When the price of natural gas plummeted and drilling was no longer encouraged, the employees were let go. A half-dozen man camps sat deserted in the sagebrush desert. No one knew where the men went any more than they knew where they’d come from in the first place. That a few of the unemployed refugees of the man camps had stuck around in the game-rich mountains seemed plausible-even likely-to Joe.

He secured his animals and walked the floor of the basin looking for remains of the elk. Although predators would have quickly moved in on the carcass and stripped it of its meat and scattered the bones, there should be unmistakable evidence of hide, hair, and antlers. The bow hunters said the wounded bull had seven-point antlers on each beam, so the antlers should be nearby as well.

As he surveyed the ground for sign, something in his peripheral vision struck him as discordant. He paused and carefully looked from side to side, visually backtracking. In nature, he thought, nothing is perfect. And something he’d seen-or thought he’d seen-was too vertical or horizontal or straight or unblemished to belong here.

“What was it?” he asked aloud. Through the trees, his horses raised their heads and stared at him, uncomprehending.

After turning back around and retracing his steps, Joe saw it. At first glance, he reprimanded himself. It was just a stick jutting out from a tree trunk twenty feet off his path. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t a stick at all, but an arrow stuck in the trunk of a tree. The shaft of the arrow was handcrafted, not from a factory, but it was straight, smooth, shorn of bark, with feather fletching on the end. The only place he’d ever seen a primitive arrow like this was in a museum. He photographed the arrow with his digital camera, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and grasped it by the shaft and pushed hard up and down while pulling on it. After a moment, the arrow popped free and Joe studied it. The point was obsidian and delicately flaked and attached to the shaft with animal sinew. The fletching was made of wild turkey feathers.

It made no sense. The bow hunters he’d interviewed were serious sportsmen, even if they’d hunted prior to the season opener. But even they didn’t make their own arrows from natural materials. No one did. Who had lost this arrow?

He felt a chill roll through him. Slowly, he rotated and looked behind him in the trees. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Cheyenne or Sioux warriors approaching.

He found the remains of the seven-point bull elk ten minutes later. Even though coyotes and ravens had been feeding on the carcass, it was obvious this was the elk the bow hunters had wounded and pursued. The hindquarters were gone and the backstraps had been sliced away. Exactly like the hunters described.

So who had taken the meat?

Joe photographed the carcass from multiple angles.

Joe walked back to his horses with the arrow he’d found. He wrapped the point of it in a spare sock and the shaft in a T-shirt and put it in a pannier. He caught Buddy staring at him.

“Evidence,” he said. “Something strange is going on up here. We might get some fingerprints off this arrow.”

Buddy snorted. Joe was sure it was a coincidence.

As he rode out of the basin, he frequently glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t shake a feeling that he was being watched. Once he reached the rim and was back on top, the air was thin and the sun was relentless. Rivulets of sweat snaked down his spine beneath his uniform shirt.

Miles to the southeast, a mottled gray pillow cloud and rain column of a thunderstorm connected the horizon with the sky. It seemed to be coming his way. He welcomed rain that would cool down the afternoon and settle the dust from his horses.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the carcass he’d found. Or the arrow.

That night, he camped on the shoreline of a half-moon-shaped alpine lake and picketed the horses within sight of his tent in lush ankle-high grass. As the sun went down and the temperature dropped into the forties, he caught five trout with his 4-weight fly rod, kept one, and ate it with fried potatoes over a small fire. After dinner he cleaned his dishes by the light of a headlamp and uncased his satellite phone from a pannier. Because of the trouble he’d had communicating several years before while temporarily stationed in Jackson Hole, he’d vowed to call home every night no matter what. Even if there was no news from either side, it was the mundane that mattered, that kept him in touch with his family and Marybeth with him.

The satellite phone was bulky compared to a mobile, and he had to remove his hat to use it because the antenna bumped into the brim. The signal was good, though, and the call went through. Straight to voice mail. He sighed and was slightly annoyed before he remembered Marybeth said she was taking the girls to the last summer concert in the town park. He’d hoped to hear her voice.

When the message prompt beeped, he said, “Hello, ladies. I hope you had a good time tonight. I wish I could have gone with you, even though I don’t like concerts. Right now, I’m high in the mountains, and it’s a beautiful and lonely place. The moon’s so bright I can see fish rising in the lake. A half hour ago, a bull moose walked from the trees into the lake and stood there knee-deep in the water for a while. It’s the only animal I’ve seen, which I find remarkably strange. I watched him take a drink.”

He paused, and felt a little silly for the long message. He rarely talked that much to them in person. He said, “Well, I’m just checking in. Your horses are doing fine and so am I. I miss you all.”

He undressed and slipped into his sleeping bag in the tent. He read a few pages of A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, which had turned into his camping book, then extinguished his headlamp. He lay awake with his hands beneath his head and stared at the inside of the dark tent fabric. His service weapon was rolled up in the holster in a ball near his head. After an hour, he got up and pulled the bag and the Therm-a-Rest pad out through the tent flap. There were still no clouds and the stars and moon were bright and hard. Out in the lake, the moose had returned and stood in silhouette bordered by blue moon splash.

God, he thought, I love this. I love it so.

And he felt guilty for loving it so much.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26

The rhapsody ended at noon the next day. There was a lone fisherman down there in the small kidney-shaped mountain lake and something about him was wrong.

Joe reined to a stop on the summit and let Buddy and Blue Roanie catch their breath from clambering up the mountainside. The late-summer sun was straight up in the sky, and insects hummed in the wildflowers. He shifted in the saddle to get his bearings and searched the sky for more clouds. The sun had been relentless on the top of Battle Pass. There was little shade because he was on the top of the world, with nothing higher. He longed for an afternoon thunderstorm to cool things down, but the thunderhead had slowed its sky march and the rain column now looked like an afterthought. He hoped for a more serious cloud, and to the south he could see a bank of thunderheads forming at what looked from his elevation like eye level.

But first, he’d need to check out the fisherman.

Joe raised his binoculars and focused in, trying to figure out what there was about the man that had struck him as discordant. Several things popped up. The first was that although the hundreds of small mountain lakes in Sierra Madre had fish, the high-country cirques weren’t noted for great angling. Big fish were to be had in the low country, in the legendary blue-ribbon trout waters of the Encampment and North Platte rivers of the eastern slope or the Little Snake on the western slope. Up here, with its long violent winters and achingly short summers, the trout were stunted because the ice-off time was brief. Although today it was a beautiful day, the weather could turn within minutes. Snow was likely any month of the summer. While hikers might catch a small trout or two for dinner along the trail, as he had, the area was not a destination fishing location worth two or three days of hard hike to access.