Land of Wolves, page 14
I walked toward him as he finished the call. He looked to be about a thousand years old with wrinkles on his wrinkles, but handsome nonetheless even with a prodigious and colorful black eye.
“Howdy.”
He cracked open the door of the early eighties Dodge D100 with more rust holes than body. “Hola, hola, Sheriff. How you doing?”
“I’m good, how ’bout yourself?”
“Okay, okay.” He shut the door behind him and smiled, a striking set of what I assumed were dentures sparkling white in the sunshine. He shook my hand like an irrigation pump. “More work these days, but work is good.”
“Agreed.” I spotted a bench on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store where we might be able to talk without being overheard. “Let’s have a seat over here.”
The small man followed, and we sat. “Plenty of snow still up on the mountain, and I am thinking that we will have good spring.”
I unzipped my jacket and nudged my hat back. “We already are.”
He nodded. “Sí, sí.”
“Seen any wolves up on the mountain?”
He shook his head. “No, no. I no see no wolves.” He smiled again. “You sure you see one and not some dog?”
“Yep, I saw one, but only one.” Having passed the pleasantries, I got down to business. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about Miguel Hernandez?” He nodded. “How well did you know him?”
“Not too well, not too well. He work for us a couple of years now.”
“What was he like?”
“Moody, he was moody man—read too many books.”
“Do you know if he had any problems here in town with anybody?”
“What kind of problem?
“I don’t know, arguments he might’ve had, fights or anything?”
He laughed, fingering the discolored swelling around his left eye. “He up on the mountain, who he gonna argue with, the trees?”
“I heard he was in a fight at the Euskadi Bar in town.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“What about Abarrane, did he ever argue with him?”
He studied me. “They have arguments sometime, sure.”
“About what?”
“Money, time, the sheep—same stuff everybody argue about.”
“How big were the arguments?” He shrugged, saying nothing. “I was told recently that Abarrane is a little tough on the hired hands.”
“Who tell you that?”
“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment.”
He stared at me some more. “I work for the man for twenty-three year now—you think I stay with him he not good to me?”
“That’s not what I asked, Mr. Jimenez.”
He huffed and puffed a bit. “Why you try to blame this on Mr. Extepare?”
“I’m not blaming anyone, but there’s a man who’s been killed and I’m trying to find out who did that.”
“Not Abarrane.”
“Then who?”
He stood, smoothing his wool bibs. “I no talk to you no more.”
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Jimenez, but we can either have a nice chat here on this bench out in this lovely spring air or we can go over to my office—either way this conversation isn’t over until I say it is.”
He stood there for a moment and then sat back down. He didn’t say anything but crossed his tattooed arms and looked out into the parking lot.
“Thank you.” I waited a moment and then continued. “So, am I to understand that Abarrane has a bit of a temper and has physically abused his hired help in the past?”
Begrudgingly, he responded. “Not like you talk.”
“Then what?”
“These men, the new ones, they no good, no good. They no want to work. We come there, and the camp all gone to hell and sheep scattered all over the mountain—that no good.”
“You mean Miguel Hernandez?”
He gestured openly. “All of them.”
“Let’s confine ourselves to Hernandez. Did you ever see him arguing with anybody besides Abe?”
“Yes, he argue with everyone—he rather argue than breathe.”
“He ever argue with you?”
“Yes.”
“About what?”
His head dropped, but then he looked away. “He sometime stick his nose where it no belong.”
“Concerning?”
“I . . . Not at, um . . .” His eyes returned to mine. “. . . liberty to say.”
I let that one sit for a spell. “Is it true that he was hurting himself, cutting his arms with a knife?”
He nodded his head and looked away. “Sí, sí.”
“Just one more question.” He continued to study the parking lot as I leaned forward, examining his face. “How did you get that black eye?”
* * *
—
“If you can throw together a couple of sandwiches for me too, that’d be great.”
Ronnie, the deli guy, started cutting the meat on the slicer and looked up at me. “Nobody cuts ham this thick, Sheriff.” He grinned. “What are you doing, feeding a wolf?”
“Watch what you’re doing before you lose a thumb.”
He finished wrapping up the pound of ham and then went about making my sandwich. “Horseradish?”
“Absolutely.”
Knowing my habits, he reached back and grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips and an iced tea, depositing them in a white paper bag, and then began making the next one. “Philly hoagie?”
“How did you guess?”
He chin pointed. “She’s standing behind you.”
I turned to find my undersheriff. “Howdy.”
She cracked open a Diet Coke I was sure she had purloined from the cooler. “Hey. Any luck?”
“The camp tender said there was another herder up on the mountain range, Jacques Arriett, and that there had been some problems between Hernandez and Arriett and that I might want to go speak with him.”
“How do we find him?”
I patted the breast pocket of my shirt. “I have a map Jimenez drew for me.”
She sipped her soda. “So, we’re going on a picnic?”
“A jug of wine and thou . . .”
Ronnie nodded at Vic and held up some peppers. “Hot and sweet?”
“Yeah, just like me.”
She leaned against the glass and looked up. “Anything else?”
“Jimenez was sporting a beauty of a black eye.”
“That’s the camp tender, right?”
“Yep.”
“Who clipped him?”
“He kind of intimated it was the other herder, Arriett.”
“Basque?”
“French-Basque, the genuine article. Think we should get Sancho to go with or instead of us?”
She made a face. “Why does he get to do all the cool stuff? Besides, he’s got an abandoned vehicle, a lost dog, and somebody stole one of the CLEAR CREEK TRAIL signs.”
“Spring is officially upon us.”
Ronnie winked at Vic and then handed me the entirety. “You can pay here—save you time at the checkout line.”
“Deal.” I handed him some bills, took my change, and we started out through the automatic doors. Figuring that since I had Dog we’d travel in my truck, I made my way and climbed in as the beast gave up riding shotgun and jumped onto the backseat. Vic climbed in and buckled up.
“Where’s the infamous shotgun?”
“I gave it to Jimenez to give back to Abarrane since Lucian didn’t want it.”
She nodded. “So, what’s the story on all the animosity between cattlemen and sheepmen?”
I started my truck and backed out, took a right, and headed out of town. “Transhumance.”
“Is that some kind of LGBTQ thing?”
“I don’t think so.” Settling in, we raced across the foothills and then began the long climb crisscrossing the canyon that leads to the high country. “It’s a type of herding that goes back to the old-world methods of pastoral migration, moving large herds of sheep from the lowland plains to the mountains where there’s enough grass to fatten the herds.”
“So, what was the problem?”
I gestured out the window. “It’s not easy to explain but private land ownership and fences to make it simple. The old style called for vast areas where sometimes thousands of sheep grazed across the checkerboard of public and private land. There was always and maybe still is competition between the cattlemen and the sheep owners for that grass. You add the homesteaders into the pot, and you historically get trouble.
“So, it was all about grass?”
“Some, but I suspect there was a little more to it than that.”
“What?”
“Bigotry. Most cattlemen and cowboys were white, while most shepherds were Hispanic, Mexican, Native, or Basque. The cattlemen looked down on the sheepmen—they saw them as meek individuals who didn’t have the gumption to seek independence like the cowboys had, and both cattlemen and sheepmen looked down on the homesteaders.”
“That’s stupid.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t, but you have to remember that period of the American West was a time of great racial identification and suspicion of different peoples.”
“Was it really violent?”
“In 1903, the Sheep Shooters, a group of antisheep cattlemen, tallied between eight thousand and ten thousand sheep killed on the open range. Hell, hooded riders used clubs to kill thousands of them here in Wyoming and Montana.”
“When did all that foolishness stop?”
“World War I, when we all got the Germans as a mutual enemy. It’s still a difficult business to be in. The sheep industry has bottomed out in many ways. There are fewer sheep in this country than there were two hundred years ago and only a tenth of the number that there were in the forties. There are now a little over five million sheep, mostly located on land that can’t support cows.”
“Who has the most sheep?”
“China, with about a hundred and forty million.”
“How come we’re not getting shepherds from China?”
“Good question.”
She sat up as I turned right onto the gravel roadway. “Where, exactly, are we going?”
“The road at Hunter Corral and the access path on the other side of Paradise Guest Ranch.”
“So, the other side of paradise.” She lodged her boots on the dash as she always did. “Sounds good to me.”
* * *
—
Clay Miller, the head ramrod at Paradise Guest Ranch, said we were free to use their road to the park where Extepare had one of his herds, and he even invited us to lunch—I had held up my white paper bag.
He cocked his stained cowboy hat back on his head and nodded. “Arriett’s up in that North Park section, but he comes in here every week or so.”
“For what?”
“Wine—he’s French after all.”
I nodded and started my truck as Clay squinted an eye at me. “So, what are we doing about this wolf problem?”
Playing into the old joke, I made something up. “I think the Game and Fish are capturing them, neutering them, and then releasing them.”
“They do understand that the problem is the wolves eating the sheep and not screwing them, right?”
“Have a nice day, Clay.”
Laughing, he pulled back from my window and waved us through the open gate. “Don’t get bit.”
Bouncing along the dirt road, we entered the tree line and watched as the forest closed around us. There was a small amount of snow on the ground where the drifts had been, but it was obvious that winter was in recession, and before long the brimming reservoirs would be sending the life-giving water down the mountain to the pastures and irrigation ditches below.
“I love it up here.”
I turned to look at her. “Really?”
“There aren’t any people.”
“Oh.” I waited a moment before adding. “You know I have a cabin up here.”
She turned to look at me. “What?”
“A private lease with the Forest Service that my family has had since 1904.”
“Where?”
I gestured in a vague direction. “Oh, back that way.”
“And you never told me about it?”
“Its formal name is Ranch 34 of the National Order of Cowboy Rangers—a fraternal order of cowboys that started up before the turn of the century whose lodges were referred to as ranches, and the one here in Absaroka County was my family cabin, Ranch 34. Back before World War I, these groups were mostly organized to provide life insurance and burial rates, but the NOCR was infamous for one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Stealing the body of William Frederick Cody, aka Buffalo Bill.”
She turned in the seat to stare at me. “What?”
“January 10, 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody died of kidney failure in Denver, Colorado, and for four months lay in state until they could blast enough ground away to bury him at the top of Lookout Mountain, there near Denver. The American Legion and other groups in Wyoming responded by joining together in a reward for the return of the body to Cody, Wyoming, which resulted in the state of Colorado placing the body under armed guard until it could be interred under four feet of concrete in June of that same year.”
“So, Wyoming and Colorado fought over the body?”
“Yep.”
“And this National Order of Cowboys and Indians . . .”
This time I said it a little more forcibly. “National Order of Cowboy Rangers.”
“They went down and tried to steal the body?”
“Yep.”
“But they didn’t?”
“There’s a lot of conjecture on that.”
“But Buffalo Bill is buried on Lookout Mountain in Colorado, right?”
I drove along in a modicum of silence. “I don’t know, is he?”
She continued to study me. “Oh, you fucker.” After a moment, she slumped back in her seat. “I want to see this cabin.”
I nodded. “If I can remember the combination.”
“Then you can tell me the rest of the story.” She pointed to the ridge in the wide meadow. “Sheep.”
Sure enough, there was a broad band of off-white at the ridge, so I wheeled up the dirt road and slowly bumped our way to the location about a half-mile distant.
The sheep wagon was backed into the trees at the very top of the ridge, which provided viewing access to both sides of the vast field of what would become green grass. Pulling my truck up a respectful distance, I parked and we both got out. I didn’t see any dogs or livestock other than the sheep, so I allowed Dog the luxury of stretching all four of his legs.
The beast jumped out and trotted toward the wagon, choosing a chocked wheel to lift a leg.
There were about a hundred head milling about, looking for new grass and bathing in the warmth of the spring sun, as I knocked on the door of the wagon. “Jacques Arriett, are you home?”
There was no response.
Walking around the wagon, I could see where a horse or mule had been tied up in the shade, but the water bucket was still half-full and the stake line hung limp to the ground. “He must be out on his mount.”
“Rounding up wine?”
“Maybe.” I looked around but couldn’t see any sign of the man. I smiled. “I guess we could’ve called ahead.”
“Uh huh.” She knocked on the door again. “You think he hung himself too?”
“I hope not, and just for the record I don’t think Miguel Hernandez hung himself either.” Glancing toward a copse of aspens near the wagon, I walked over and ran my hand over the trunks, studying the signs and images that had been freshly carved in the tender bark.
“And this breakthrough in the big case is based on what?”
Pulling out a small notepad from my jacket, I drew a pencil from my pocket and quickly sketched the images as best I could. “Mule hair on the inside of Hernandez’s pants.”
“That means somebody could’ve used a mule to hang him.”
I continued to study the symbols. “And the mules were tied up when we found his camp.”
“Holy shit, you’re right.”
“I guess I’d be more worried if this Jacques guy’s mule or horse were here.”
Folding her arms, she leaned against the wagon. “Walt, why the hell would someone be running around killing shepherds?”
I took in the entire area but could see no sign of Arriett. Finally folding my field notepad closed, I turned to look at her. “I wish I knew.”
* * *
—
The place hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen it almost fifteen years ago. Some of the footers on the front porch were starting to rot along with the exposed rafter ends and the purlins. The old asphalt roof was missing a few tiles, but the tarpaper underneath appeared to be holding up, at least until I could get inside.
Feeling along the top of the doorframe, I finally found the old commercial-style key. I turned to see Vic leaning against the railing looking through the grove of quaking aspens to the beaver pond below. “This is beautiful.”
“Not bad, huh?”
“Why do you never come up here?”
I looked around, taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out. “Strong associations with my grandfather.” I turned back toward the door, hoping that Tom Groneberg, the manager of my familial properties, hadn’t changed the lock.
Luckily the key turned like I’d been here only days before.
Standing there in the doorway, I inhaled the old air that my grandfather had at one time exhaled and my feet felt frozen to the porch.
“You all right?”
“Um . . .” I glanced inside. “Yep.” I took a step. The place looked exactly as I remembered. The room was dominated by an old moss-rock fireplace, barrister bookcases, and old Mission furniture. From where I stood I could see the massive moose mount on the far wall and the old Navajo rug that covered the floor where the weathered leather sofa stretched across the room.
