Page 4 of Three-Inch Teeth

“I’ll keep an eye out for your son,” Joe said.

*

TWO HOURS LATER, after Joe had eaten his sack lunch of cold fried chicken and orange slices in his pickup and had fed Daisy her ration of dried dog food out of a tin bowl, Hutmacher called back. He was in tears.

“Oh my God, Joe,” Hutmacher cried. “You need to get out here.”

Joe sat up in his seat. He’d never heard his friend so distraught. “What’s going on?”

“I found Clay Junior down by the river. Or I should say, I found part of him.”

“What?”

“I found his leg. I think he got attacked by a bear or a wolf or a mountain lion. I don’t know what the hell happened, but it’s awful. Get here as fast as you can,” Hutmacher said through a choking sob. “It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Did you call Sheriff Beveridge?”

“That bitch won’t pick up,” Hutmacher said bitterly.

“I’m twenty minutes away,” Joe said.

*

ALTHOUGH HE RARELY activated either his siren or the wigwag lights mounted on the top of the cab of his green Ford pickup, Joe turned on both of them when he fishtailed from the county road onto the interstate highway.

“Hold on,” he told Daisy as he rocketed past a passenger car from Montana and an oil-field truck from Casper. The turnoff for the Double D was ten miles south on I-25.

He plucked the radio transmitter from its cradle on the dashboard while he drove and was instantly connected to a dispatcher in Cheyenne.

“This is GF-14,” he said, referencing the number that corresponded to his badge number. His warden number had recently changed from nineteen to fourteen on account of two more senior game wardens retiring and three leaving the agency in the last year. “I’m responding to a call from the foreman of the Double D Ranch, who reported a possible large-predator attack on his property.”

“Oh God,” the female dispatcher said. “Not again. Please, not again.”

Joe understood the reason for her breach of protocol. There had been four bear attacks on humans in the last month in Wyoming, more than ever before. Three had occurred just outside the boundaries of Yellowstone Park, but one had happened a hundred and fifty miles straight south of the park. This, if it turned out to be a bear attack, would be the first one in the Bighorn Mountains of north-central Wyoming.

There weren’t supposed to be grizzly bears in the Bighorns.

“Please notify the Predator Attack Team to stand by,” Joe said. “I’ll check in with you when I get there.”

“Affirmative. What is your twenty?” she asked.

“Eight miles north of the scene.”

*

THE PREDATOR ATTACK Team consisted of five armed wardens from around the state who were called to respond immediately to large-carnivore attacks. They were a kind of SWAT team, except trained to confront wild animals instead of human perpetrators. Members of the PAT were equipped with tactical gear, high-end optics and communications equipment, armor, bear spray, and semiautomatic rifles. Joe was an alternate member of the team and was called upon if the team was a man down or if one of them was unavailable on a moment’s notice.

He didn’t relish the assignment because he didn’t like the idea of hunting down and murdering a bear.

That, and he was terrified of them.

*

GOING OFF WHAT little Hutmacher had told him, Joe drove straight through the ranch yard of the Double D to a two-track road that led down to the Twelve Sleep River. The headquarters complex of the ranch was impressive, with a magnificent gabled home built of local sandstone nestled into the side of a hill, surrounded by outbuildings and quarters for ranch employees. The foreman’s home was a two-story log structure set down and to the side of the owner’s house, but with the same expansive view of the river bottom and the mountains beyond. Joe noticed as he drove by that Hutmacher’s pickup wasn’t parked in its usual place.

Joe plunged down the hillside on the two-track into a shimmering grove of aspen. Mule deer skittered out from the trees to his right, and three scrappy whitetails came out to his left. He slowed as the two-track made several tight turns in the woods before it flattened out onto a large hayfield and the road dispersed into nothing.

He drove carefully across the hayfield, knowing small irrigation ditches wound their way through it. The ditches were hard to see, and he didn’t want to drop his tires into one and get stuck. Ranchers instinctively knew how to navigate their hayfields without roads or markers, but Joe didn’t.

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