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from town.
    “What do you know about them?” Reed asked.
    Joe told Reed that the Cates family ran a hunting-guide business called Dull Knife Outfitters. Dull Knife was one of the oldest big-game outfitters in the Bighorns, and one of the most notorious. There were rumors that Eldon was involved in taking elk out of season as well as in the wrong hunt areas, on behalf of clients, and that he made deals with hunters to obtain prime licenses on their behalf without going through the lottery, if they paid his special fee. Joe had even heard that Eldon had a secret elk camp deep in the mountains that he operated completely above the law, where he guaranteed certain wealthy hunters a kill that would make the record books.
    But they were rumors only. Joe had never caught Eldon committing a crime, and no accuser had ever come forward. He’d interviewed several Dull Knife clients over the years and none of them would implicate Eldon. Despite spending years on horseback in the most remote areas of the mountains, he’d not yet found Eldon’s secret camp—if it existed at all.
    Eldon had a unique reputation among the other, more respectable outfitters in the district. Although sniping among competing hunting guides was normal, the one thing Eldon’s competitors could agree on was that
they didn’t like Eldon
. They thought he used his reputation as the oldest outfitter in the mountains as a slam against them, and they didn’t like how he challenged the ethics of the profession—which reflected poorly on
them
. Guides said that Eldon sometimes claimed kills made by their clients by tagging them on behalf of
his
clients, and that he refused to respect the boundaries of the Wyoming Outfitters Board’s designated hunting areas. He would also bad-mouth other outfitters to his clients, calling them “amateurs,” “greenhorns,” and worse. For a number of years, Eldon drove his four-wheel-drive pickup around town with a magnetic sign on the door that read DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS: SATISFYING OUR CUSTOMERS WHEN THE OTHER GUIDES WER E STILL IN DIAPERS.
    Joe had been asked by several outfitters to talk to Eldon about it, but Joe told them there was nothing he could legally do. When the magnetic sign was stolen from the truck while Eldon was in a bar, Eldon had vowed to press charges for theft against the other outfitters in the county, but he never did.
    Joe had always considered Eldon Cates to be an aggravating throwback who would someday foul up. When he did, Joe wanted to be there.
    Bull was another story. Bull was bigger and dumber than his dad, and two years earlier, Joe had caught the son and his unpleasant wife, Cora Lee, red-handed with a trophy bull elk in the back of their pickup three days before the season opener.
    Bull’s hunting rig could be identified instantly because it had been retrofitted as a kind of rolling meat wagon. He’d welded a steel pole and crossbeam into the bed and strung a steel cable and hook from a turnbuckle. With the device, Bull could back up to a big-game carcass, hook the cable through its back legs, and hoist it up in order to field dress and skin it on the spot.
    Bull’s scheme had been to kill the bull prior to the arrival of two hunters from Pennsylvania. If either of the two hunters didn’t get their own trophy bull elk, Bull was going to tag the carcass with their license and let them take it home, thus guaranteeing a one hundred percent successful hunt. The Pennsylvania clients hadn’t been in on the scheme, from what Joe could determine.
    Judge Hewitt was a hunter himself, and he came down hard on Bull Cates.
    The violations had cost the outfitter several thousand dollars in fines, the forfeiture of his rifles and pickup, and the loss of his outfitter’s license from the state association. Bull was bitter and claimed Joe had “deprived him of his livelihood” and that he would someday even the score. Cora Lee acted out during the sentencing and hurled epithets at Joe and Judge