Read Out of Range for Free Online Page B

front door and the shutters as well as a gout of blood on the porch. Joe found it remarkable and sickening how much blood this bear had lost, and both he and Trey kept expecting to find the bear’s body any minute. Joe admired the big bear nearly as much as he feared it. He would have liked to simply let it go and die in peace, if there was a guarantee that the bear would die.
    The tension in the situation, and between Joe and Trey, thickened. Trey admonished himself for taking a wild shot that wounded the bear, and Joe felt that Trey was blaming him for not firing. Joe blamed himself as well, and replayed the bear escape over and over in his mind as he rode. He wasn’t convinced that he had frozen, but he sure hadn’t shot the bear. Things had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had a sure shot. Had he?
    On the second afternoon, they lost the signal. They drove to the highest hill they could get to and parked. The only thing they could do, Trey said, was hope the bear wandered back into range of the receiver.
    “We might as well get right to it while we’re waiting,” Trey said, his tone even more rock bottom than usual. “We’ve got a hell of a mess in Jackson, Joe. I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into.”
    Joe nodded.
    Trey made a pained face. “I’m getting more than a little concerned that some of my game wardens are letting the pressure get to them. I wish I knew how I could help them deal with it. But I don’t.”
    Joe asked, “What do you mean?” But he knew. In the past year, a game warden at a game check station in the Wind River mountains had gotten into an argument with his son, shot him, then turned the pistol on himself. No one knew what the argument was about. Another game warden in southern Wyoming, assigned to a huge, virtually uninhabited district, simply vanished from the state. He was later found in New Mexico at the end of a threeweek bender. He would tell anyone who would listen to him that the locals had been out to get him, that he had run for his own life. A departmental investigation could find no evidence of his charges, and he was dismissed.
    Unlike any other law enforcement personnel Joe was aware of, game wardens were literally autonomous. They ran their own districts in their own way. Monthly reports to district supervisors like Trey were required, but because supervisors had districts of their own to contend with, they rarely micromanaged game wardens in the field. This was one of the many aspects of his job that Joe valued. It was about trust, and competence, and doing the right thing. But this kind of autonomy brought a secret lonely hell to some men, and ravaged them.
    “It’s not like there never was any pressure, back in the old days when I started,” Trey said. “We had poaching rings, hardheaded landowners, plenty of violent knuckleheads to deal with. But we didn’t have the political stuff as much.”
    “Is that what you think happened with Will?” Joe asked.
    “He let it get to him?”
    Trey nodded. “I’m not sure, of course. He never really said that, except for the occasional bitching that we all do.
    But Jackson is such a hot spot for that kind of thing. The most extreme are there, it seems. Hunters versus animalrights types. Developers versus environmentalists. Rich versus poor. Outofstate landowners versus local rubes.
    Bearbaiting poachers versus happy hikers. Shit, and it’s not just local, either. It’s national and international. I’m afraid he thought that just about everyone wanted a piece of him, or had a gripe with how he did his job. He never told me that, but all you have to do is read the papers to see what he was in the middle of.
    “Jackson is unique, Joe,” Trey continued. “Everything there is ramped up. All of the different issues are hotter.
    Jackson is Wyoming’s very own California, for better and worse. Things that happen there will eventually influence the rest of the state and beyond. Everybody knows that.