PART ONE
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror, the human form divine,
And Secrecy, the human dress.
—William Blake, “A Divine Image”
ONE
THE SLEEK GOLDEN PROJECTILE EXPLODED INTO THE THIN mountain air at three thousand feet per second. It was long and heavy with a precise pointed tip and a boat-tail design tapering from the back shank, and it twisted at over three hundred and fifty thousand rotations per minute.
Designed by ballistic engineers and weighing one hundred and eighty grains, or slightly less than half an ounce, the bullet was entirely jacketed by a smooth gilding of ninety-five percent copper and five percent zinc, with a wall-thickness variation of near zero. The pointed red ballistic tip of the nose also served as a heat shield. The projectile was engineered to withstand the extreme aerodynamic heating effects produced by the speed of its trajectory.
Inside the jacketed round was a soft lead core. Upon impact and deep penetration, the ballistic tip would drive backward into the lead core and expand the projectile into a mushroom shape in order to create a large wound cavity.
It sliced through the windless evening in absolute silence. But far behind it, two distinct sounds rang out: the report of the shot itself and the sharp crack in the air as the bullet broke the sound barrier.
The rocky rise and the sagebrush-encrusted foothills of the Bighorn Mountains receded from view until they blended into the layered landscape.
One second.
The crowns of river cottonwood trees passed far below, as did the lazy S-curves of the Twelve Sleep River. Two distant drift boats hugged the eastern bank as fishers cast to deep pools and holes darker in color than the rest of the river. As if in bas-relief, fishing guides manned the oars and pointed out rising trout for their clients.
Below, a V of geese held in a frozen pattern over the river as they glided toward a field to the south. Above, a red-tailed hawk hovered motionless in a thermal current as it scoured the landscape for rabbits and gophers.
One point five seconds.
A cow moose and her two calves pushed through the willows without stealth or grace to splash into the river ahead, out of view of the angling boats. A river otter slipped into the current without a ripple. Bald eagles on dead branches studied the current below them and didn’t look up as the bullet zipped by hundreds of feet above.
The cow moose flinched and raised her head at the sound of the crack.
Two seconds.
An ocher spoor of dust trailed a tractor equipped to gather up large round hay bales in an irrigated field on the other side of the river. The dust was infused with the last blast of sunlight from the summit of the western mountains and the combine produced an outsized impression on the bronze terrain.
The backs of Black Angus cattle covered the pasture like cartoon balloons, each animal tethered to its own long shadow.
The red roof of a barn shot by below, and ravens circled the fresh kill of a jackrabbit hit by a motorist on a black ribbon of highway.
Two point five seconds.
Almost imperceptibly, the bullet began to drop and slow and drift slightly to the left, a motion called the aerodynamic jump. Because it was flying east to west through the air, its course was altered slightly by the gravitational force of the rotation of the earth known as the Eötvös effect.
The fourteenth and fifteenth fairways of a golf course scrolled by below, the turf freckled with the gold leaves of fall. A small herd of mule deer grazed on the grass near the clubhouse, unaware that interlopers—white-tailed deer from outside the area—were flanking the mulies in a raid that would play out in minutes.
A large band of pronghorn antelope, their backs lit up by the shaft of light, flowed like liquid across a sagebrush flat on the other side of a service road beyond the golf course.
Three seconds.
A series of expensive homes constructed of gray rocks and heavy dark wood backed up to the fifteenth fairway. Covered lawn furniture and dormant barbecue grills sat on flat-rock patios. Two of the homes were occupied, but only one had lights on.
The home with the lights was dead ahead, and a large plate-glass window illuminated from within formed a yellow rectangle.
Beyond the glass, inside, a small dark man sat behind a dining room table. He was staring intently in the direction of the mule deer. The table was set with a bottle of wine and two glasses, and place settings that glinted in the reflection of an overhead elk-antler chandelier.
The window and the face of the man inside got larger.
Three point five seconds.
The man at the table announced something and gestured with his hand as he did so, accidentally scattering the silverware beside his plate. He leaned to his side to retrieve an errant spoon at the exact second the bullet punched through the glass.
The void left by the man was suddenly filled by the figure of a woman just behind him. She was entering the dining room from the kitchen, carrying a platter of pork chops aloft in both hands.
The top button of her blouse enlarged exponentially and then there was a high impact and an explosion of red and black.
TWO
WYOMING GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT WAS IN AN UNFAMILIAR saddle on the wide back of an unfamiliar horse when the call came for him to return to his Saddlestring District immediately, “if not sooner.”
He was eight miles from the trailhead in the Teton Wilderness with three other riders, all on stout mountain quarter horses. Snow had dusted the treeless tops of the Gros Ventre and Teton Ranges during the night and it was cold enough that clouds of condensation haloed their heads.
They’d saddled up in the parking lot of the Forest Service campground before dawn using headlamps to see. The leather of the saddles, reins, and latigos had been stiff with the fall morning cold, and it had taken a full two hours of riding in the light of the sun before the frost in the grass melted away and Joe’s tack thawed out enough to be supple.
They’d assembled and left so early for a grim reason: to locate the mauled and likely dead body of a local elk-hunting guide who’d been attacked the evening before by a grizzly bear. Or at least that’s what his client, a hunter from Boca Grande, Florida, had claimed.
Joe rode with his twelve-gauge shotgun out of its scabbard and crosswise over the pommel of his saddle. He’d loaded it with alternating rounds of slugs and double-aught buckshot. His bear spray was on his belt and he’d made a point to unhook the safety strap that held the canister tight in its holster.
Over his shoulder was a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P rifle chambered in .308 Winchester with a bipod and red dot scope and a twenty-round magazine. Two of the other riders carried the same weapon because it had recently replaced M14 carbines in the arsenal of the department’s newly formed Predator Attack Team—a heavily armed, specially trained SWAT team created for bear incidents—to which Joe had recently been named.
His senses were on high alert for the sight, sound, or smell of a rogue six-hundred-pound bear. To Joe, every noise—whether it was the click of a hoof on a rock or the chatter of a squirrel in the branches of the trees—seemed magnified. He was jumpy and his mouth was dry. The coffee and jerky they’d eaten for breakfast that morning on the drive out to the campground roiled in his stomach.
Although he’d been on many similar horseback expeditions, this one felt oddly different. With all three of his daughters out of the house and Marybeth alone at home, Joe couldn’t help but feel he was getting too old for this kind of thing. He did his best to repress the thought and concentrate on the task at hand, although he couldn’t deny that he missed his wife and he wished she were closer.