Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds (2 page)

“Wait here,” he says.

He opens his door and the light floods out onto the snow. The windswept crust crunches when he steps away from the vehicle. He ducks his head against the wind and walks around to the front of his car. A wash of fluid sizzles on the hood. His shadow stretches across the shin-deep snow toward a broad swath of crimson. He walks toward it on numb legs. There are spatters and droplets in no recognizable pattern, already turning pink as the snow covers them.

Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa
.

“Christ,” he whispers, and looks up the road toward where he can barely see a dark hump on the ground, at the edge of sight. The trail of blood grows darker and more apparent as he approaches it.

“What is it?” Ashley calls from behind him.

“Get back in the car.”

He hears her hop down into the snow and close the door.

“Jesus. Is that blood? It’s all over the side—”

“I said get back in the car!”

The shape in the road doesn’t move. It’s too dark to see anything more than the pattern of blood around it.

Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa
.

His entire body sags with relief when he’s close enough to see the animal’s fur blowing on the wind. If it had been a man, there would have been no way out of this situation, not while he had a witness with him. Life as he knew it would have come to an end. He would have lost his job and his wife and—

Len stops in his tracks.

Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa
.

The animal’s fur is long and white, nearly indistinguishable from the snow.

Another step closer and its shape begins to draw contrast.

“What
is
that?”

Ashley’s voice surprises him. He whirls to find her right behind him, limned by the glare of the headlights.

“I…I don’t know.”

Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa
.

He turns around and leans over the carcass. He reaches for it. Quickly retracts his arm.

Takes a deep breath and tries again. Grips it by the flank. Rolls it over.

“Dear Lord…”

November 23
^rd

Archuleta County

Four Days Ago

The GPS collar had transmitted an automatic emergency alert after twenty-four hours of inactivity. Usually, such an alarm was preceded by multiple alerts regarding diminishing activity suggestive of a sick or injured animal. In this case, however, the animal’s movement had coincided with that of the herd clear up until the moment it stopped moving entirely, which could mean one thing. The ram had fallen victim to either predation or poaching. Then again, the transmitter could have fallen out of its casing. They’d already experienced several incidents when the screws meant to bind the casing to the leather collar had disengaged and ended up on the forest floor or embedded into the flesh of the animal’s chest. Their hook-like ends were nearly impossible to disengage and had to be surgically removed.

The bighorn sheep relocation project was Trey Seaver’s baby. Conservative estimates suggest that as recently as forty years ago there were two million bighorns scattered throughout the American and Canadian Rockies. Now there were maybe forty-five thousand in geographically isolated herds. Following the pneumonia epidemic that swept through the northern part of the state, they’d been forced to take drastic measures to ensure the survival of the most threatened populations, especially the herds in the RBS-9 range. In the last five years alone, twenty-six of the thirty-two radiocollared sheep died, twenty-two of them from pneumonia, and that was after the herd was cleared by a veterinary virologist. The problem was due to the contagion passing from herds of domesticated sheep, despite the animals never coming into direct contact with one another.

It was Seaver who introduced the proposal to relocate the remaining herd—fourteen animals total, six of them collared—to the San Juan National Forest, clear down in the southwestern corner of the state. As a conservation biologist, it was his job to ensure the survival of the animals in their new habitat. It had only been three months and already he was facing the prospect of a second dead animal before the first breeding season. The first wandered onto Highway 160 and met with the grill of a Peterbilt hauling raw lumber for Pueblo. If he lost another ram, they’d be lucky to produce more than a couple lambs in the spring.

While the GPS tracking software worked perfectly to log the positional data of the herd from a global perspective, it was essentially useless in the field. They’d only been able to narrow the signal to an area of one square mile of nearly vertical mountains and valleys, and hence he was reduced to using an old-school UHF tracker, like a real ranger.

He raised the three-element antenna and watched the signal on the monitor of the radio telemetry unit, which consisted of three concentric circles around a crosshairs and a solid red beacon to mark the signal. The origin of the beacon was just over the rise to the west.

The slope was slick with talus buried beneath several inches of fresh snow, rerouting him around the sheer escarpments and through the trees. The sheep might have been well suited for this environment, but he certainly wasn’t. If he slipped, he’d be a hundred feet downhill before he could even let out a yelp.

He found a crevice between two granite cliffs and used the sides for leverage to climb up to the summit. It was hard to believe poachers would have gone to the effort to get all the way up here. He was five miles from the end of a ten-mile dirt road with a padlocked gate at the turnoff from a road few knew existed, and yet still he wore an orange vest over his black winter jacket with the Colorado Division of Wildlife patch on the sleeve. You never knew when you might pop over the top of a hill and find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle, especially during hunting season. Most hunters he knew were exceptionally careful people, but it was staggering how many entered these mountains and never made it back out. Seaver chalked it up to alcohol and idiocy, two things that should never be combined in the vicinity of lethal weapons. After once watching an accountant from Boise look straight down the barrel of his loaded rifle in an effort to figure out why it wasn’t firing, he figured out that stupidity was likely a terminal condition.

Seaver crowned the butte, from the top of which he could survey nearly the entire county. There wasn’t a single house as far as he could see, only impenetrable pine forests and snowcapped peaks. Devil’s Creek meandered through a slim meadow at the bottom of the valley, although the stream itself wouldn’t reemerge from beneath the accumulation until sometime in March. Having grown up on the East Coast, it always amazed him to find such vast expanses of nature completely untouched by man. Today, however, the last thing he wanted was to navigate a veritable maze of pine trees to find a dead ram.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to look that hard. The animal’s tan body stood out against the snow below him, in the lee of the butte.

He found a game trail to the south and half-scurried, half-slid to the base of the rock formation, which towered twenty-five feet over his head. The steep hill was as slick as glass, so he stayed right up against the embankment as he worked back north toward where the ram lay, its fur dusted with frost. Its head was crumpled forward in such a way that its forehead was braced against the ground, as though butting it. The tips of its curved horns were embedded in the dirt. Its front legs were pinned underneath it, its rear legs stiff and stretched straight out behind its white rump.

Seaver clenched his fists. Poachers. It had to be. The animal had still been running when it went down and made no effort to rise once it did. He turned in a circle in hopes of seeing the footprints of the poachers in the snow or smoke rising from a distant campfire, but instead saw only an eternity of mountains and forests where they could easily hide from him for the rest of their lives if they wanted to.

He waved away a handful of flies and stood over the remains. Its belly was distended with the gasses of early decomposition, making its fur appear to stand on end. He removed the digital camera he’d brought for documentation’s sake from his backpack and snapped pictures of its right flank, its lifeless face and clouded eyes, and finally of its left flank and the blood-crusted fur surrounding the entry wound. He zoomed on the entry wound, only what he saw was all wrong. The bullet from a large-caliber rifle produced a fist-size crater, from which the tattered skin peeled back, but this…it looked almost like the ram had been attacked by wild dogs. The tissue was macerated and raw, the muscle beneath the grayish layer of connective tissue partially torn. The clotted blood was black and sparkled with a layer of ice. The sharp edges of broken ribs protruded from beneath its left front leg, where they’d pierced the hide.

Seaver looked down at the ground beside the dead animal for several seconds before crouching and brushing away the snow. The weeds and dirt were discolored by blood, although in insufficient quantity to suggest that the animal had bled out here.

He stood and shielded his eyes against the sun. The unmarred white led straight downhill to the tree line. From this vantage point, he could see the faint indentations where its hoof prints had yet to fully vanish beneath the fresh accumulation.

There weren’t any wolves up here. He’d been part of the initial survey of predatory species to determine the viability of the location and they hadn’t even come across any anecdotal evidence, let alone spoor. If a pack had roamed into the San Juans, then he suddenly had a really big problem on his hands.

He followed the ram’s tracks down toward the forest. He slipped and caught himself. Lost his traction and slid twenty feet down the slickrock. The snow churned up in his wake was marbled with pink.

The ram had been bleeding as it bounded up out of the forest. It appeared to have run clear up until the point where it simply dropped dead in full stride.

Wounded deer and elk were known to lead hunters on chases covering many miles. Lord only knew how far away this animal had been attacked or how it had ultimately managed to elude its pursuit. When he reached the tree line, he understood why.

The dense canopy had captured the vast majority of the snow, allowing only sparse swatches to accumulate on the mat of dead needles and aspen leaves. He had to stoop to walk under the lower canopy. Once the slope vanished from sight behind him, he realized how easily he could lose his bearings and become irretrievably lost. The tracks and blood that had led him here vanished in the shadows and detritus. He only caught the occasional glimpse of the sun through the branches and snow overhead. The ground grew steeper, the footing more treacherous. He was just about to turn around and attempt to pick up the trail again when he saw a gully through the trees to his right. Someone had carved an arrow into one of the trunks.

Seaver hopped down the abrupt bank and picked his way toward the bottom. The slope was steep and lined with boulders. Tree roots stood from the ground where the seasonal runoff eroded the dirt. The tree with the arrow stood apart from the others. The bark had crumbled and the sap was old and crusted. He chiseled the amber with his thumbnail. It had to be several years old. Maybe more.

The arrow pointed to the west. He turned in that direction and saw another arrow, pointing deeper into the valley. They were haphazardly carved using a dull instrument. Definitely not a knife. Maybe a rock?

The second arrow led him to a third, which, in turn, guided him into a dark ravine and a fourth arrow, only this one pointed straight down.

Seaver approached the broad pine tree slowly. It leaned forward from the bank as though preparing to fall. Its upper canopy was long dead and it was only a matter of time before it came down. Its roots protruded from the dirt. Something had burrowed into the ground between them. There was no scat near the mouth of the warren or tracks in the dirt. It was too big for a ground squirrel and too small for a fox.

Again, he looked up at the arrow, which appeared to be pointing directly at the burrow.

He knelt and craned his neck to see inside the hole. At first, he saw only darkness. He leaned closer and saw just about the last thing he expected to find. Rather than a pair of small eyes looking back at him, he saw his own distorted reflection on the circular lens of a video camera.

* * *

The Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department was responsible for more than 1,300 square miles and a seasonal population of as many as forty thousand clustered in the town of Pine Springs and scattered through the surrounding wilderness. Crime was largely of the domestic variety and generally involved wives and livestock, although not necessarily in that order of priority. This time of year, it was either feast or famine. In the summer, they could always count on the revenue from issuing speeding tickets, but the roads were rarely nice enough to go the speed limit in the winter, which meant that rather than patrolling, the deputies were often reassigned to ancillary duties, from working with emergency management to assisting animal control, issuing permits, and serving warrants. Considering even that was barely enough to keep two men busy, Sheriff Wayne Dayton gave his staff his blessing to moonlight wherever they could find the hours. Most worked night or weekend security at the college over in Durango or drove armored transport for Wells Fargo. Very rarely did he need to call for all hands on deck, but it was starting to look like today might have potential.