“Should try it sometime.” Randy coughed then flicked his butt into the snow. “Might change your mind getting in the thrill of the hunt and all.”
One of Kabe’s wicked grins slid across his mouth. “You know, I never thought there’d be an upside to having a felony record.” Not like that was any type of secret. The entire county knew within a week of Kabe’s arrival in Utah why he was there, how long his period of probation would be, and had some version of what he’d gone up for. “But now I guess there is. Can’t possess a firearm, so no hunting permits for me.” He shoved the thermos in the saddle bag and then tried to jam his hands into his jacket pockets. His right one got all tangled up in straps of the bright orange hunting vest I’d given him to wear over his red ski jacket.
Utah only required a certain amount of blazing orange to be worn for hunting, but I’d rather play it safe. Apparently, so did Randy. He wore insulated coveralls and I had a winter-weight jacket, both in the required color. Somewhere Randy’d picked up a cowboy hat with a crown in Hunter Orange. Kabe had my extra tangerine colored stocking cap pulled down over his mop of black hair and I had a ball cap with the hood of my jacket tugged up over top…all three of us looked like traffic cones. Better an obnoxious color than getting shot by someone who mistook you for a deer.
Kabe managed to sort himself before glaring at me. “I’m going to take a leak.” I guess all the misery of today would be laid at my feet. I’d make it up to him later. “Don’t kill anything while I’m gone.” He grumbled as he pushed off into the snow. We’d chosen a spot where the pines kept the worst of the drifts back. Maybe three feet out from the break, the snow piled knee deep. And that was over the thin crust of ice from the first snow-melt-freeze we’d had that winter.
I called on after him, “With as much noise as you’re making, the elk will have to be deaf and blind to stick around.” Kabe flipped me off as he stomped off. I turned away and checked my rifle and saddle while Randy fished out another smoke. Then his chuckle called my attention back to him. “What?”
“Is he worth all that?” I got the sense Randy meant more than just today’s little fit.
I wasn’t at all sure how to really answer that. Instead I decided to deflect the question a little. “You’ve been married, what, thirty years now?”
“Yep.” He shrugged. “‘Bout that.”
I shot his question back to him, “She worth it?”
Randy stared up at the steel gray clouds for a bit. Then he brayed out a laugh. “Sometimes.”
“Okay…” I had to laugh too. “Yeah, sometimes is about right.”
“Don’t ever let my wife know I said that.” He pointed one gloved finger at my nose to drive the point home.
“That goes both ways.” I laughed. “Whoever spills better watch out for the other.”
“Joe!” Kabe’s shout exploded across the snow. “Joe!” A murder of crows launched into the air at the sound, adding their caws and cackles to Kabe’s frantic yells.
Leaving Randy to handle the horses, I lit out in the direction Kabe’d gone. Easy enough to chase his track through the snow, hard as heck to follow it though. Branches caught my clothes and dropped ice down my back as I careened through the small stands of pine, egged on by the sound of Kabe’s yells. All of one word—my name. I came up and around into this little hollow expecting to see Kabe bloody or broken or facing down a coyote—something.
Instead, I found him just standing almost right in a patch of brambles and staring down at the ground. “What are you on about?” I got to admit I sounded irritated, mostly because I was. And all that annoyance evaporated the moment he turned his head to look up at me. His brown skin had gone gray and his hazel eyes seemed frozen wide. “What?” I slowed and looked him over. He may not have been physically hurt, but I’d seen the look of shock before and he wore it all over his face. “What’s wrong?”
Kabe swallowed, hard, before looking back down at his feet. At first my mind didn’t register nothing but snow covered sticks, with tatters of something blackish-orange clinging to a gnarled stump jutting in amongst them. Five little knobs on a ball and here and there little shiny blue rags fluttered where they’d been caught in the twigs. About a second later my brain shifted and told me what it was I was looking at.
A frozen hand jutted up out of the snow right near Kabe’s feet.
I kept my tone even, “I’m here, boy.” No sense in shaking him up any more than he already was.
“Joe.” Kabe sounded like he might throw up. “I think I’m standing on the rest of the arm. I heard it crunch.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure whether it was his sense or his shock that I should thank for him not panicking and thrashing about. “You’re going to walk backwards, right in the same footsteps that got you there.”
“Everything okay?” Randy’s voice came from behind me.
I held my hand out back behind me. “Stop where you are, Randy. Okay?” Then I returned my attention to Kabe. “Come on, Kabe, just walk backwards.” When he didn’t start moving right away, I hardened my tone. “I said move!” That seemed to snap him out of the stupor. He shook his head, as if to shake the thoughts physically off, and started to back up into his own trail.
Shock’ll do that to folks; turn off all sense, making some people unproductively and irrationally frantic while turning others meek as babies. Finding a body, especially because you stepped on it, could jolt most anyone. Took him only about seven steps to make it back to me. About that time I started to notice the smell. Wasn’t strong, but that heavy, musky odor laced with a touch of mildew—you knew something dead was nearby.
“Damn, something died.” Guess Randy smelled it as well.
I started checking over Kabe, rubbing his cheeks with my thumbs to generate some heat in his face. “Unless deer ‘round here have taken to wearing clothes, that something dead is human.” I jerked my head toward where that twisted, dried hand seemed to be clawing its way out of the snow bank.
“Shit.” I might not have agreed with Randy’s word choice, but I sure couldn’t argue with the sentiment. This pretty much ended my hunt and told me where I’d be spending the rest of my afternoon.
“Joe.” Kabe’s rapid breathing seemed to be slowing and I could see some pink coming back into his face. “Crap. I heard this snap and I looked down and there’s this
hand
coming up out of the snow at me. I fucking freaked.”
Randy came up beside us and tapped Kabe’s shoulder with a metal flask. I glared at him some, but neither Kabe nor Randy shared my beliefs, so I didn’t say nothing about it when Kabe took the little bottle and knocked back a slug. Instead, I squeezed his arm and praised him some. “Well, you kept your wits about you and didn’t move none.”
“I was too fucking scared.” Kabe shuddered. “What if I moved and like stepped on its head or something.”
Now that Kabe was coming ‘round, my mind started thinking less like his boyfriend and more like a cop. We were somewhere off Highway 22 between Widtsoe and Antimony. But exactly where, that was up to debate. One of the reasons I went with a professional guide was that Randy made sure we had the okay to go on any private land he thought had a good shot of getting lucky. We’d gone through maybe a dozen gates during the morning…and my permit allowed for hunting on National Park Service territory.
So, honestly, I wasn’t all sure whether we were in the Dixie National Forest or out of it. It’s not like it’s one big chunk of federal property. No, Dixie’s a patch here and a big swath over there and maybe a mile or so of a little nothing town carved out of the middle. Jurisdiction around these parts tends to sometimes be more a function of guesswork than maps, especially when you get on into the mountains.
Pretty much where we were.
I pulled out my little handheld GPS and took a reading. It didn’t settle my mind at all. “Okay, I need to get hold of Noreen in dispatch and have her get in touch with the rangers as well.” I started planning the next several hours out. The County Coroner, well last I heard he was off in Aruba, so I put a nix on that. I was off duty—wouldn’t have been hunting if I weren’t—but I was one of two deputies trained in crime-scene processing, so I guessed I’d be pulling some overtime on this.
Not that I knew this was or was not a crime. What I knew right then was I had a hand sticking out of the snow and an arm under it, least if Kabe’d heard right. There might be a whole body down under a good two feet of snow or the body could be anywhere and some scavenger dragged that bit over this way. Whoever owned that arm could have died from foul-play, misadventure or had a heart attack while out hiking for all we knew.
I did know I was going to need help.
I huffed out in frustration, my breath hanging in frozen mist in front of my face. “We’ll need to backtrack out to someplace where we can get cell reception.”
“I got a satellite phone.” Randy coughed and spat. “It’s a buck and change a minute, but I think this qualifies as an emergency.”
“How’d you afford that shiny toy?” Kabe’s voice sounded a lot less off than it had earlier. Between the question and his tone, the shock seemed to be fading.
“Ain’t no toy.” Randy turned and started back towards where we’d all come from. “I run hunting trips all up in the middle of nowhere all the time.” Since the body weren’t going to get up and go for a run I followed and Kabe kept in step with me. “Locals like Joe know how to handle themselves…” He grinned back at us as he talked “…but get some idiot up here who’s got a permit, a rifle and no sense. When they go ahead and shoot their own toe off, well that’s not the time you want to be wondering how the heck you’re gonna get the nice moron who paid you twenty-five hundred bucks, in advance, out of the woods and into the hospital.”
I heard the diesel engine long before the two-track snow-cat lumbered into view. A pair of National Park Rangers, both of whom I knew by sight, sat bundled in the cab and a bunch of stuff-sacks, totes and crates, most likely holding emergency gear, were strapped to the pipe frame in the open back bed. That solved my problem of how to haul the body out once we freed it from the snow.
Randy’d taken off with the horses almost an hour back. No sense in having them standing around getting cold. He’d left us with a bunch of gear and supplies to keep me and Kabe from becoming secondary casualties, then headed on out. Said he’d leave flags along the route we came in on so that the responding officers could find us.
Once the snow-cat shuddered to a halt, Ranger Nadia Slokum slid out of the passenger side of the cab. Even under a layer of parka I knew that sleek, compact frame. I waved and got a, “Morning, Sugar!” in return greeting. Her dark cheeks, from what I could see over the scarf around her face, were all pinked up from the cold.
The other law enforcement ranger unfolded his lanky frame out of the small vehicle. Shifting his gloves to cover the gap where his parka didn’t quite cover his wrists, Fred Noces corrected her. “It’s damn near half-past noon.” His smile, flashed out of a dry creek bed of a face, pulled some of the sting out of his words. Fred could come off cranky to folks who didn’t know him, but I never took nothing by his gruff attitude. It’s just who he is and he’d been that way all the years I’d known him.
Nadia and I didn’t go so far back. When I first met her this summer, she’d been stationed at Bryce Canyon. Sorta helped me out when things got bad back then and kinda adopted Kabe and I like we were her wild children or something. Now that she’d settled in, her actual beat covered the whole of Dixie National, all two million acres of it. Fred and Nadia had likely caught my dispatcher’s call out and headed on over to pitch in.
Whether or not this body turned out to be on US government property or state land, we all helped each other out ‘round here. My department, Garfield County Sheriff, only had seven members and, while the Forest Service boasted a lot more rangers, most weren’t law enforcement. A state trooper, Sheriff Simple and one of the other Garfield County deputies were on their way over as well.
Fred dug into the gear on the back of the cat. “Brought you something,” he called as he pulled a heap of black rubber out of one of the sacks and tossed it towards me.
“You are an angel, sir!” When I caught the package the legs came unwrapped and one rubber sole hit me in the thigh.
Kabe narrowed his eyes. “Hip waders? You’re going fishing?”
“No.” I laughed and shook out the bundle. “But I’m gonna spend the next few hours kneeling in snow.” I’d have to take off my boots to put them on, but, luckily, I had on my heated socks so I might actually stay warm during this adventure. “Might as well not get wet while I’m doing it.” I braced myself against a tree and toed out of my left boot.
“That’s pretty intense work.” Nadia gave us a slow once over, like she thought we might have done lost our minds. “You going to wait for specialists?”
Left foot half in the wader’s boot, I spread my hands and gave her one of my big ol’ country boy grins. “You’re looking at ‘em.” A little more serious, I added, “I am actually one of the few officers in this county who have advanced training in evidence collection and preservation.” I jerked my thumb over towards where Fred sat on the bed of the cat jerking up his hip waders. “That man there’s another.”
“Little rusty, but yep.” He stood and stomped his foot into the boot portion. “When I worked Smokey Mountain in Tennessee, back in the late nineties, I took the opportunity to go take the four day Outdoor Body Recovery Course they give for law enforcement out at the U of T’s Body Farm.”
While he’d talked I’d managed to get my other boot off and foot into the waders. “Jess Garts of my department and I went down to Arizona and took a three day course. The other two are State Troopers.” Then I fought with pulling the darn things up my legs.
“One of them would be Doug Dougherty, he’s on his way over.” Suited up, Fred dove back into the bins and bags on the back of the cat. “Caught him on the phone as I was out the door.” When he came back up, Fred checked his tongue at Nadia. She looked up in time to catch the roll of crime scene tape rather than get hit in the chest by it.