Page 69 of Battle Mountain

“There’s my man,” Geronimo said with some relief. “We’re back in the hunt.”

Chapter Seventeen

Joe and SusanKany had found Spike Rankin’s pickup off an unmaintained Forest Service road in a pocket of aspen about a quarter of the way up the east side of Battle Mountain. The location had been provided by Sheriff Haswell’s office, and they’d pinpointed it using the onX Hunt GPS app on Kany’s phone. Kany parked short of the vehicle in a flat, grassy meadow that would allow her to turn her truck and the horse trailer around and head back without having to back up.

Joe glanced at his watch as they approached the gray Power Wagon on foot.

“We’ve got maybe an hour and a half of light left,” he said. Kany nodded and walked shoulder to shoulder with Joe. She’d left Ginger back at her state-owned home.

Kany glanced at her phone as they walked and said, “No cell signal.”

“Story of my life,” Joe replied.

The early evening was cool, and shadows from the standing aspen were growing long across the meadow and making the grasslook like it was overlaid with jail bars. A slight breeze rattled the dry leaves on the stand and a few fluttered down onto a carpet of yellow.

The truck was just far enough off the main Forest Service road that it couldn’t be seen from it. A muddy Polaris RZR was strapped down on a platform that covered most of the bed.

“They must be on foot,” Joe said. He approached the driver’s side from the back of the pickup and Kany split off to look into the cab from the passenger side.

“It’s unlocked,” she said with surprise as she pulled the door open. Joe did the same on the driver’s side and he leaned into the cab. The interior was cluttered with maps, insulated coffee mugs in their holders, blaze-orange caps and neck gaiters wadded up on the top of the dashboard, and an empty binocular case tucked in between the two front seats. The back section of the cab was piled high with clothing, boots, ropes, saddlebags, and canvas panniers. He thought it looked a lot likehispickup: a working office on wheels.

Joe moved out of the doorway and leaned down next to the rear tire. The key fob for the truck had been placed on top of it, just behind the bumper. It wasn’t a surprise to find it, since most fishing guides and outfitters Joe knew always left the key with the vehicle to avoid the possibility of losing it or getting it damaged out in the field or in a river. That Rankin had left the truck unlocked and the key with it said to Joe that the outfitter was confident no one would come by the vehicle while it sat there.

Kany ducked out of the cab and found a small soft-sided Yeti cooler in the bed of the Power Wagon. She brought it to Joe and they opened it up. It was filled with bottled water, several cans ofbeer, and white-bread sandwiches sealed up in a quart-sized Ziploc bag. There was a bed of partially melted ice in the bottom of the cooler.

“They didn’t take their lunch,” she said. “That tells me they planned to come right back to the truck.”

“I agree.”

“It also means they’re probably within eight to ten miles from here at most, since they didn’t take their horses or the ATV.”

Joe nodded his agreement with that as well, then backed away from the truck to get a good view of the mountain terrain. It was vast. Battle Mountain loomed to the southwest and filled up the entire horizon. It was densely wooded, except for a few granite knuckle-like promontories that poked out of the sea of dark green. The top of the mountain was bald and already dusted with snow.

“That’s a lot of country,” he said. “Are there any roads on this side?”

“Not really,” Kany said. “There are a few old logging roads to the south, but they’re all but impossible to use. Dead trees have fallen over the tracks and the Forest Service doesn’t maintain them anymore.

“I tried to go up there last spring just to get more familiar with this area,” she said. “There’s an old mining town up there called Summit I wanted to check out. But I gave up after a few miles because I was tired of getting out of the truck to move dead trees.”

“What about the other side?” Joe asked, gesturing toward the summit.

“That’s where the B-Lazy-U Ranch is located, in a valley on the other side of Battle Mountain. That’s the ranch I was telling youabout earlier. But as far as I know, none of the ranch roads come over the top to this side.”

“It looks like good elk country,” Joe said.

“It is,” Kany responded. “But there’s so much black timber that it’s hard work to get up in there. That’s why it isn’t hunted all that much, even though most of it is public. I remember one guy telling me the only way to get an elk down from the top of Battle Mountain is to quarter it and pack it out on foot or horseback. Either that, or stay up there a few weeks and eat it one meal at a time.”

“No wonder Rankin hunts here,” Joe said. “He knows he doesn’t have to share it with a bunch of local road hunters.”

“True,” she said. Then: “We had better saddle up before we lose our light.”

—

Kany rode ared roan gelding named Badger and Joe followed her on Henry, a wide-backed mule. Henry was laconic but sure-footed, and he was lazy enough that Joe constantly clicked his tongue and prompted the animal to keep going. He’d tied his field gear bag to the back of his saddle and his shotgun filled the saddle scabbard.

In the bag were items he’d assembled and collected over the years to be of use in practically any situation: extra layers of clothes, dry socks, a compact one-man tent, a compressed down sleeping bag, a first-aid kit, matches and a fire starter, a tin plate and utensils, toilet paper, insect spray, shells for his shotgun and .40 rounds for his Glock, parachute cord, a headlamp, a waterpurifier within a Nalgene bottle, and several MREs that he hoped he’d never have to try and eat.

They took a well-trodden game trail through the trees that meandered up the mountain. The elk and deer that used the trail chose a route that avoided overhanging branches for the most part, but Kany and Joe had to bend forward several times and dismount once to keep going.

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