Adrian Muller kept his head buzzed and stood about six foot, two hundred pounds with little fat. He ran every other day and cycled or mountain-biked in between. After three tours in Iraq he also flinched at a car door slamming and had a jumpy restlessness that the mountains might eventually take care of. Or it might stay with him for life, hard to say. Marquez knew several Vietnam vets who never got over it.
Muller returned home to Bishop in the Owens Valley within sight of the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada. He’d gone through warden school in Santa Rosa a couple of years ago. He was new to warden work but not to the mountains. He was ambitious, smart, and confident. His wife, Jen, was a minor celebrity as a climber, and moved here for the rock before Muller met her. Eight months ago, barely a year and change into being a warden, Muller had applied to join the SOU and Marquez had met him then. He left it with Muller that he needed to work as an area warden longer first. That was not the answer Muller wanted, so there was some tension this morning as they shook hands.
The Fish and Game office was on West Line Street in a building that looked like a converted motel. A sign on a window read California Department of Fish and Game. Out front was a small lawn, hedges, and a place to park Marquez’s truck. They drove south toward Independence in Muller’s Fish and Game rig.
‘It’s going to be a steep climb up to Anvil Camp,’ Muller said. ‘How are you with altitude?’
‘I’m usually fine.’
‘If you think it’s a problem at all, I don’t mind going up alone.’
Marquez smiled.
‘I think they spent a night there,’ Muller said. ‘I found a backpacker who may have seen them.’
‘You found a backpacker after you talked to me?’
‘I called a friend who works at the ranger station in Lone Pine and she checked permits for me. Three backcountry permits got pulled for Anvil Camp, none in the name you gave me. What is it again?’
‘Maitland. Patrick Maitland.’
‘Right, and there aren’t any in that name, but I’ve got names and numbers on the other backpackers. Do you want them?’
Marquez copied those numbers down as they drove. In Independence they went west toward the mountains on Onion Valley Road until they reached the dirt track that broke off toward the Mount Williamson trailhead. Few peaks in the lower forty-eight were bigger than Williamson. Only Whitney and White Mountain Peak were taller. California bighorn summered above ten thousand feet and in the winter, if mountain lion didn’t force them to stay high, they dropped out of the preserve to around five thousand feet for better grazing. Right now, after the unusually light winter’s snow, they were moving back into the high country. But Muller and Marquez weren’t chasing the bighorn. They shouldered backpacks and hiked toward the stationary radio collars.
The trail followed Symmes Creek, crossing it several times before making a long switchbacking climb up through trees and rock, rising twenty-four hundred feet to a saddle that looked across at the big granite face of Mount Williamson. Many of the chutes had already melted off and the rock was dark. It was the earliest melt Marquez could remember, but he was glad it was as warm as it was this morning and after the climb up from Symmes Creek, it felt good to sit in the sun and take a break.
They slept at Anvil Camp that night and at first light Muller spread a topo map and marked the route he thought they should follow. Half a mile along that route they stowed their gear and hiked five miles through loose talus and the occasional stand of limber pine, both climbing and descending as they followed sheep trails. On the steep talus slopes they sent loose rock sliding with each footstep as Muller worked off a hand-held GPS unit and they moved toward the coordinates the biologist had given.
When they got closer they smelled the carcasses. It happened just as they crossed under a small outcropping of rock. The wind carried up the mountain and on it the dead. Then it was easy to find them, two male bighorn, both decapitated, and not just horns but the heads gone as well. Not easy to carry a head out from here and Marquez stopped and thought about that. The body of one lay with its hind legs in the flow of a small snowmelt stream, the other in the sparse brush. Coyote and birds had fed on both.
‘Let’s look around for the heads,’ Marquez said.
‘They took them.’
‘Let’s look anyway.’
As they searched they found the radio collars lying side-by-side on a flat piece of granite and as Muller reached to pick one up, Marquez stopped him.
‘Let’s videotape first.’
The collars weren’t thrown down; they were displayed on the rock. Someone making a statement. They videotaped and then collected the collars before returning to the carcasses and studying the bullet wounds that had killed them and decapitating cuts that must have been made with a surgical saw. They were that clean.
Terri Delgado warned of a trophy hunt, but Marquez hadn’t accepted that. These horns sold for fifty to sixty thousand a pair on the black market, yet the fact that the shooter or shooters may have carried the heavy heads out suggested Delgado’s tip was right.
He took a last long look before leaving. Bighorn herds had once roamed much of the west. He remembered reading an account by John Muir of bighorn following each other one after another off a one hundred fifty foot cliff, skipping off tiny ledges to slow their fall, and then bounding away. That they existed or didn’t hardly mattered anymore. That fluidity and grace Muir witnessed had no context in our urban world. At best they that might make an entertaining YouTube to forward to friends. But they once had been common in the American west. But that was before they were ever described as elusive and shy. That was before they had run into us.
On the hike out they pushed hard, Marquez and a young man half his age who was determined to upbraid Marquez for not recommending him for the SOU. They came fast down a trail together in the late afternoon, and if you were coming up you might not have heard them coming, but your instinct would have been to step out of their way as they passed, though going by you they wouldn’t have made much noise.
When they got back to Bishop they had a beer together and Muller said, ‘I had sniper training before my first tour. I learned enough. I’ll hike back up there and try to figure out where they shot from.’
‘Good. Call me if you learn anything.’
Muller nodded and asked, ‘What’s going on with the SOU?’
‘There’s an investigation under way.’
They walked outside, shook hands, and Marquez got in his truck. He lowered the window and asked, ‘If the guide was a local, do you have anyone in mind?’
‘I might.’
They left it there and that night Marquez stayed in Bishop. He checked into the Creekside Best Western and called home before remembering that Katherine was in a meeting in San Francisco until later tonight. He turned the TV in the motel room on but the conversation with Desault weighed on him and he couldn’t relax. The room felt too small.
After clearing his messages he walked out to his truck and drove up the long grade from Bishop to Lake Sabrina where it was empty and the sky bright with stars and the white arch of the Milky Way. He took an old metal thermos cup and a half pint of Scotch over to a rock and sat down. It was cold and his body was tired from the hike. He zipped his coat, turned the collar up, but the cold seemed to come from inside until he poured half an inch and drank it down. Across the valley above the desert floor was the black silhouette of the White Mountains. He looked at the lights of Bishop below and the dark road falling as things that happened eighteen years ago returned to him. He heard the voices of the dead, Brian Hidalgo talking about street food in Saigon and the panic in the last days as the US left. He saw Billy Takado standing drinking a beer at a fish taco stand near the concrete plant in Ensenada, and then flashed on Jim Osiers’ body in the truck and thought about the article on the Zetas and Stoval and Sheryl’s warning.
Desault was right. He was made for this offer, but at what cost? Taking Desault up on the offer would leave Katherine angry and sad, and it was in many ways a betrayal of a future they had many times talked about. He poured another drink into the metal cup. Going after Stoval wasn’t just going after an animal trafficker or illegal trophy hunter. It was wading back into the violence. It meant becoming a Fed again. It meant things he thought he’d left behind forever.
He stood and walked back to the truck. In fifteen minutes he’d be in the motel room. At dawn he’d meet Muller. Tomorrow, he should call Desault and tell him no, but he knew he wouldn’t. The book was still open. It was about honor and a promise made the dead and tonight under these stars in this mountain there was no line between living and dead. He saw their faces so clearly they might as well be here with him.