Nowhere to Run Read Free

DISMOUNTED once he was on the floor of the basin to ease the pain in his knees and let his horses rest. As always, he wondered how horsemen and horsewomen of the past stayed mounted for hours on end and day after day. No wonder they drank so much whiskey, he thought.
    Joe led his horses through a stand of widely spaced lodgepole pines that gradually melded into a pocket of rare and twisted knotty pine. Trunks and branches were bizarre in shape and direction, with softball-sized joints like swollen knees. The knotty pine stand covered less than a quarter mile of the forest, just as the elk hunters had described. As he stood on the perimeter of the stand he slowly turned and noted the horizon of the basin that rose like the rim of a bowl in every direction. This was the first cirque. He was struck by how many locations in the mountains looked alike, how without man-made landmarks like power lines or radio towers, wilderness could turn into a maelstrom of green and rocky sameness. He wished the bow hunters had given him precise GPS coordinates so he could be sure this was the place, but the hunters were purists and had not carried Garmins. Still, though, they’d accurately described the basin and the cirque, as well as the knotty pine stand in the floor of it.
    In the back of his mind, Joe thought that if there really were men hiding out in these mountains stealing elk and vandalizing cabins and cars, they would likely be refugees of the man camps. Over the past few years, as natural-gas fields were drilled north of town, the energy companies had established man camps—clumps of adjoining temporary mobile housing in the middle of sagebrush flats for their employees. The men—and it was only men—lived practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Obviously, it took a certain kind of person to stay there. Most of the temporary residents had traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to the most remote part of the least-populated state to work in the natural-gas fields and live in a man camp. The men were rough, independent, well armed, and flush with cash when they came to town. And when they did, it was the New Wild West. For months at a time, Joe had been called just about every Saturday night to assist the local police and sheriff’s deputies with breaking up fights.
    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