Winona went to examine it. “Coyote. It’s shiny and too small to be wolf scat.”
Deputy Marcs knelt beside her. “Do they teach you how to identify animal poop in vet school?”
Winona laughed. “There weren’t any courses on that particular subject when I was in school, but when you take care of animals, you learn pretty quickly.”
They moved onward, the tracks leading them steadily uphill, through a glade of willows and aspens that had been badly gnawed.
She stopped, ran her fingers over the scarred bark of a stunted aspen. “It looks like you have a lot of elk up here.”
“We do.” Jack drew his water bottle out of his pack, screwed off the top. “They move back and forth between our property and National Forest land. They’ve taken out some of our aspen stands entirely.”
“When they reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone, they witnessed a trophic cascade.” When this drew blank looks, she explained. “The wolves created an ecological shift. They fed on the ungulates—elk and deer—and reduced their populations. The remains left by the wolves fed other species and put nitrogen into the forest soil. The lower population of elk meant that aspen and willow glades could thrive, and that helped the beaver bounce back because they eat willows. The increased number of beaver dams helped aquatic species to thrive. The ecosystem began to heal itself.”
Nate adjusted one of the straps on his backpack. “Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. I would welcome wolves on our land—provided we got compensation for our livestock losses.”
They stopped at noon to hydrate and eat the bagged lunches Jack had made for them—roast beef sandwiches, celery and carrot sticks, apples, and homemade brownies.
Jack drew out his sandwich. “Mountain air makes a person hungry.”
While they ate, Deputy Marcs peppered Jason with questions. How old had he been when he’d first learned to cut sign? What had made him want to work with the Shadow Wolves? Would he be willing to come back and do a training for the Forest County Sheriff’s Department?
As Winona ate, she couldn’t help but feel the peace that came with being in the wild. The landscape here was so vast that it seemed to swallow up everything but the present moment. Up here, there was onlynow.
She breathed it in, closed her eyes, let her senses go.
The wind in the trees. The staccato chirp of a downy woodpecker. The angry chatter of a squirrel. The scent of pines and fresh, clean air.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Jason watching her.
She met his gaze, felt a stab of longing, looked away. “It’s beautiful up here.”
“That’s what my great-grandfather thought.” Jack reached into his lunch bag and drew out his apple. “He bought this land after fighting in France in World War One. He wanted to escape the world and find some peace.”
Winona unwrapped her brownie. “Did he? Find peace, I mean.”
“I surely hope so.”
After lunch, they moved on again, heading across the mountainside but no longer gaining elevation. The wind picked up, got colder, a bank of gray clouds moving in from the northwest.
Nate looked up. “That storm is coming.”
It was around three in the afternoon when they reached the western property line of the Cimarron and found the fence down.
“This is the old mining road.” Jack pointed with a gloved hand. “That’s Forest Service land on the other side.”
Jason held up one end of the severed wire. “Wire cutters. This is where he’s coming onto your property. You could repair the fence, put up more warning signs, let him know you’re aware of him, maybe even put up some kind of surveillance camera.”
Nate turned to his father. “I’ll bring up some men and repair it as soon as I get a chance. He could just cut the fence again or enter somewhere else, but at least the bastard will know we’re watching.”
Jason knelt by the road. “The tracks lead that way, down the mountain. But there are a lot of other tracks mixed in—bike tires, other four-wheelers, horses.”
Deputy Marcs knelt beside him. “It looks like this road is popular with mountain bikers, hikers, horseback riders, and all-terrain vehicles. Are you able to discern one set of tire tracks from another in all this mess?”
“Yeah. I could lose it farther on, but for now, it’s pretty clear.”
Winona walked over, looked down at the overlapping tracks. “How isthatclear?”
Jason touched a finger to the track. “See the flying chevron here in the center of the tire tread? That’s our guy. Let’s see where this goes.”