Savage Run by C. J. Box Page B

crinkled with concern from whatever peril she was dreaming about.
    Hazelton Road, the route to the site of the cow explosion, cut upward through the timber to the west and there was a small streamside campground, empty except for a single vehicle that was partially obscured by trees. Near the vehicle was a light green dome tent. Joe zoomed in on the tent and the campsite with the spotting scope, feeling like a voyeur. Through a shimmer caused by the distance and warmth, he could see people sitting at a picnic table. Two stout women, one with a mass of thick brown hair and the other with short straight hair, sat on opposite sides of the table. Between them, on the tabletop, were pieces of equipment Joe couldn't identify from this distance. Their heads were bent over whatever they were doing, so Joe could not see the face of either woman.
    Joe zoomed out and moved the scope through the rest of the campground. Empty
    Upstream, though, a reed-thin man with a straggly beard and baggy trousers cast a spinning lure into the boiling creek. The man stood bolt upright, with one shoe on shore and the other on a rock in the stream. Joe smiled to himself. No fishing vest, no tackle box, no creel, no waders, no stoop to his back as he sneaked up on a promising pool. This man did not look like a fisherman any more than Joe looked like a cricketeer. The stream was wild and would calm down, clear, and become fish able in about six weeks, in mid-July Now, it was swelled past the banks with spring runoff, and lures cast into it would rocket down the stream with the fast flow and hang up in streamside willows.
    Nevertheless, fishers were required to have both licenses and state habitat stamps, even if it was unlikely that a fish could be caught, as was the case here. Joe's job was to make sure fishermen had licenses. He zipped the spotting scope in its case, rolled up the window, and started the truck, which woke Maxine from her worrisome adventure.
    one OF THE STOUT WOMEN at the picnic table turned out to be a man wearing thick dreadlocks that cascaded across his shoulders and down his back, but the woman looked vaguely familiar. Both turned to him as he stepped out of his pickup in the campground. They had been reassembling a well-worn white gas camping stove on the table, and the man seemed frustrated by it.
    Joe left Maxine in the truck in case the campers had dogs of their own and approached them on a moist, pine-needled path. Their vehicle was a twenty-year-old conversion van with California plates. He introduced himself, and the couple exchanged a furtive glance.
    The two were purposely ragged looking. He wore khaki zip-off trousers that were fashionably blousey and stained, and an extra-large open shirt over a T-shirt.
    "Raga," the man said, wiping his hands on his pants and standing. "This is Britney We can't get our stove to work."
    "You could use the fire ring instead," Joe offered, pointing to the circle of fire-blackened rocks. "It's real early in the year and there are no fire restrictions as yet."
    "We don't do fires." The man called Raga snorted. "We don't do charred flesh. We're low-impact." It was said as a kind of challenge, and Joe had no desire to follow it up.
    "Raga?" Joe asked.
    "It's short for Ragamuffin," the woman said abruptly Her voice was grating and whmey Joe turned to her, and the sense of familiarity was stronger.
    Raga shook his hair and tilted his head back, and looked down his long nose at Joe. "This is Britney Earthshare. It's not her real name, of course, but it's the name she goes by You might have seen her in the press a couple of years ago. She lived in a tree in Northern California to protest the logging of an old-growth forest."
    Yes, Joe thought. She was familiar. He had seen her on television, being interviewed by reporters who raised their microphones into the air alongside the trunk of the tree she had named Duomo. She would answer their questions by shouting down from her platform, which was