“Damn,” the fisherman said.

“Damn is right,” Joe said, shaken. “You hooked me.”

“I fouled the cast, I guess,” the man said.

“Seemed deliberate to me,” Joe said, reaching across his body and trying to work the lure free. The barbs were pulled through the fabric and he ended up tearing his sleeve getting the lure out.

“Maybe if you’d stay clear of my casting lane,” the fisherman said flatly, reeling in. Not a hint of apology or remorse.

Joe dismounted but never took his eyes off the fisherman in the water. He fought an impulse to charge out into the lake and take the man down. He doubted the miscast was an accident, but there was no way he could prove it, and he swallowed his anger. He led his horse over to the tree, tied him up, and took the bag down. There were very few items in it, and Joe rooted through them looking for a license. In the bag was a knife in a sheath, some string, matches, a box of crackers, a battered journal, a pink elastic iPod holder designed to be worn on an arm but no iPod, an empty water bottle, and half a Bible-Old Testament only. It looked as if the New Testament had been torn away.

“I don’t see a license,” Joe said, stealing a look at the journal while the fisherman kept his back to him. There were hundreds of short entries made in a tiny crimped hand. Joe read a few of them and noted the dates went back to March. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Was it possible this man had been in the mountains for sixmonths?

“Don’t be reading my work,” the fisherman said.

On a smudged card inside the Bible was a note: FOR CALEB ON HIS 14TH BIRTHDAY FROM AUNT ELAINE.

“Are you Caleb?” Joe asked.

Pause. “Yeah.”

“Got a last name?”

“Yeah.”

Joe waited a beat and the man said nothing. “So, what is it?”

“Grimmengruber.”

“What?”

“Grimmengruber. Most people just say ‘Grim’ cause they can’t pronounce it.”

“Who is Camish?” Joe asked. “I keep seeing that name in this journal.”

“I told you not to read it,” Caleb Grimmengruber said, displaying a flash of impatience.

“I was looking for your license,” Joe said. “I can’t find it. So who is Camish?”

Caleb sighed. “My brother.”

“Where is he? Is he up here with you?”

“None of your business.”

“You wrote that he was with you yesterday. It says, ‘Camish went down and got some supplies. He ran into some trouble along the way.’ What trouble?” Joe asked, recalling what Farkus had said at the trailhead.

Caleb Grim lowered his fishing rod and slowly turned around. He had close-set dark eyes, a tiny pinched mouth glistening with fish blood, a stubbled chin sequined with scales, and a long, thin nose sunburned so badly that the skin was mottled gray and had peeled away revealing the place where chalk-white bone joined yellow cartilage. Joe’s stomach clenched, and he felt his toes curl in his boots.

“What trouble?” Joe repeated, trying to keep his voice strong.

“You can ask him yourself.”

“He’s at your camp?”

“I ain’t in charge of his movements, but I think so.”

“Where’s your camp?”

Caleb chinned to the south, but all Joe could see was a woodstudded slope that angled up nearly a thousand feet.

“Up there in the trees?” Joe asked.

“Over the top,” the man said. “Down the other side and up and down another mountain.”

Joe surveyed the terrain. He estimated the camp to be at least three miles the hard way. Three miles.

“Lead on,” Joe said.

“What you gonna do if I don’t?”

Joe thought, There’s not much I cando. He said, “We won’t even need to worry about that if you cooperate. You can show me your license, I can have a word with Camish, and if everything’s on the level, I’ll be on my way and I’ll leave you with a citation for too many fish in your possession.”

Caleb appeared to be thinking it over although his hard dark eyes never blinked. He raised his rod and hooked the lure on an eyelet so it wouldn’t swing around. After a moment, Grim waded out of the lake. As he neared, Joe was taken aback at how tall he was, maybe six-foot-five. He was glad he hadn’tgone into the lake after him. Joe could smell him approaching. Rancid-like rotten animal fat. Without a glance toward Joe, Caleb took the daypack and threw it over his shoulders and started up the mountain. Joe mounted up, breathed in a gulp of clean, thin air, and clucked at Buddy and Blue Roanie to get them moving.

A quarter mile up the mountain, Caleb stopped and turned around. His tiny dark eyes settled on Joe. He said, “You coulda just rode away.”

Nearly to the top, Joe prodded on his pack animals. They were laboring on the steep mountainside. Caleb Grim wasn’t. The man long-strided up the slope at a pace that was as determined as it was unnatural.

Joe said, “The Brothers Grim?”

Caleb, obviously annoyed, said, “We prefer the Grim Brothers.”

Later, Joe asked, “Where are you boys from?”

No response.

“How long have you been up here? This is tough country.”

Nothing.

“Why just the Old Testament?”

Dismissive grunt.

“What kind of trouble did Camish run into yesterday?”

Silence.

“Some of the old-timers down in Baggs think someone’s been up here harassing cattle and spooking them down the mountains. There have even been reports by campers that their camps have been trashed, and there’ve been some break-ins at cabins and cars parked at the trailheads. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Caleb grunted. Again not a yes, not a no.

“The elk that was butchered confounds me,” Joe said. “Whoever did it worked fast and knew what they were doing. The bow hunters said it must have happened within twenty minutes, maybe less. Like maybe more than one man was cutting up that meat. You wouldn’t know who up here could’ve done that, then?”

“I already told you. I don’t know about no elk.”

“Have you heard about a missing long-distance runner? She disappeared up here somewhere a couple of years ago. A girl by the name of Diane Shober?”

Another inscrutable grunt.

“The Brothers Grim,” Joe said again.

“We prefer the Grim Brothers, damn you,” Caleb spat.

Joe eased his shotgun out of the saddle scabbard, glanced down to check the loads, and slid it back in. He’d have to jack a shell into the chamber to arm it. Later, though. When Caleb wasn’t looking. No need to provoke the man.

They were soon in dense timber. Buddy and Blue Roanie detoured around downed logs while Caleb Grim scrambled over them without a thought. Joe wondered if Caleb was leading him into a trap or trying to lose him, and he spurred Buddy on harder than he wanted to, working him and not letting him rest, noting the lather creaming out from beneath the saddle and blanket. It was dark and featureless in the timber. Every few minutes Joe would twist in the saddle to look back, to try to find and note a landmark so he could find his way back out. But the lodgepole pine trees all looked the same, and the canopy was so thick he couldn’t see the sky or the horizon.

“Sorry Buddy,” he whispered to his gelding, patting his wet neck, “it can’t be much farther.”

Caleb’s subtle arcs and meandering made Joe suddenly doubt his own sense of direction. He thoughtthey were still going north, but he wasn’t sure. Out of nowhere, a line came back to him from one of his favorite old movies, one of the rare movies he and his father had both liked, The Missouri Breaks:

The closer you get to Canada, the more things’ll eat your horse.

Joe could smell the camp before he could see it. It smelled like rotten garbage and burnt flesh.

For a moment, Joe thought he was hallucinating. How could Caleb Grim have made it into the camp so much before him that he’d had the time to sit on a log and stretch out his long legs and read the Bible and wait for him to arrive? Then he realized the man on the log was identical to Caleb in every way, including his clothing, slouch hat, and deformed nose, and he was reading the missing half of the book he’d seen in Caleb’s daypack earlier-the NewTestament.