Chapter Nineteen
Sheridan read the texts from her sisters one after the other as she drove toward the Bucholz Cattle Company headquarters, and she replied by sending thumbs-up emojis.
She was grateful they were both safe, and extremely interested in what they’d have to say later.
Sheridan also breathed a small sigh of relief that April hadn’t shot anyone.
Working daily with the falcons of Yarak, Inc.
, Sheridan had noticed that her visual perception had improved when she was out in the field.
Although not even close to the ability of the raptors she flew, she found that she could spot subtle items on the landscape and in the air that had previously eluded her, like prey birds and small animals.
Sheridan could look out over familiar vistas and note small aberrations that she would have previously missed.
Nate attributed her newfound ability as a beginning stage of yarak itelf.
She wasn’t so sure of that, but she welcomed a higher sense of natural awareness.
Which is why she noticed an almost imperceptible column of dust rising into the morning sky far in front of her on the road.
She could not yet see the vehicle or vehicles that made it, but the haziness above the sagebrush terrain and below the massive blue sky indicated that someone was coming her way from the ranch.
Since they’d all decided to arrive at their respective ranch targets around the same time and without a heads-up to the owners, for a moment Sheridan wasn’t sure what to do.
Encountering John and Shelby Bucholz on the road would be less than optimal.
The Bucholzes could rightly send her back on her way, or even call the sheriff and report her for trespassing.
And even if they did neither one, any exchange she had with them while they parked side by side on the road would be truncated and incomplete.
She could perform a three-point turn on the road and beat it toward the junction, but that would defeat the purpose of their whole strategy that morning.
Sheridan chose to eliminate those choices altogether.
Instead, she engaged the four-wheel drive and turned sharply left off of the ranch road. She kept one set of tires in a meandering cowpath and bounced over sagebrush with the other. She drove up a small hill, topped it, and fled down the other side out of view from the road or the oncoming autos.
Sheridan killed the engine of her SUV and snatched a pair of powerful Zeiss binoculars she used for falconry spotting from her console. She piled out of her SUV and jogged back up to the top of the rise and ducked down.
She poked the lenses of the binoculars through a thick sagebrush and focused on the road.
Within a few minutes, Sheridan watched as three identical white pickups in a convoy appeared.
Road dust rose like a wake behind them. None of the pickups resembled any of the ranch models she’d seen the previous summer.
That meant the Bucholzes were likely still at home and once the vehicles passed she could resume her journey. Or she hoped so.
As they got closer, she could see that each of the trucks had a logo of some sort on the driver’s-side door. The middle truck had a bed filled with brightly painted metal gear with an arm of some kind extending the length of the bed.
The convoy didn’t drive as far as where Sheridan had set up, but instead slowed down and took a new-looking two-track to the east. As the trucks made the turn, she focused in on the graphics on their front doors.
Each read: Global Exploration.
She’d never heard of the company before, but she noted that all three pickups had Texas plates.
—
Sheridan watched the convoy as it proceeded southeast. She could make out the boundary fence of the ranch ahead of them, and she wondered how far they would go. She knew that Lorne Trumley’s Crazy Z-Bar Ranch was just beyond the fence line they were approaching.
That’s when the first vehicle stopped. The second and third pickups nosed in behind it and people started getting out.
The driver of the first vehicle was a big man wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap. He was big and dark-haired, and effusive in his movements.
John Bucholz climbed out of the passenger side and stood next to him. Shelby opened the door from the back and joined them. For a moment, Sheridan was flummoxed. She hadn’t expected the Bucholzes to be there.
The driver gestured across the landscape, and both John and Shelby looked on in rapt attention. The man pointed, and gestured, and waved his hands to explain something to them. The Bucholzes both nodded along.
After a few minutes of explanation, the burly driver stepped aside and let the other men who’d followed him hold court for a few minutes, pointing out things Sheridan couldn’t see across the swale.
It seemed like some kind of on-site presentation.
As before, the Bucholzes seemed to listen carefully and asked a few questions.
Sheridan wished she could lip-read what was going on, and what was being discussed.
Whatever it was, she decided, John and Shelby were excited about it.
Then, instead of climbing back into their units and departing the area, as Sheridan had hoped, she watched the burly man lead the Bucholzes across the swale on foot.
He pointed toward the ground and in several instances squatted down and seemed to paw at the earth.
The other drivers followed the Bucholzes like ducklings.
What’s going on? she asked herself.
Whatever it was, Sheridan knew she couldn’t reappear on the ranch road without being seen. She’d be there as long as the three trucks were out there. And it didn’t appear that anyone was in a big hurry to leave.
She scooted down the hill toward her SUV and didn’t stand up until she knew she was out of their view.
Sheridan didn’t want to leave her part of the plan incomplete.
She couldn’t bear letting her sisters down after they’d done exactly what she’d laid out to them.
Not being able to visit the Bucholz Ranch and gather information left a huge hole in their investigation.
And she didn’t know if they’d be able to fill it.
News and gossip traveled fast in Twelve Sleep County.
If the sisters left the Bucholzes until last, Sheridan didn’t doubt that one way or another John and Shelby would know that Lucy and April had visited their neighbors.
The whole point of coordinating the visits to all three ranches at the same time was to catch the ranchers unprepared.
Then an idea came to her.
If she couldn’t use the main ranch road to get to the Bucholz headquarters, there was another way.
She could get there using a backdoor approach: over the sagebrush to the perimeter of their ranch, then across the side of the mountains on Forest Service roads.
Sheridan could then access the ranch compound from the other side, where those old guest cabins were located.
The cabins where she’d glimpsed someone inside. The off-limit cabins that were the reason she’d been kicked off the ranch and denied her bird abatement fee the summer before.
She could be waiting there when the Bucholzes returned, and they’d no doubt be caught off guard when they saw her. That’s the situation she’d hoped for in the first place. It was sneaky and less than ideal, but she couldn’t come up with anything else.
She liked it, but it was risky. She’d already opened herself up to be charged with trespassing, and her new plan was to trespass even further.
But she wanted to know, once and for all, what the Bucholzes were hiding at those cabins.
Did her dad find out a couple of days ago? she wondered. And could that be why he was shot?
Sheridan drew out her phone and tapped a message into the group text: Change of plans. Going to the HQ to wait for them. I’ll explain later.
—
Through dry streambeds, around downed trees, and over reddening buckbrush, Sheridan maneuvered her SUV off the ranch property and onto Forest Service land to fully skirt the ranch.
She used an old fire road that ran parallel to the boundary fence for five miles before crossing back onto private Bucholz land.
She took an ancient two-track that meandered along the side of a small creek that she knew led to the Bucholz place eventually.
She startled a small herd of elk who were bedded down in the grass next to the creek, and they thundered through the lodgepole pines to avoid her.
Sheridan was struck, as she always was, with how massive bulls could slice through close-packed tree trunks without banging their antlers on the branches.
As she neared the ranch compound, the floor near the stream narrowed and canyon walls rose up on both sides.
Finally, as the canyon pinched in even more, the first of the old cabins came into view. It was a simple one-room log structure, and it was in poor shape. The roof had collapsed inward, and misshapen open window frames gaped without glass.
She powered down her truck windows and crawled her vehicle past the first cabin toward a second one in similar condition. She jumped with alarm when a fat marmot with a brown belly whistle-screeched at her from the doorframe as she drove by, then scuttled back inside.
When the third and fourth cabins came into view, Sheridan stopped her SUV and killed the engine.
She made sure she had her phone on her, and she debated whether to retrieve the shotgun from the back seat to take with her.
She decided against it, reluctantly. Being an armed intruder on private property wouldn’t have much of an argument going for her, and that made it more likely she could get hurt—or arrested again.
Instead of the shotgun, Sheridan retrieved a canister of bear spray out of her console and clipped it on her belt. No one could criticize her for having bear spray in grizzly country, could they?
—