Authors: C. J. Box
It was an hour until dusk in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, near the North Fork of the Twelve Sleep River. Storm clouds that had scudded across the big sky all day now bunched to the southeast as if they’d been herded, and they squeezed out intermittent waves of snow pellets that rattled across the dry grass and shivered the dead leaves. A slight breeze hung low to the ground and ferried both the scent of sage and the watery smell of the river through the lowland brush.
The peregrine falcon was blinded with a leather hood topped by a stiff white bristle of pronghorn antelope hair. The bird sat still and upright, secured to the falconer’s hand by thin leather jesses tied to its talons and looped through his gloved fingers. The falcon, Nate thought, was still and regal and hungry—tightly packed natural explosives encased by feathers, just waiting for a fuse to be lit.
Although slightly less than twenty-four inches tall, the female he held, once released, was the fastest species on the planet, capable of
speeds during its hunting dive of more than two hundred miles an hour. When it balled its talons and struck a bird in flight with that velocity, the result was a concussive explosion of blood, bones, and feathers that still took Nate’s breath away.
The falcon, like all his raptors over the years, had no name. And every time he released one to hunt there was a chance she would fly away and simply never return.
He slowed his pace and listened as he approached the wall of willows. Through the brush was a shallow, spring-fed pond not more than three acres across. It was hard to see from the ground but was obvious from the air, and it was the only substantial body of water for miles around except for the river itself. Therefore, it attracted passing waterfowl. And when the breeze shifted he could hear them: the rhythmic, almost subsonic clucking of paddling ducks. The peregrine heard them, too, and responded with an instinctive tightening of her talons on his hand.
Nate raised the bird so he could whisper directly into her hood, “They’re here.”
NATE WAS TALL
and ropy, with long limbs and icy blue eyes set in a hawklike wind-burned face. The hair he’d cut and dyed months before was growing back long and blond but hadn’t reached its customary ponytail length. He wore stained camo cargo pants, laced outfitter boots, a faded U.S. Air Force Academy hooded sweatshirt, and a thick canvas Carhartt vest. Strapped to his rib cage on his left side, between the sweatshirt and the vest, was a scoped five-shot .500 Wyoming Express revolver. A three-inch braid of jet-black human hair was attached to the thick muzzle by a leather string.
He reached across his body with his right hand and gently untied the falcon’s hood and slipped it off. The peregrine cocked her head at
him for a moment, then returned to profile. The single eye he could see was black, piercing, and soulless—the amoral eye of a killer.
Nate opened his left hand to free the jesses, and raised her up. Her wings unfurled and stretched out for a moment, then her talons bunched and pushed off his glove. He turned his face away as he was pummeled with thumping blasts of air from her beating wings and brushes of her wingtips. The first moment of flight was ungainly; she dropped slightly and thrashed to the left, the jesses swinging through the air, her feet long and extended, until she found invisible purchase and began to rise. She cleared the tops of the willows ahead by inches.
The falcon climbed in circles that were tight at first and then larger as she rose above the treetops and found a current. Then, as if she’d burned through the first stage of a booster rocket, she catapulted into the sky.
THE PAST MONTH
had been spent in a state of training and trepidation, ever since his longtime colleague Large Merle had shown up gutted at his front door. Nate had transported all seven feet and four hundred fifty pounds of Merle toward the town of Saddlestring in his Jeep, with his friend gasping for breath through chattering teeth. The last thing Large Merle had said before he collapsed was:
“The Five. They’ve deployed.”
Nate knew exactly what that meant. The showdown he’d been anticipating for years was at hand, and Merle was the latest victim. Large Merle had died with a moaning death rattle five miles out of town, and Nate had flipped a U-turn and returned to his stone house on the banks of the North Fork. He’d said a few private words over the body and had it shipped via Freightliner to Merle’s only living relative, a sister in North Dakota. Then he began to prepare for visitors.
_______
THE PEREGRINE FALCON
was little more than a pinprick in the sky, a tiny black speck set against roiling thunderheads. Nate watched the bird circle in the ellipse of a lazy thermal spiral. The falcon was so high in the air it took a knowing eye to see it. But the ducks knew the falcon was there because none had attempted to fly.
Nate nodded to himself and tugged on the end of an empty burlap sack he’d tucked through his belt. He flipped the sack over his shoulder to keep it out of the way, and approached the willows in silence.
Before he entered the brush, he paused and looked over his shoulder and scanned the terrain. His small house was far below in the river valley, his Jeep parked next to it. The old structure was bordered by massive old river cottonwood trees with gnarled gray bark and skeletal limbs. Because most of the leaves were gone, he could see his clapboard mews for housing falcons, and an upturned flat-bottomed boat on the bank of the river he used for crossing. On the east side of the North Fork, a steep red wall rose sixty feet into the air. The top was flat and dotted with scrub. Beyond the flat the country rose at a gentle pitch in a series of waves and folds until it melded into the multicolor pockets of aspen and then the dark timber fringe of the mountains. Rounded peaks above the timberline were dusted with the fresh first snow of the fall.
To the west was an undulating treeless sagebrush flat that continued for miles. A single two-track road cut through the sagebrush and meandered its way through cuts and draws to the stone house. There was no other way in, and if someone was coming he could see them from miles away. On the sides of the sections of road out of his vision, he’d installed motion-detection sensors and hidden closed-circuit cameras that would broadcast images of visitors into his house well before he could see them with his naked eye or through his binoculars.
From his vantage point on the plateau where the willows hid the pond, Nate noted how the river had risen. Although there had been little rain and only a few bursts of fall snow, the thirst of the river cottonwoods for water had subsided as the trees withdrew their appetite and focused inward, preparing for winter. Without thousands of trees sucking water from the Twelve Sleep, the level of the river rose high enough to be navigable again.
All was quiet and still in every direction.
Nate turned back around, reached out and parted the stiff willow branches, and stepped inside.
AS THE BRUSH
closed around him he could no longer see the peregrine, but he knew she was there by the nervous tittering of the ducks ahead. The ducks weren’t alarmed because of his presence or the noise he was making as he pushed through the willows, but because of the falcon in the sky.
He sensed an opening through the branches a moment before he was knee-deep in stagnant water. The bottom of the pond was silty beneath his boots but solid underneath, and with a few more steps he was waist-deep in the pond as mallard and teal ducks scattered in his path, motoring across the surface of the water and sending the alarm to the entire population of twenty or twenty-five ducks. The silt he’d disturbed underfoot plumed through the dark pond water and turned it the color of chocolate milk near his legs.
But not one of the ducks took flight. Nate smiled to himself as he beheld one of nature’s brilliant secrets.
For ducks, geese, and other waterfowl, the very silhouette of a peregrine falcon in the sky—even if they’d never encountered one before—was deeply imprinted into their collective psyche. They knew somehow the predator thousands of feet in the air would kill
them in an instant if they became airborne, just like they somehow knew the falcon would not hit them on the ground or on the surface of the water. So as long as the ducks didn’t fly, they were safe. Their instinct was so ingrained that it superseded even his own intrusion into their world.
He waded across the pond with the burlap sack and gathered up four mallard drakes and dropped them inside as if selecting ripe zucchini. As he chose them, the others swam away and bunched against the reeds, practically climbing over one another to get away. Four was enough, he thought, for two good meals and duck soup later. He’d use the wings as lures for falconry exercises and the feathers as stuffing for training dummies.
Knotting the open end of the sack, Nate waded across the pond and grabbed a fat mallard hen from the flock. As he lifted the bird, her bright orange feet windmilled under her belly, as if she was trying to run through the air. Droplets of pond water beaded on her feathers.
He leaned back and looked up into the sky and held the duck out from his body in full view. Peregrines had incredible eyesight, and he could almost sense the falcon locking in on him and the object in his hand.
Nate drew the hen in close and said, “God bless you and thank you,” something he always said to wild creatures before he took an action that would result in their death, then hurled the duck into the air, where it had no option but to fly or drop back to the earth like a rock.
He called out: “For my hunting partner.”
The duck came alive with a burst of energy, and started to climb. It flew horizontal and fast, skirting the top of the brush in a mad dash toward the far river.
Hundreds of feet above, in a move made silent by its distance, the peregrine deftly shrugged out of the thermal, tucked its wings tight against its body, balled its talons so they resembled twin hammers, and began to drop headfirst through the sky.
Nate could hear it coming as it shot earthward like a missile. The sound was a kind of high-pitched whistle that increased in volume as it built up velocity.
He glanced over toward the retreating duck. The hen had cleared the willows and was aiming for the river valley, its wings beating so fast they were blurs. It didn’t fly in a straight line but seemed to know its only chance was to feint and zigzag through the air.
Somehow, while dropping through the sky at incredible speed, the peregrine homed in on the flying duck and was able to make microscopic flight adjustments in its stoop attack so that when the two objects intersected—with an audible
whap
sound and an explosion of feathers that seemed to fill the sky—Nate took a sharp intake of breath and almost fell back into the water from the sheer bloody beauty of it all.
AS HE MADE
his way down the slope toward the river with the sack of wriggling mallards, he paused next to the peregrine. The falcon was eating the remains of the dead duck. Flesh, guts, bones, and feathers filled its gullet to the size of a billiard ball, and its hooked beak was shiny with bright red blood. The bird paused and looked up, their eyes locked, something was exchanged, then the falcon resumed eating.
Nate untied the sack and reached in and grasped a drake by its neck and pulled it out. He cinched the top to contain the others and stashed the sack of live ducks beneath a mountain ash tree and
weighted it with a rock. He would have the duck for dinner. This completed the circle—hunt, kill, eat—and always reminded him he was of the natural world and not simply striding atop it.
KNEE-DEEP
in the cold water, Nate wrung the neck of the duck with a sharp swing of his arm and held it out away from him as its wings beat in death throes. A full gust of wind roared up the river, roiling the surface of the water and shaking the trees. Golden spade-shaped cottonwood leaves fell into the water like upturned palms and bobbed and floated in the current.
He pushed both thumbs through the taut belly skin of the duck and worked them under its breastbone. The blood inside was hot, and the smell was metallic and pungent. With his left hand, he grasped the body of the duck and with his right he broke the entire breast away until it came free. After tossing the carcass toward the bank, he bent and dipped the breast into the water to clean and cool it. Spirals of dark blood snaked between his knees.
The gust of wind played out and silence returned and he thought he heard a sound. Nate looked up at his falcon to see she had stopped eating and was focusing on something upriver. He followed her gaze as the pointed snout of a drift boat emerged from around a grassy bank.
The wind had overridden the distinctive noises of an approaching boat—the slight lapping of the current on the sides of the fiberglass hull, the squeak of oars being dipped through oarlocks, the shuffle of boots on the boat deck, the scrape of a shallow river rock against the flat bottom.
He was caught, he thought. There was no way he could turn and splash toward the shore and find cover before he was seen. Warning jolts fired through his nerves.
His vest was open, and he reached up and slipped the thong loose that secured his .50 caliber weapon in its shoulder holster. Instinctively, he flexed his fingers in and out and stood up tall as the boat made the turn and came into full view. It was a low-profile open McKenzie-style Hyde drift boat, off-white in color, with a green-and-brown horizontal stripe on the side. There were three men in the boat—one standing behind the casting platform in front, one at the oars, and the third seated in the back. The man in back was slumped over and looked to be injured—or sleeping.
“There’s somebody,” the man standing in front said over his shoulder to his companions. Then: “Hey, mister. We’ve got a hurt man here. Can we pull over and call for some help?”
Nate didn’t answer. They certainly weren’t making any effort to sneak up on him. He made several quick determinations. First, the assassins sent for him in the past had been professionals and had come from out of state. These men looked like locals. Second, it
was
hunting season, and therefore not unusual to see hunters about. Third, he’d been spotted and would have to deal with them one way or the other.