Chapter 3
A turkey vulture circled high overhead.
“Hurry up,” the rancher, Neff, said. “I got a wolf to kill.”
Tean ignored him.
The cow had been dead for maybe twenty-four hours, but not much longer—flies buzzed up as Tean approached, but no maggots, not yet, and bloat hadn’t set in.
She had been old and—Tean judged—sick before that, if the dried fecal matter clumped around her tail was any indication.
Scavengers had already gotten to her eyes, her tongue, even her hindquarters, ripping away chunks of soft flesh around the anus.
Something else had torn her open behind the ribs and gotten to the internal organs.
The big question was: what was that something?
It was a beautiful day in this narrow valley of the Bear River basin.
The October afternoon was warm, although not as warm as it was back in Salt Lake.
And while the bottomland pasture was mostly brown this late in the year, tall grasses and good growths of browse still lined the banks of the creek a hundred yards off.
Sage and juniper bristled on the foothills before giving way, higher up, to dense gold-and-green stands of aspen, spruce, and pine.
The smell of the dead cow filled Tean’s nose, and back by Neff’s ATV, some kind of Shepherd mutt was barking his head off.
Neff shifted his weight. He was a round-faced, middle-aged White man, with a forelock of graying hair poking out from under his cattleman hat.
A long-sleeved plaid shirt, Wranglers, and a pair of square-toed boots completed the standard Utah Rancher package.
“Are you blind or something? Write your report, or do whatever you have to do, and let me get on with my business.”
Tean snapped a few photos with a digital camera, checked the ground to make sure he wouldn’t trample any evidence, and then moved around the cow to snap a few more pictures.
Most people thought of forensics as something only human law enforcement had to deal with, but the science of wildlife forensics was becoming more and more important as part of legal proceedings in crimes against animals, like poaching, the exotic pet trade, or illegal trading of animal products.
It was also important, although less frequently, in animal attacks.
“This is ridiculous,” Neff said, and he started to step forward. “Look, right here—”
“Mr. Neff, stay where you are,” Tean said.
“This is my ranch. You don’t get to tell me where I can go.”
“I haven’t finished documenting this. If you come over here, you might destroy evidence.”
Neff huffed a breath and threw a look at his companion—a man probably twenty years younger with bloodshot eyes. The ranch hand’s name was McCall, and he stood there, not looking at anyone as he tugged at his gloves.
“Look right there,” Neff said, but he stayed where he was. “Use your eyes, man. They eat on them for days, open them up like that. And I’ve seen that damn wolf right up on that ridge. You’re telling me this is a coincidence?”
Once Tean had finished documenting the carcass, he moved outward in a spiral until he found a track. He knelt, held a pen close to the print for size comparison, and snapped another photo.
It was all so much bullshit.
“What’d you find?” Neff asked. “What is it?”
Tean went back to his search. The spiral carried him outward until he was close to the shrubby willows and snowberry lining the creek.
He paused there, considering the softer ground, visually following it upstream to where the creek flowed out of the foothills.
No easy-to-spot tracks, but sure enough, a flash of fluorescent yellow on a stubby pine.
He found another yellow blaze to the left.
And then, a few seconds later, to the right.
He made his way back to Neff and McCall. Neff had his hands on his hips. McCall was staring down like a kid who knew he was in trouble.
“Mr. Neff,” Tean said, “I think what we have here is a simple case of a coyote—maybe a mated pair or a small family group—scavenging a carcass.”
Neff’s face darkened with blood.
He opened his mouth, but Tean spoke first. “I don’t see any evidence that a wolf attacked and killed your cattle, and so my recommendation to the Fish and Wildlife people is that lethal control is neither necessary nor appropriate in this situation.”
“That’s bullshit,” Neff said.
“I’m sorry—”
“This is bullshit. It’s my property. It’s my land. I got a wolf killing my cattle, plain as day, but because some fucking wetback bureaucrat tells me it’s not a wolf, I’m supposed to sit around and do nothing. That’s what’s wrong with this country!”
“I’d like a ride back to my truck,” Tean said to McCall.
“I’m going to call your supervisor,” Neff said. Spittle made a little strand of spider silk at the corner of his mouth. “Incompetence. I’ve never seen such a half-assed job. You’re going to be out of a job.”
And that threat was why Tean was out here instead of Maddie or Jamal or any of the conservation officers who normally would have handled it. That, and the fact that Neff owned close to half a million acres.
To McCall, Tean said, “Now, please.”
McCall gave Neff a sideways look, but he started for the second ATV. Tean climbed in next to him, and McCall started the engine, and they drove off.
The dog was still barking.
A breeze raked Tean’s face, carrying the dusty, spicy scent of the sage as they crossed the pasture.
The sun was high overhead, and the shadows in the valley had thinned down into little slivers of blue: at the base of a rocky bluff; where the creek bank dropped sharply; under a cottonwood where a pair of cows lay.
Tean looked back once. The turkey vulture had dropped out of the sky.
He got in the truck, drove off the ranch, and found a pullout where he could park and finish his notes. He’d barely started writing when his phone buzzed. The screen said Ed Collins—Tean’s new boss.
“Hello,” Tean said.
“Hey! How’s it going?”
“What do you need, Ed?”
“Are you back on the road? I don’t want to interrupt if you’re working.”
“What did Mr. Neff say I did wrong?”
Ed laughed. It was a big, booming, good-natured laugh. It would have been at home on a used car lot. “Oh boy, he’s a character, isn’t he?”
“He is,” Tean said. Joe Neff was also a wealthy man, a big political donor, and hunting buddies with a number of red-blooded elected officials.
“You can probably guess he’s not happy,” Ed said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tean said.
Ed made a noise that might have been affirming or acknowledging or maybe just a nice, humming sound he’d perfected to mean absolutely nothing. “He really thinks it was a wolf,” Ed said in that same upbeat tone.
“But it wasn’t.”
Ed made that noise again. “He really thinks it was, though.”
“But it wasn’t, Ed.”
“Well,” Ed said, “maybe.”
Tean took a deep breath. Anger, like so many things, seemed like it was just beyond his fingertips most days, but right now there was a hint of…something. “Ed, this is my job. This is what you pay me to do. I looked at that cow, and I’m telling you right now that a wolf didn’t attack it.”
“Hmm. Well, you’re the expert.”
Tean took another deep breath.
“But I wonder, if you stepped back and took another look, if there might be something. You know?”
“Ed,” Tean said. And then he stopped. His thoughts were doing that thing again—spinning and colliding and throwing up sparks. He made himself put the words in order before he tried to speak again. “In the first place, it’s rare for a pack of wolves to go after a fully grown cow.”
“But not unheard of,” Ed said.
Tean ignored that. “Second, we don’t have packs of wolves in Utah.
” Which Ed would have known if he had any background or experience appropriate for his current job, instead of being a former executive at a pesticide company.
Hell, he would have known it if he’d done so much as a year of Boy Scouts.
“What we might have,” Tean continued, “is a single wolf who has crossed over into the state. And one wolf, working on its own, is not going to take down a cow. If this were depredation, we’d be looking at a dead calf. ”
“Right, well—”
“But this wasn’t a case of depredation, Ed. Not by a wolf. Not by anything. That cow was sick, and that’s why she died.”
“See, that’s where I’m concerned, because you can’t know that—”
“I can know that, Ed. I do know that. Because that’s my job.
That cow was covered in fecal matter from uncontrolled diarrhea.
On top of that, there’s no sign of bites to the throat or snout, which is what you’d see if this had been a wolf attack.
There are no bites to the hindquarters, which is what you’d see if this had been a wolf attack. ”
“Now, there, Mr. Neff disagrees—”
Mr. Neff can go fuck a duck. The words exploded in Tean’s head, and they came in Jem’s voice.
“Mr. Neff saw damage to the hindquarters that was caused by scavengers ripping off chunks of soft tissue. Not bite marks from wolves harrying prey. The real issue, Ed, is that the only wounds that might have been from a wolf, where they accessed the internal organs behind the ribcage, are all clearly post-mortem. There’s no hemorrhaging.
There’s no blood—nothing on the ground, no blood trails.
There’s no sign of a struggle, no broken vegetation, no drag marks.
I found one track, and it belongs to a coyote. ”
Ed’s breathing came close and loud on the phone. The sales-lot good humor sloughed off his voice. “Maybe if it was a small wolf.”
“It wasn’t,” Tean said. “You’ll have the depredation report tomorrow, and I’ll send a copy to Fish and Wildlife.”
“Now hold on,” Ed said. “I understand you’ve got your opinion, but Mr. Neff thinks you’ve made a mistake. And I think we should respect that, don’t you?”
No was the obvious answer. The obvious answer was to point out that Mr. Neff clearly wanted an excuse to kill a wolf, and he thought his buddies would rubber-stamp it for him.
But the anger had blown out. And Tean was tired.
“I told Mr. Neff we’d get the carcass back here for a full necropsy,” Ed said.
“And Tean, I just want to be clear here: we want to do right here. And that means we’re going to be absolutely thorough.
We’re going to check everything for any possible evidence that a wolf was behind this.
Because we can’t have a wolf running around out there, taking people’s cattle and ruining their business, can we? ”
The question dangled in the air like a knife.
“No,” Tean said.
“Great! Glad we’re on the same page. Now, I’ll call Mr. Neff and see about getting that carcass. We want to get on this toot sweet, don’t you think? We’ve already wasted enough of his time.”
Some sort of sludgy answer was working its way out of Tean’s throat, but it didn’t matter; Ed killed the call.
Tean tossed his notes onto the passenger seat. He stared out the windshield for a moment at the steep, rocky face of the valley wall.
His phone buzzed.
Ed again. He just needed Tean to okay a flamethrower and helicopter for Joe Neff to get that wolf—
But instead, a woman spoke. It took Tean a moment to recognize Lucy Young’s voice because it had been a long time since he’d heard it.
“Tean, it’s Ammon.”
And he thought, in the disorienting gap that followed, Somebody shot him. He’s a cop. He’s been shot.
But her voice broke as she said, “They’re saying he—they’re saying he killed someone.”