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panniers and checked his daypack and saddlebags looking for it. He thought: They took it. He re-created the encounter with the brothers step-by-step and pinpointed when it likely happened. When he’d followed Caleb to the cache.
    “The arrow,” he said aloud and rooted through all of his gear again. It was gone as well.
    His anger turned to thoughts of revenge. If the brothers used the phone—and why else would they have taken it?—their exact location could be determined. It was how the feds tracked down drug dealers in South America and terrorists in the Middle East. Joe could bring a team back up into the mountains and nail those guys.
    Being out of radio contact was not unusual in itself, and often he didn’t mind it one bit. This time he did. Marybeth would worry about him. In fact, he was worried himself. And what if the brothers hadn’t taken his phone for their own use? What if they’d taken it to isolate him, to cut off his communication with the outside world?
     
    LATER, AS GRAY WISPS of clouds passed over the moon and the wash of stars were so close together they looked like swirls of cream, he lay outside his tent again in his sleeping bag, with the shotgun across his chest, and he thought how different things could have turned out if he’d taken Caleb’s advice and simply ridden away when he had the chance.

    EVERY YEAR at the Wyoming Game Wardens Association meeting, after a few drinks, wardens would stand up and recount the strangest incident or most bizarre encounter they’d had the previous year. There was a sameness to many of the stories: poor hunters mistaking deer for elk or does for bucks, the comic and ridiculous excuses poachers came up with when caught in the act, out-of-state hunters who got no farther into Wyoming than the strip club in Green River, and run-ins with hermits, derelicts, and the unbalanced. It was always amazing to Joe how more often than not those who sought solace in nature were the least prepared to enter it. But it was exactly the opposite with those brothers. He felt he was the one who was encroaching, as if he’d barged unasked and unwanted into their living room.
    They were the reason he’d lain awake all night with his hand on his shotgun as if it were his lover.
    Joe thought bitterly, This isn’t fair. This was not how it was supposed to be on his last patrol.
    It was like walking into a convenience store for a quart of milk and realizing there was an armed robbery in progress. He didn’t feel prepared for what he’d stumbled into. And unlike other situations he’d encountered over the years—and there were countless times he’d entered hunting and fishing camps outnumbered, outgunned, and without backup—he’d never felt as vulnerable and out of his depth.
     
    HE THOUGHT HOW STRANGE it was that no one—hunters, ranchers, hikers, fishers—had ever reported seeing the Grim Brothers. How was it possible these two had lived and roamed in these mountains and not been seen and remarked upon? Two six-and-a-half-foot identical twins in identical clothing? That was the kind of legend that swept through the rural populace and took on a life of its own. It was exactly the kind of tale repeated by men like Farkus at the Dixon Club bar.
    So how could these brothers have stayed out of sight?
    Then Joe thought, Maybe they hadn’t . They’d certainly been seen before.
    But whoever had seen them felt compelled to keep their mouths shut. Or maybe they never lived to tell.
     
    AFTER SEVERAL HOURS, Joe dragged his bag a hundred yards from the camp into a copse of thick mountain juniper on a rise that overlooked the tent and his horses. If they came for him, he figured, he’d see them first on the approach. He sat with his back against a rock and both the shotgun and the .308 M-14 carbine with peep sights within reach. Finally, deep into the night, he drifted into an exhausted sleep.
    He didn’t know how long he’d been out when his eyes shot open. It was still