Winterkill (17 page)

All that was left of the sage grouse was a pair of clawed feet. Sheridan watched as the hawk dipped down and took one of the feet in his mouth and started eating it. The crunching sound reminded her of when she opened peanuts to eat them.

“Here comes the peregrine,” her dad whispered.

She looked up and saw it, an airborne “V” cruising upriver like a missile, a few feet from the surface of the water
and ice. She could hear it cutting through the air with a hiss as it went by.

“Stay still,” her dad said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I think he’ll come back.”

“Do you have another sage grouse?” she asked, concerned.

“Yup.”

It took a few moments before the peregrine reappeared. This time, it was flying downriver, and a little closer to the bank.

“What a beautiful bird,” Sheridan said.

“Peregrines are the ultimate hunters,” her dad said. “They’re not the biggest falcons, but they’re the fastest and the most versatile. They used to be endangered, but now there are lots of them.”

She was entranced.

And when the peregrine came back, flared, and lit with a graceful settling of his wings just a few feet away from them, she felt as if something wild, and magical, had happened.

Her dad lowered the other grouse to the ground in front of the peregrine. The little bird, darker and somehow more cocky and warlike than the red-tailed hawk, gracefully tore into it.

“I think I’d rather learn about these falcons than play basketball,” she heard herself say.

I
n
the pickup, as they drove from Nate Romanowski’s place in the pre-dark of winter, Sheridan realized just how cold she was. Her teeth chattered as she waited for the heater to warm up. Seeing the falcons had made her forget about the cold, forget about how late it was getting.

She noticed that her dad’s cell phone, clipped to the dashboard, was turned off, and she mentioned it.

“I forgot about that, damn it,” he said, turning it on. Her dad rarely cursed.

Almost immediately, it rang and he grabbed it quickly. She watched him. His expression seemed to sag, then harden, as he listened.

“I can’t believe she said that.”

“Is it Mom?” Sheridan asked. But she knew it was.

“I’ll be home in half an hour, darling. I’m so sorry this happened. And I’m sorry you couldn’t reach me.”

Sheridan was concerned. His voice was low, and calm, and very serious. But she knew that inside, he was hustling.

T
he next morning
dawned gray and cold, and there was a bulletin on the radio that said a stockman’s advisory had been issued for Northern Wyoming. For their first day back to school, the girls were dressed in clothes they had received for Christmas. Because the girls had become used to sleeping later in the morning over the break, Joe and Marybeth had trouble moving them along so they would be finished with breakfast and ready to go when the bus arrived.

“Christmas is over, ladies,” Joe told them. “Back to work we go.”

Marybeth was quiet, her eyes tired. She had spent most of the previous night awake and crying about her encounter with Jeannie Keeley. Joe had held her, and shared her rage and frustration. Both Joe and Marybeth were painfully aware of the fact that this might be the last “normal” breakfast with the three girls for a while. And both were determined to see it go smoothly. Neither Marybeth nor Joe had said anything to April, or Sheridan and Lucy about Marybeth’s encounter with Jeannie Keeley the afternoon before. But April seemed prophetic, and was acutely alert. Throughout breakfast, her eyes darted furtively from Marybeth to Joe, as if trying to pick up a signal or read a glance. Just as Maxine always seemed to
know when Joe was going to go out of town, April seemed to sense instinctively that something was afoot. Sheridan and Lucy, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were oblivious to the morning drama.

After they’d gathered their coats and backpacks, Joe ushered all three girls outside to meet the bus. As the bus doors opened, April turned and threw her arms around Joe’s neck and kissed him goodbye. Joe couldn’t remember such an open display of affection from April before. When he returned to the house, it was obvious that Marybeth had seen them from the front window, and she was wiping away tears again.

Before they could talk about it, the telephone rang. Marybeth picked the receiver up, and as she listened, Joe watched her face turn into an ivory mask.

“Who is it?” Joe mouthed.

“Robey Hersig,” Marybeth answered in a sharp voice. Joe could not hear the county attorney speaking, but he could tell what Hersig was saying by Marybeth’s reaction.

“Robey, I appreciate you letting us know,” Marybeth said, and hung up the phone. She looked up at Joe and her eyes were flat and distant. “Robey said that Jeannie Keeley got a judge down in Kemmerer to issue an order for April’s return. The judge issued the order last week, and Robey just got a copy of it. He’s going to fax it to us.”

Kemmerer was a small town in southwestern Wyoming. Joe was puzzled. Why Kemmerer?

“Robey says the judge is a loose cannon, some kind of a nut,” Marybeth continued, still eerily matter-of-fact. “He said the order could probably be overturned in court, but until that happens we’re obligated to hand over April if Jeannie wants her.”

Joe stood still, his eyes locked with Marybeth’s.

“Joe, Robey says that if Jeannie comes for her and we don’t turn her over, that
we
could be charged.”

Joe shook his head, as if trying to shake away the news.

Her mask cracked and she broke down, and he welcomed her into his arms. “Joe,” she asked him, “What are we going to do?”

A
fter
Marybeth regained control and seemed to hammer her emotions into the armor of icy resolve, she left for work at the
library. Joe, frustrated, spent the day in the field. There was plenty to keep him busy, as always, and he threw himself into it in a barely controlled frenzy. Better to work himself hard physically, he thought, than to sit and contemplate what was happening at home.

He loaded his snow machine and mounting ramps in the back of his pickup, drove up the Crazy Woman drainage as far as the road was plowed, then chained up and continued until he reached a trailhead. He backed the snowmobile down the ramps with a roar, then raced across untracked snow up and over the mountain. In the drainage below was a designated winter elk refuge, and he cruised down through it. Because of the deep snow, most of the elk that normally would have been there had moved to lower ground, even though a contractor had dropped hay for them. Instead of using the refuge, though, the elk were eating Herman Klein’s lowland hay, as well as the hay of other ranchers in the valley. Joe didn’t particularly blame the elk, but wished they would have stayed around. The few elk that were present on the range were emaciated. He could tell they weren’t likely to last through the winter. The storms and the coyotes would get them. They stood dark and mangy, looking pathetic, he thought.

He fought a totally uncharacteristic urge to challenge them with his snowmobile, to charge at them and watch them run. Instead, he turned back and raced up the mountain he had come down, flying though the trees with a recklessness that both frightened and exhilarated him.

He stopped short of his pickup and tried to collect his thoughts. He noted the elk population of the winter range—seventeen sick and starving animals—in his notebook. He would check the other ranges throughout the week, and compile a report for Terry Crump. Joe expected to find the same depressing results in the other refuges as well. A lot of elk were going to die this winter, he concluded. He couldn’t protect them. Too damned many would die of winterkill.

O
ne
thing had crystallized in Joe’s mind during his breakneck rush up the mountain: He needed to talk with Jeannie Keeley. He drove toward Battle Mountain and the Sovereign Citizen compound but was stopped by a sheriff’s-department
truck that was blocking the road. The Blazer was sidewise on the plowed one-track, its front and back bumpers almost touching the walls of snow.

Joe slowed to a stop as Deputy McLanahan emerged from the Blazer and walked toward his truck. McLanahan raised a hood over his head as he approached. A short-barreled shotgun was clamped under his arm.

Joe rolled his window down.

McLanahan’s damaged nose was a grotesque blue-black color and there were half-moons of dark green under his eyes. He looked worse than Joe remembered.

“Where are you heading, game warden?”

The way McLanahan said it, “game warden” sounded to Joe like “son-of-a-bitch.”

“Patrolling,” Joe said, which was not quite accurate. He had intended to go to the compound to see if Jeannie Keeley had returned. And to advise Wade Brockius that April should not be the pawn in the bitter game Jeannie was playing.

“I thought the hunting seasons were over,” McLanahan stated. Joe could tell the deputy was in his hard-ass mode, and he guessed that being assigned to roadblock duty by the sheriff might have precipitated it.

“They are,” Joe agreed. “But I’ve got winter range all over these mountains to check. What’s going on here, anyway?”

McLanahan’s face looked raccoon-like inside the hood.

“Roadblock. I’m supposed to check anyone coming in or going out.”

“Because of the Sovereigns?”

“Yep. They’ve overstayed their welcome as of today. The eight-day camping limit has done run out.”

Joe didn’t understand. “What?”

“Folks can camp for eight days in this national forest campground. That’s it. Then they have to move on. These yay-hoo extremists have not only overstayed their welcome, they’ve tapped into the electricity and the phone lines up there. I’m freezing my ass off down on this road and those assholes are up there surfing the Internet and using county power to heat their RVs.” McLanahan spat, but the cold spittle didn’t clear his lips. “Sheriff Barnum and Melinda Strickland want them to get the fuck out of our county. So they posted
eviction posters up there last night, and I’m here to see if they leave.”

So Barnum and Strickland are working together. How odd,
Joe thought.

“And if they don’t leave?” Joe asked.

A grim smile broke across McLanahan’s face. “If they don’t leave there’s a plan in place to take care of business. We won’t stand for any more incidents like what happened with Lamar or that BLM guy.”

Joe rubbed his eyes. He knew it was a nervous habit, something he had the strong desire to do as stress built up inside him. “What’s the connection between the Sovereigns and those two?” Joe asked. “Do they really think they’re connected in some way?”

McLanahan’s eyes were flat pools of bad pond water. “The day the Sovereigns showed up was the day Lamar got killed,” he said, deadpan. “The BLM guy was a week later. Both are Feds. These Sovereign nutcases hate the government. We’ve got one of ’em in jail, but the rest are up in that camp. Is it really that hard to figure out, game warden?”

McLanahan said “game warden” in that way again. Joe controlled his anger, and asked calmly, “What are they going to do?”

“You mean, what are
we
going to do,” McLanahan said, the grin still stretched tight. “Melinda Strickland called in a couple of experts in the field. They’re in charge of the situation, and they’re a couple of bad-ass cowboys.”

Joe thought of the two men who had questioned Sheridan, then driven to the Forest Service building. But he said nothing.

“So what are you going to do if they don’t leave?” Joe asked again.

McLanahan’s bruised and mottled face contorted even further into a kind of leer. Joe realized that McLanahan didn’t have a clue what Barnum, Strickland, and the two “bad-ass cowboys” were planning. But he didn’t want Joe to know that.

“Let’s just say that we’re not going to stand around and scratch our nuts like they did in Montana with those Freemen,” McLanahan finally said.

“What’s that mean?”

“That’s priveleged information,” McLanahan blustered.
He stepped away. “I’m freezing to death standing out here,” he said. “I’m going to get in my truck and fire up the heater. You want to go up there you’re going to have to clear it with Barnum first.”

“Have you seen an older-model blue Dodge pickup come up this road?” Joe asked. “With a man and a woman in it? Tennessee plates?”

“Nope.”

Joe watched McLanahan walk away. Joe’s mind was swirling with new implications. He rubbed his eyes.

I
n
the afternoon, Joe patrolled the breaklands. He drove the BLM roads boldly, and took the ones that would crest hills or traverse sagebrush clearings, choosing to fully expose himself. He was looking for the light-colored Ford. He hoped the driver of the Ford, the man (or men) who had lured Birch Wardell into the canyon, would try to do the same to him. He needed some kind of action that would make him feel he was doing something, and occupy his mind to delay the inevitable.

The inevitable would be later in the evening, when he and Marybeth sat down with April to tell her that her mother wanted her back.