Out of Range by C. J. Box Page A

many beers. He tried to reassess where he was in time and place in regard to his new assignment. He was four days behind schedule, and he had not yet had a chance to really talk everything over with Marybeth, without distractions. He had frozen when he should have fired. He convinced himself that if the bear had gone after Trey, he would have reacted well and started blasting. Of course he would have, he thought. He had pulled his weapon and fired in anger before. Once, he had hit a man from a long distance, but he hadn’t known it at the time. But he had never faced someone, or something like a bear, looking him straight in the eye.
    Later, he felt the shroud lifting. The guilt he had felt earlier about leaving Marybeth and the girls was still there, but the challenge of what he was about to face surged hot and steady. He already missed his family, but the residue of the telephone call with Marybeth remained. It had not been a good conversation.
    Sure, she had a right to be worried and angry. But he had wanted to talk with her, tell her how tough it had been to go facetoface with that bear, and what he had done. Instead, it had all been about her. She made him feel guilty. She always made him feel guilty. He knew the last five years had been tough on her. She’d gone through more than anyone deserved. But would there ever be a time when he didn’t have to walk around on eggshells? When she didn’t seem to blame him for what their life had become?
    He was being unfair. Despite everything, he loved her.
    Without her he would spin off the planet. He needed her to ground him.
    But he looked forward to the change. He looked forward to his new district.
    Had the pressures in Saddlestring, and in the house, really gotten to him to this degree, he wondered, that the prospect of riding up alone on armed men in a hunting camp seemed like a boy’s holiday? He tried to shake that thought out of his head. He tried to make an argument that it was good to have a mission, good to have a tough assignment. It was good to be trusted by Trey, to have been chosen out of the other fiftyfive game wardens for the hottest, most highprofile district.
    As he drove up the canyon, he watched the signal on his cell phone recede to nothing, followed by a digital no service prompt.
    Here we go, he thought. Here we go.
    Seven
    Even though he should have been prepared for them, even though he had seen them dozens of times in photos, paintings, movies, on postage stamps, and in person, Joe still felt his heart skip a beat when the timber opened up on the road south of Yellowstone Park and the Tetons filled up the late afternoon vista. Mount Moran in particular, with its commashaped glacier of snow, burned bright in the cloudless sky. The dark, rounded shoulders of the Bighorns, his mountains, had been replaced by the glittering silverwhite Tetons, which thrust upward like razoredged sabers trying to slice open the sky. He felt like he was switching his comfortable horizon with a new, dazzling, hightech model.
    He wondered if he would ever get used to seeing those mountains without feeling a flutter in his stomach each time he looked. It was hard, Joe thought, not to be intimidated by the Tetons. There were no other mountains like them in the world; so new, sharp, and lethal that foothills hadn’t yet had the courage to approach them. He wondered if Will Jensen had ever gotten used to them. How could something that dramatic ever really provide the comfort of familiar scenery?
    Traffic south to Jackson through Grand Teton National Park was heavy, and Joe became part of a long parade of vehicles. The highway was choked with huge recreational vehicles helmed by older drivers who apparently thought the fiftyfivemileperhour speed limit was a challenge they wouldn’t dare confront. He settled in, unable to pass because the exodus of tourist traffic in the oncoming lane was just as dense. Driving cautiously, he knew that the sighting of a moose, elk, or bear