeping mist or anything else he couldn’t see or touch. Had there been a time when he believed in monsters and things that went bump in the night?
Nope,
he thought. He had always been a skeptic. He remembered when neighborhood kids gathered around a Ouija board, and urged him to join them. Instead, he went fishing. When his friends stayed up late at night to watch creature movies, Joe fell asleep. Sheridan was different, though, and always had been. He hoped she’d outgrow the dreams.

S
omething had dragged, or carried, the carcass away. The trail was obvious; a spoor of flattened grass led across the meadow in a stuttering S-curve toward the northern wall of pine trees. Puzzled, he followed it.

The mature bull moose weighed at least 600 pounds, he guessed. Whatever had moved it had tremendous strength. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a set of pickup or ATV tracks in the meadow, but they weren’t there. He wondered if it could be the grizzly. As he walked silently across the meadow in the flattened grass track of the moose, he tried to peer ahead into the dark trees and see into them. He listened intently for sounds, and noted the absence of them. There were no chattering squirrels in the trees, or calling jays. Except for the low hum of insects in the grass near his feet and the high, airy flow of a cold fall breeze through the branches, it was deathly silent in the meadow. Again, he felt a chill run up his spine, which raised the hairs on his neck and forearms.

He couldn’t explain the odd feeling he got again from the meadow. It felt as if something was physically pushing against him from all sides. Not hard, but steadily. The crisp fall mountain air tasted thicker than it should have, and when he breathed in, his lungs felt heavy and wet. He sensed a kind of shimmer in the air when he looked at the wall of trees and the granite mountains that pushed up behind them. He didn’t like the feeling at all, and tried to shake it off.

Joe slipped the strap of the necropsy kit over his head so that his hands were free. He drew his semiautomatic weapon and worked the slide, seating a cartridge in the chamber. With his left hand, he unclipped the large can of bear spray from his belt and thumbed off the guard. He cautiously approached the wall of trees, his weapon in his right hand and the spray in his left. All of his senses were tuned to high, and he strained to see, hear, or smell anything that would give him a warning before it was too late.

That’s when he saw the bear track in the center of the crushed grass. The huge paw was the size of a pie plate and had pushed down through the mat of grass into dark soil. He could see the heel imprint clearly; it was pressed into the dirt, as were the prints of all five toes. Nearly two inches
from the end of the toe marks were sharp punctures in the ground, as if a curved garden rake had been swung overhead and embedded deeply into the earth. The creature that had made the tracks was the rogue grizzly bear, he was sure of it. None of the native black bears could leave a track that large. The odd thing, he thought, was that the track was pointed toward him, and not toward the wall of trees. Why wasn’t the track heading away from the meadow?

Then he answered his own question. If the bear was dragging the moose out of the meadow, he would have clamped down on the moose’s neck with his teeth and pulled it backward, like a puppy dragging a sock. The fact that the heel print was deeper than the claws indicated that the bear was struggling with the heavy carcass, backing up and digging deep into the earth for traction.

He glanced at the bear spray he carried and then at the .40 Beretta.
Too small,
he thought,
too puny.
Not only would he likely miss because he was such a poor shot with a handgun, but even if he hit his target it would probably do no more than make the bear angry.

He stood, thought, and shrugged, then plunged forward, toward the trees that lined the meadow. There was a hole in the brush where something—the bear?—had already blazed through. Branches had been bent and snapped back and broken. Entering the pool of shadow cast by the wall of pine trees, Joe squinted to see better. The forest was unnaturally dense and cluttered with wicked snarls of dry deadfall. The tree trunks were the thickness of the barrel of a baseball bat and extremely close together. Joe lowered his shoulder and pushed through.

The forest floor was dark, dry, and carpeted thickly with several inches of bronze pine needles. His boots sank with each step, and the earth was springy. The smell inside was a combination of dried pine, vegetative decay, and the sudden strong odor of the dead moose that for some reason Joe had not noticed until now.

As his eyes adjusted to the half-light filtering through the pine boughs, the carcass of the moose seemed to emerge on the forest floor right in front of him. The stench was suddenly overpowering, and Joe stepped back and thumped his shoulder blade against two tree trunks that
prevented further flight. Holstering his gun, he held his breath while he dug a thick surgical face-mask from the kit, pulled the rubber band over the back of his head, and fitted the mask over his nose and mouth. He smeared Vicks VapoRub across the front of the mask from a small plastic jar in the kit to further block the smell. Then he approached the carcass and got to work.

The carcass had obviously decomposed even more. Blooms of entrails had burst through several places in the abdomen of the moose, where the hide had been stretched so tightly that it split. Again, he marveled at the surgical precision of the incisions that had been made. He could see no wounds that he had missed the day before, except for the gouged rips in the neck from the teeth of the bear that had dragged it from the meadow. Joe photographed the wounds from several angles using his digital camera. The photos, he thought, didn’t convey the dread and fear he felt. They looked clinical, and somehow cleaner than the real thing.

He put on thick rubber gloves and squatted next to the carcass with his kit open. Using dental charts, he noted the size of the pre-molars as well as their stain and wear and guessed that the bull was at least seven years old, in its prime. Pushing a stainless steel probe through the hide along the spine of the moose between the shoulders, then in the middle of the back, and finally between the haunches, he noted that the body fat of the animal was normal, even a little excessive. Joe thought it was unusual in a drought year that the moose seemed so robust and healthy. Whatever had happened to the moose, it was clear that it hadn’t died from either starvation or old age.

He ran a telescopic metal detector over the animal from its tail to the rounded end of its bulbous snout. No metal. If the animal had been shot, the bullet had passed through the body. But there was no exit wound. Conventional high-powered hunting bullets were designed to mushroom inside the body and do horrendous damage inside. But they were engineered to stay inside the body somewhere, not to exit. There was the possibility, Joe thought, that the shooter was using specialized armor-piercing type rounds that could pass straight through. But he doubted that scenario.
In fact, the more he studied the body, the less he could convince himself that somebody had shot it.

Using a razor, Joe sliced tissue samples from the places on the moose’s hindquarters, neck, and head where its hide had been cut away. He dropped the strips of meat into thick paper envelopes to send to the lab in Laramie. Plastic would spoil the samples, and he didn’t want his effort to go to waste. He duplicated the procedure with another set of envelopes he would send to another lab.

After he completed his work, he stood above the carcass and stared at it. If anything, the face stripped of its flesh seemed more gruesome in the dark silence of the forest floor. The smell of the decaying body was working its way through the mask, overpowering even the Vicks. Joe looked around, suddenly realizing that he had been so intent on collecting the samples and completing the necropsy that he hadn’t thought about the grizzly. Was he out there now, somewhere in the shadows? Would he be coming back?

Why would the bear go to all the effort of dragging the huge corpse into the trees and not feed on it? Moose was highly choice meat, for hunters and for bears. If the bear wasn’t hungry, why would he have worked so hard? If the bear intended to eat the moose later, why hadn’t he buried the carcass or covered it with brush as bears usually did?

Joe zipped up his kit and retraced his steps. Nothing about this dead moose made sense. His only hope to solve the puzzle, he thought, was if the lab boys could come up with something from the photos and the samples. But even if the moose died of some strange disease, how would they account for the incisions and the missing skin, glands, and organs?

As he neared the meadow, the light fused yellow, and when he emerged from the forest he had the same feeling a swimmer does as he breaks the surface from below. In the meadow, Joe turned. He listened closely for the sounds of a bear approaching or, for that matter, any sound at all. There was none. But there was still that shimmer in the air, and the closed-in feeling of density.

Maybe,
Joe thought,
somebody or something is watching me.
Maybe that was
why he felt so unnatural and out of sorts in the meadow. He swept the forest with his eyes, trying to find something out of the ordinary. A set of eyes, perhaps, or the glint of the lenses from binoculars. He turned slowly in the center of the meadow, not far from where the moose had originally lain. He scanned the three walls of trees, and the creek bed, even the high, slick faces of the mountains. He saw nothing unusual. But he was thoroughly and ashamedly spooked.

Still clutching his weapon and the bear spray, Joe walked across the meadow and dropped down into Crazy Woman Creek. As he walked downstream, he felt the pressure lessen. Eventually, he couldn’t feel it at all. The sun seemed warmer and brighter overhead. A raven cawed rudely somewhere on the opposite bank.

I
n the afternoon, Joe sat in his truck on the crest of a sagebrush-covered hilltop in the breaklands east of Saddlestring. Behind him, the terrain arched and transformed into the foothills of the Bighorns, where he had come from. In front of him were miles of blue-gray sagebrush plains cut through with slashes of red ravines. From his vantage point, the breaklands looked like the ocean caught in freeze-frame; wavelike rolls of undulation stopped in time. This was pronghorn antelope country but there were few hunters out. He had identified only two vehicles over the past three hours, distant sparkles of glass and steel over two miles away. Watching through his window-mounted spotting scope, he observed the four-wheel drives move slowly on BLM roads.
Road hunters,
Joe thought. He had heard no shots. After the first weekend of antelope season, hunting activity was minimal in the breaklands. Pronghorns were so plentiful and easy to hunt that serious hunters had harvested their game within hours of the season opening. Those still out were either stubborn trophy hunters looking for the perfect rack, or local meat hunters who felt no sense of urgency.

Joe sat back from the spotting scope and rubbed his eyes. Maxine sighed and rolled over on the passenger seat, still sleeping.

He had stopped in town and mailed the tissue samples of the moose. The packages should arrive at the lab in Laramie and his other source in
Montana the next morning. He had called both recipients on his cell phone and left messages asking that the examinations be expedited. He promised to forward the digital photos of the moose via e-mail that evening, when he got back to his house, so they could see the source of the samples.

From his vantage point, looking out at the plains, he could see forever. He loved this particular time in the fall for many reasons, but one of the major reasons was how the air and light seemed to sharpen, and everything was in perfect focus. In the summer, waves of rising heat rose from the plains and limited his field of vision. In the winter, moisture in the air or wind-borne snow did the same thing. This time in the fall the air was crisp and fresh and clear, and the colors from the trees that filled the valleys gave the landscape a festive, celebratory quality. Yet, today, the spectacular view failed to fill him with the same sense of awe that it usually did. He just couldn’t stop thinking about the dead bull moose.

Even without the strange feeling he’d had in the meadow—which he now seriously doubted had come from anywhere other than his own imagination—the circumstances of the animal’s death made even less sense than they had the day before.

Joe shook his head. He hoped some answers would come from the Wildlife Veterinary Research Services, where he’d sent the samples.

Then something caught his eye—a glint—and he leaned into the spotting scope again and tilted it upward, past the breaks into the private ranch lands miles beyond. Focusing the eyepiece, he simultaneously tightened the mount on the window to steady the telescope.

The glint, it turned out, was not from glass but from water forming around a freshly drilled well. The drilling rig that produced it was surrounded by three large pickup trucks, all the same make, model, and color. Men moved quickly between the pickups and the well, splashing through the growing pool of water. Joe couldn’t see them clearly enough to make out their faces, or read the logos on the pickup doors, but he recognized what was going on. He had seen it dozens of times in the past year.