Earl could make out what was going on by watching gestures and body language. The game warden was demonstrating how to pull the orange safety clip from the nozzle of the bear spray and trigger it to spray. He stepped away from the three onlookers until he was downwind from them. He extended his arm and Earl could clearly see a big bloom of pepper spray shoot from the canister Joe held. The cloud of red floated away from them until it dissipated near the tree line.
Afterward, Joe walked back to the group of men and personally showed each one how the spray worked. Then he helped to clip a unit of the bear spray onto Steve-2’s web belt. The other two watched and did the same.
“Now we need to make some decisions,” Joe said to the men. He chinned back toward the big pile of gear and equipment. “We need to decide what we absolutely need and what we have to leave behind.”
One of the three moaned. Earl didn’t think it was Steve-2.
Earl followed while Joe Pickett led the three over to the gear. Unfortunately, it was out of the range of the live radio because their voices trailed off into nothing.
“What’s going on now?” Brad asked.
“They’re making two piles of gear,” Earl said. “Stuff that stays and stuff they’ll take with them, is my guess. Jesus, they really brought a shitload of crap.”
“What kind of gear are they leaving behind?” Brad asked.
“Who cares?” Kirby hissed. “What are you going to do? Go down there and root through it?”
“It’s probably worth a lot of money,” Brad said. “We could sell it for a lot. Those boys are richer than hell.”
Earl took in a deep breath and sighed. He was getting impatient with their bickering, and both boys knew the signal and shut up.
Earl grunted as he bent around so he could see them both. Brad, the older one, was an ungainly bear of a man. Earl was big himself—over six feet tall and thick through the middle—but Brad was an even larger version of that. He wore a curly black beard and his metal-framed glasses with thick lenses were always smudged. The lenses made his eyes look bigger at certain angles, which gave him the appearance of always being puzzled and a few beats behind whatever was going on. Which, in most cases, was true.
Brad wore a camo Carhartt hunting parka the size of a tent and huge lug-soled black lace-up outfitter boots. He could pack two quarters of elk out of the backcountry with one haunch on each shoulder. His size made it necessary for him to ride a draft horse instead of a mountain quarter horse.
Kirby, meanwhile, was wiry and compact with close-cropped sidewalls and a mop of dark brown hair on top, a recent haircut that made him look like a 1930s mobster or a Nazi party member, Earl thought. Kirby looked mean, like his mother, and he was. He was also smart and quick and ruthless. Earl often told clients Kirby could put the sneak on a bull moose in the willows, leap on its back, and cut its throat from behind. And Brad was there to pack it out.
His younger son favored tight-fitting high-tech KUIU camo clothing. Unlike Brad, Kirby was meticulous in his dress. There were no motor oil stains on his jacket and no mud on his knees. Under his left arm, he wore a shoulder holster with a .44 Magnum revolver, and on his right thigh, an exterior sheath with a twelve-inch bowie knife.
Earl said to both of them, “We’re not going down there and looting the crap they leave behind.”
Brad instantly looked away. He hated being chastised by his father, and Earl knew it. So did Kirby, who looked smug and triumphant.
“We’ve got a job to do,” Earl said. “We can’t be screwing around with things like that.”
“My radio trick is working,” Brad said, gesturing to his handheld.
“Except we can’t hear a goddamned thing,” Kirby replied.
“He’s right,” Earl grunted as he turned back around and positioned himself at the spotting scope. “Hearing them talk to each other doesn’t help us at all. Plus, it could backfire on us if even one of them notices there’s a radio on in a day bag. I’m just not sure it was worth the risk.”
Kirby said, “The tracker we planted on them is good enough.” That had been Kirby’s idea, of course.
Earl said, “We don’t need any of that high-tech shit. You know how I feel about relying on technology. It’s like counting on horses. Both will always let you down when you need ’em most. These guys won’t be hard to track at all.”
The radio in Brad’s hand crackled.
“. . . time to match up horses to riders,” said a faint voice over the radio. The three Thomases got quiet.
It was Joe Pickett again, moving closer to the horse with the radio in the saddlebag. Earl watched as the game warden spoke to the three Californians and then obviously stepped aside and deferred to the wrangler.
They couldn’t hear the wrangler speak, except a word here and there.
“Brock’s sizing up each guy,” Earl reported quietly to his sons. “He’s matching each one to a specific horse. Like they was some kind of dude ranch or something.”
“It kind of is,” Brad said with derision.
“Where’s Pickett in all of this?” Kirby asked.
“Off to the side saddling his horse,” Earl said.
“I bet he doesn’t want anything to do with these dicks,” Kirby said.
Earl chuckled. He was thinking the same thing.
“Now he’s putting the panniers on the packhorses,” Earl said after a few minutes. “The rancher is helping him. They seem to know what they’re doing.”
“Can Pickett tie a diamond hitch?” Brad asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
* * *
—
An hour later, Earl slid backward from the juniper with his spotting scope. “They’re moving out.”
Joe Pickett was on the lead horse, followed by Steve-2, the big dark guy, and the nervous weasel. The rancher trailed them, leading a string of three packhorses. The live radio hadn’t been discovered and turned off, but the sounds from it were muffled and random.
All that the Thomases could hear over the radio was the sharp punctuation of horseshoes striking rocks and an occasional nervous word or two from the riders.
“Are you sure my saddle is tight enough?”
“Is this how you steer a horse?”
“How can I make this horse pick up the pace?”
“My butt is going to hurt like hell tonight.”
Brad extended his hand and helped his father stand up. Earl’s joints got stiffer every year. As he pulled Earl to his feet, Brad said, “Sounds like a bunch of guys who have no business coming into our mountains.”