Off the Grid (5 page)

It was the white smudge on top of the roof of the mews that had caught his eye, he realized.

When he got closer he saw the gyrfalcon. It was the one from his dream.

The bird turned its head and their eyes locked.

He realized that perhaps it had not been a bad dream that morning, but a premonition.

RUNAWAY BEAR

The closer you get to Canada, the more things’ll eat your horse.

—T
HOMAS
M
C
G
UANE
, The Missouri
Breaks

In the late afternoon of his forty-seventh birthday, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was headed off the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains toward home in his green departmental pickup when he got the call urging him to turn around and go back.

He had just made a tight turn on the switchback road from the dark timber into the light when his phone lit up. He squinted against the setting sun and checked the screen on his phone. The call was from Jessica Nicol White, one of three large-carnivore biologists doing a study in the area.

Joe eased his truck and horse trailer onto a pull-out barely big enough to accommodate both units. He could feel Rojo, his saddled sorrel gelding, shift his weight for balance in the trailer behind him. He’d probably been sleeping, Joe guessed, after a full day of trail riding in the mountains. Rojo was ready to go home and get turned out, and Joe was ready to get home as well. He’d been up since four-thirty a.m., because it was the first week of hunting season.

It had been a long day that started with Joe saddling Rojo in the dark by the headlights of his truck. His fingers had been as stiff as the leather on the saddle from the cold, and his breath billowed around his head. He rode for a quarter mile and dismounted to walk so his joints would loosen up and he could warm up through exercise. Joe had to do more and more of that kind of thing as he got older, he’d found. He didn’t really feel comfortable until the sun rose and penetrated the dark lodgepole pine forest.

At the first camp, he’d shared a bacon-and-egg breakfast over a campfire with a trio of elk hunters from West Virginia, and then rode in a huge loop through the trees for the rest of the day, checking licenses, conservation stamps, and making sure game laws had been obeyed.

Joe preferred riding from camp to camp on horseback rather than using his pickup or four-wheel ATV. There were few good roads in the forest, and on Rojo he could cut through stands of trees and enter the camps fairly silent. There was no reason to make a splashy entrance and possibly alert poachers or spook elk being stalked. The department
wanted
hunters in the area to have a big harvest, because the elk population was getting out of control.

The risk of riding, though, was the possibility of a hunter mistaking Joe’s horse for an elk or a moose in the trees and firing away. That, and getting thrown if Rojo acted up. More hunters were injured by horse accidents, Joe knew, than any other reason.

The day had gone smoothly with no drama. The hunters he met were serious sportsmen and he’d found no violations and had issued no citations. Of the twenty-three hunters he’d checked, seven had already killed their elk. The big animals had been field-dressed and hung from game poles.

Throughout the day, the hunters swapped stories and asked Joe where the elk were, what the weather would be like, and if there had been bears or wolves spotted recently in the area. The reintroduction of wolves and the growing population of grizzly bears had thrown a new curve into the elk-hunting experience. Decades before, the biggest fear that hunters had had was being mistaken for a game animal by another hunter or getting injured while on the hunt. Now they worried about being attacked and eaten by grizzly bears, or harassed by wolves—as improbable as the latter might be.

•   •   •

F
ROM
J
OE
’
S
VANTAGE POINT
at the pull-out, the Twelve Sleep River Valley sprawled out below him, the town of Saddlestring a smattering of buildings and streets in the far distance. Eight miles beyond Saddlestring was the dark blue hump of Wolf Mountain and his home, where his wife, Marybeth, and two of his daughters were waiting for him. He hoped they hadn’t baked a cake, and for once—after years of pleading his case—were placing dozens of candles on a peach or apple “birthday pie” instead.

His yellow Labrador, Daisy, was curled up on the passenger seat beside him and she lifted her head and yawned. She was tired, too.

“Joe Pickett,” he answered.

“Joe, this is Jessica White. We’ve got a situation with GB-53.”

GB-53 (which stood for “Grizzly Bear Number Fifty-three”) was a 550-pound male grizzly bear that had wandered into the Bighorns from Grand Teton National Park the summer before. The GPS collar had tracked its meandering route through the Bridger-Teton Forest, over the Absaroka Range, across the Powder River Basin, and over the top of the Bighorns near Burgess Junction. It seemed
to have found a home on the game-rich eastern slope of the mountains and had been there for the last three months.

“What kind of situation?”

“There may have been an interaction with a hunter.”

“An interaction? Speak English, not bureaucrat.”

There was panic in her voice. She said, “A hunter we met this morning agreed to carry a transmitter with him. We’ve been watching his movements all day and the movements of GB-53. About fifteen minutes ago, their locations merged into one.”

“Did you hear any shots?” Joe asked.

“No, no shots.”

“Can you see anything?”

“Not from where we are. We’re about two miles away from . . . the interaction. We need your help. We don’t want this to be what we think it is.”

Joe didn’t, either. He said, “I’ll get turned around. You’re still at the meadow where I saw you last?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Hang tight. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. In the meantime, call dispatch and Sheriff Reed in Saddlestring. Ask him to get the search-and-rescue team assembled. Tell them to arm up, since we may have a killer bear on the loose.”

“Oh my God,” she said. “This is what we didn’t want to happen.”

“Don’t panic,” Joe said. “Keep your eyes on your screen so we know where the bear goes. Do you have a way to contact the hunter?”

“We’ve tried,” she said. He could hear a sob catch in her throat. “We’ve tried his cell number a dozen times, but service is terrible up here.”

“You didn’t give him a handheld?” Joe asked. “So you could communicate with him directly?”

“We meant to . . .” she said, her voice trailing off.

Joe closed his eyes and reopened them. The interagency grizzly bear team had been asking hunters to be volunteers in its study. Most of the hunters asked had agreed to participate. In addition to the GPS transmitter, hunters were supposed to be given a two-way radio as part of the protocol. That way, the study team could alert the volunteer if a grizzly was nearby. Apparently, the study team had forgotten to give the man a radio.

“GB-53 is still there,” she said. “He’s not moving at all.”

“Has the hunter moved?”

A long beat. “No.”

Joe thought of, but didn’t say, the maxim he’d heard countless times over the years:
A fed bear is a dead bear
.

•   •   •

A
S
J
OE TURNED
his rig around from the pull-out, he speed-dialed Marybeth.

She answered on the second ring.

“Yes, Joe?” she asked. Her voice was flat. She knew what it meant when he called her close to dusk and he was expected home.

“I’m going to be late,” he said.

“Of course you are.”

Marybeth ran the Twelve Sleep County Library. She’d been working long days because the library board was pushing a one-cent sales tax to expand the old Carnegie building and modernize the facility. The local election was two weeks away. She’d obviously left work early to get home to prepare for Joe’s birthday party. Even
though he really didn’t care about his birthday anymore, he always looked forward to seeing his family together.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We may have an injured elk hunter. A grizzly bear may have gotten him.”

“Is it anyone we know?”

“I don’t know yet,” Joe said. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

“Any idea when you might get home?”

He looked in his rearview mirror. Rojo was peering through the slider of the horse trailer and seemed to be asking him the same question. So was Daisy from the passenger seat.

“Not sure,” he said.

“We have birthday pie,” she said.

“Finally!”

“I hope it isn’t all gone by the time you get home.”

Joe chuckled at that.

“Be safe,” she said. “Don’t get eaten by a bear.”

“Not to worry. I’m stringy.”

•   •   •

T
HERE WERE FIFTY
GAME WARDENS
in the state of Wyoming and their badge numbers reflected their seniority. Joe was now badge number twenty because Bill Haley, badge number one, had retired that summer. As usual, Joe was wearing Wrangler jeans, lace-up outfitter boots, a sweat-stained Stetson, and a red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope shoulder patch. His pickup was his business office, and it was crammed with maps, notebooks, gear, and weapons.

He had a special designation no other game warden shared, that of “Special Liaison to the Executive Branch,” which meant that he
sometimes was called upon by Governor Spencer Rulon to take on assignments outside his normal duties. Rulon liked to call Joe his “range rider,” much to the chagrin of the agency’s director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, who didn’t like sharing her employees with anyone. Rulon didn’t really care about that.

Governor Rulon was in the final months of his second and last term and Joe hadn’t heard from him recently. Joe wondered what Rulon, a charismatic but at times erratic go-getter, would do with his free time. He also wondered if the next governor would maintain the special designation with Joe, who, frankly, wasn’t sure he wanted to work for anyone other than Rulon.

The governor-to-be was Colter Allen, a Big Piney–area lawyer and rancher. Since Allen had won a hard-fought Republican primary in August against three other candidates, there was no doubt he’d be the next governor. His campaign slogan was “Stick it to the feds,” which was pretty much the theme of all the Republican candidates in the race.

Joe didn’t even know the name of the Democratic candidate, whom Independent Democrat Rulon had not endorsed or campaigned for. All Joe knew was that the candidate was a college professor. He didn’t have a chance. In the strange tableau of Wyoming politics that was unique to the state, Rulon seemed to favor Allen and had publicly offered to assist with the transition before the general election even took place.

As far as Joe was concerned, the jury was still out on Colter Allen. The game warden in Big Piney had had several run-ins with Allen and he didn’t have many good things to say about him. The game warden suspected that Allen was anti–Game and Fish Department and anti–state employee. Joe wasn’t so sure that Wyoming voters
didn’t just seem to like Allen’s very Wyoming-sounding name, as well as the fact that he’d been a U.S. Marine and a high school rodeo champion.

Marybeth had told Joe they were going to meet Colter Allen when he visited Saddlestring the next week. She wanted to try and get his endorsement for the library tax and Allen’s people had sent a request through Joe’s director that Colter looked forward to meeting him. Joe, as usual, didn’t want to go to a political event of any kind, but he felt obligated to show up and support his wife. It was up to Colter Allen, Joe thought, to prove himself. The state had such a small population that all politics were personal and conducted one-on-one. Democrats often sneaked through, like Rulon had, because the governor had a way of connecting with people. He remembered names, and he didn’t govern as a partisan. Joe had no doubt that if the state constitution allowed three terms, Rulon would win again in a landslide in a state that was seventy percent Republican.

Allen would be Joe’s third governor since he had become the game warden for his 5,000-square-mile district. He’d arrested the first governor, Bill Budd, for fishing without a license, and he’d worked directly for Rulon. He wondered how many more governors he had left in him.

•   •   •

T
HE
LARGE
-
CARNIVORE
research team had set up on the edge of a mountain meadow less than a half mile from Crazy Woman Creek. They had two vehicles, an SUV with state plates and a panel van topped with a satellite dish and antennae and filled with electronics equipment. The team consisted of team leader Jessica Nicol White,
state biologist Marcia Mead, and technician Tyler Frink. Joe had seen and talked with them several times that week while he was on patrol, and they’d filled him in on their objectives.

Because of the marked increase in human and grizzly bear “interactions” in the past few years, the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming had all agreed to conduct studies in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to try to determine what was going on. In that year alone, Joe knew, a fisherman in Yellowstone Park and a hiker in Grand Teton National Park had been attacked and killed by separate grizzlies. There had been three deaths in Montana and two others in Idaho. With the exception of a photographer who foolishly got too close to a grizzly sow and her cubs in Idaho, the remaining six deaths all appeared unprovoked.

Hunting season brought a whole new set of problems because the mountains were flooded with human beings actively encroaching on grizzly bear country—which was growing in size by the year. That many humans meant that many more potential encounters, and that many more bloody deaths. The three states and the federal wildlife agency hoped that the simultaneous studies of the bears would provide new insight into grizzly bear behavior.

Some of the early findings, Jessica White told Joe, had startled the researchers. Because collars with GPS technology had replaced simple but reliable radio transmitters, researchers were able to track the movement of collared grizzlies as never before. Instead of tracking bears in close proximity to them, the researchers could use satellite technology to track the bears from any computer and location. They’d learned, for example, that one female bear named Ethyl had covered 2,800 miles over three years—a distance and range never before imagined by bear researchers. Ethyl had traveled
throughout Montana and Idaho, over mountain ranges, across rivers, and through the sleeping downtowns of small villages. Ethyl had raided dumpsters behind motels and grocery stores, and had holed up in the brush next to a rural grade-school playground for two nights and had not been detected by locals.