The Dinosaur Hunter(20)

I sat there in my lawn chair beneath my tattered trailer awning and watched a hawk circle lazily in the sky until it made a sudden dive, leveling out before disappearing near an outcrop of sand beside a weathered butte. Likely, a rabbit or mouse was its target. Whether the hawk got a meal, I don’t know but I would put money on it. Considering how hard it is to make a living in this country, predators around here don’t like to waste energy. That’s why they tend to go after sure things.

Which brought me to thinking about our bull. People are different than natural predators. They kill for lots of reasons, not just food, so the purpose of applying deadly force to the bull by a human could have any number of explanations. Consider the little boy or girl with a magnifying glass killing ants. He or she is having fun. Perhaps our bull had been killed just because some warped individual thought it would be a fun thing to do. I started a mental list. Our bull was killed for fun.

Or maybe the bull was murdered because somebody was afraid of it. Fear often causes a human to kill. If, say, a tourist of some sort had been on our property and he was confronted by our bull, could he have panicked, knocked out the bull, then completed the job with a knife? Not logical but feasible so I kept it on my list.

Anger, envy, or revenge were also possibilities. Maybe Jeanette or Ray or even I had done something to irritate somebody and he had taken it out on our bull. This one seemed a long shot. Cows were respected in Fillmore County. You didn’t just kill a cow without there being some really good reason and I couldn’t think of one. OK, I did think of one. What if, say, a certain husband of a certain mayor found out a certain Square C cowboy had been tapping his wife? As I mentioned, Ted Brescoe was a nasty piece of work but, on the other hand, if he’d done it, then why did he also go off and kill one of Aaron Feldmark’s cows and leave that stupid note? That didn’t make sense.

Finally, I thought of the possibility that maybe that note wasn’t stupid at all. Maybe environmentalists in the spirit of the old Monkey Wrench Gang of the 1970s were not only still around, they were here. In that case, if environmental activists were targeting the cows along Ranchers Road, we were going to be in a world of hurt in a county without a sheriff. The state probably wouldn’t do much about it, either. Their troopers were spread thin arresting speeders on the Interstates. As for the federal government, the BLM wouldn’t care and any bureaucratic agency higher up on the totem pole likely would side with the monkey wrenchers, anyway.

All this thinking required another gin and tonic and I was also starting to think about supper. Rice, beans, and pasta were on my menu. I’m a vegetarian, as I think I mentioned earlier. I love the work and I love the cows. I just don’t care to eat them.

About then, Ray showed up and he didn’t look happy. “Want me to fix you a g-and-t?” I asked. It was a facetious question since the boy didn’t drink.

“No, thank you,” Ray said, politely.

“There’s beer in the fridge,” I told Ray. “Help yourself.”

Ray went inside and came out with a can of cola, as I knew he would. He dragged a lawn chair from where I stored several beneath my trailer, set it up beside me, and sat down. “Amelia gone?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “She cleaned up Dusty and took off.”

I let that settle for a bit, then said, “She sure is a pretty girl. Amelia, I mean. I mean Dusty’s not bad but…”

“Don’t patronize me, Mike,” Ray interrupted.

“I wasn’t,” I swore, even though I was.

“Is there a problem?”

Ray took on the thoroughly miserable expression that only a teenage boy in love can exhibit and said, “Amelia hates Montana and can’t wait to leave. I want to stay. So when I asked her to the Independence Day dance, she said she’d love to but we don’t have a future. Hell, what does our future have to do with it? I just wanted to dance. What’s with girls anyway, Mike?”

“A very good question,” I said. “A very, very good question.”

When I didn’t say anything more for a few minutes, Ray said, “Well, aren’t we gonna talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“What’s wrong with girls!”

“I don’t think so, mainly because it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. They’re females, that’s all I know.”

We sat for a little longer, then Ray said, “What’s with that busted shovel?” I had pitched the one that had killed our bull beneath my trailer and I guess he’d seen it when he got the lawn chair out.

“That’s the one used on our bull,” I said.