“Every January, in a ballroom at the Bellagio in Vegas, there’s a dinner for a hundred or so people. Black tie,” Persaud said, slipping her hands into her pants pockets. “It’s an auction, actually, to sell four sheep tags—permits, if you will—to the highest bidders, to hunt for bighorn in Montana.”
“So these beautiful creatures, with their enormous curly horns, are peacefully grazing out here on your land, while some high rollers are standing around at cocktail hour in Vegas, looking to spend money to take out the biggest and oldest in the pack,” I said. “Am I close?”
“Close enough.”
“And how much does a Montana ram go for?” Prescott asked.
“This year’s top bidder paid over five hundred thousand dollars,” Persaud said.
“Half a million dollars?” I said. “To shoot a sheep?”
“At least that. The number goes up every year,” she said, “and it all goes to our conservation efforts, like I tried to explain earlier. We have teams of employees who collar every one of the animals so we can track them and check them for disease. We hire workers whose jobs are sheep-specific—care and control. We’ve really brought the number of bighorn sheep in this region back way up.”
“So the hunter gets a tax write-off to a charitable wildlife foundation of some sort,” Prescott said, “and a chance to bag the big kahuna.”
“The Rocky Mountain Bighorn Foundation,” she said. “That’s what we fund.”
“Collar or kill ’em. That’s quite a contrast,” I said. “Where’s Longmire when I need him? Aren’t these the Absaroka Mountains?”
“Walt Longmire has Vic. He’s got no use for you,” Prescott said to me, before turning to Persaud. “Who won the auction this year?”
“I don’t go, James. This is my backyard,” she said. “I’m sure you can find the names of the top bidders online.”
“What makes this kind of hunt so tough?” I said. “Those sheep in the valley look like sitting ducks down there.”
The older Karl Jansen spoke up. “The big money don’t buy much for an amateur hunter,” he said. “Any fool can get himself a bear if he sits alongside a trout stream out here long enough. Could be half-blind and still get lucky hitting a big elk or a turkey. Hell, I could bag those from my easy chair.”
“Comforting to know,” I said.
“What you’re looking down on is not where the bighorn spend their time,” Jansen said. “Like Junior told you, that herd must have been spooked off a ridge. Maybe a helicopter or something came in real low.”
“Why? Where do you usually have to go to find them?” I said.
“Follow my son,” Jansen said, pointing off in the distance, to the northeast. “He’ll show you why it’s so difficult. Bighorn live in steep terrain, above the timberline. Places not many folks have been to or care to go. It’s not like standing still behind a duck blind and shooting one out of the sky. You can stalk these sheep for weeks till you get them.”
Good for the sheep, I thought.
Chidra Persaud and James Prescott disappeared out of sight, behind the tall rocks, following Junior. I didn’t like that three of the people in our group of five had guns. I didn’t like the idea of being one of the two who were unarmed.
Karl Jansen brought up the rear.
“Paul Battaglia made this climb?” I asked, trying to scramble over some brush that had blown onto the path.
“Slower than you,” Jansen said. “With a tall walking stick. But he stayed on it most of the way.”
“Pretty good for a man his age,” I said. “I bet he talked a lot. I bet he asked a ton of questions.”
I was interrogating a man who was parsimonious with his words.
“Did that,” Jansen said.
“What kind of things?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at him.
“Keep your eyes forward, ma’am. Keep moving.”
I pulled myself ahead by grabbing the bare branch of some sort of scraggly tree.
“What did Battaglia ask about?”
“Names, mostly. Wanted to know more about Miss Chidra, but that shouldn’t have been any of his business.”
“What other kind of names?” I said, cresting that slope, until I realized there was another crest—even higher—right around the bend.
“He asked fewer questions than you,” Jansen said. “Move on. They’ll be waiting for you.”
We spiraled upward and onward. I finally caught up with the others, who were standing on a flat boulder, high enough over the valley to make me dizzy when I looked down.
Chidra Persaud put her fingers to her lips to signal me to be quiet, and passed me the binoculars, pointing to a craggy ledge across the river. We were on the back side of the hill that we been climbing, facing across to a low part of a mountain range instead of the valley.
I looked through the glasses but saw nothing. Rocks, dirt, cacti, and brush. Nothing moved.
I lowered them and held up my hands.
Karl Jansen came up from behind and raised the binoculars in front of me again, training them on a specific spot. The shiny objects like the ones I had seen below, earlier, came into sight. I adjusted the lenses. Now I could see a dozen or so sheep—some of which were rams, with long curly horns.
I nodded to Chidra and the others.
She walked back to me and whispered in my ear.
“Do you see the very large ram? Much bigger than the others?”
I squinted into the binoculars and fine-tuned my focus. “Yeah.”
“That’s Horace,” Persaud said.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Is it like you thinking you’re Diana?”
Chidra Persaud bit her lip. She had obviously been brought up to be more polite than I had.
“Junior Jansen has been following Horace for five years now, all up and down these mountaintops,” she said. “We figure he’s close to fifteen years old.”
“You can pick Horace out from the other rams, year after year?”
Persaud smiled. “It’s like parental instincts, separating identical twins who would fool the rest of us, at any distance,” she said. “Junior uses a hunting scope. He can recognize Horace by the details on his horns—the battle scars, if you will—from years of head butting. Horace has been broomed.”
“Did you say ‘groomed’?” I whispered back. “These guys get groomed before you kill them?”
I don’t know why I kept my voice so low. I would have been happy for the sheep to scatter and run away; I wasn’t going to let anyone shoot at a living target while I was around.
“No. It’s called ‘brooming,’” Persaud said. “It happens to them naturally. They lose the tips of their horns in battle. It shows that Horace is one of the old boys, king of the hill. He’s a real prize.”
I handed back the glasses. “Why not just transplant Horace?” I asked. “Airlift him in one of those wildlife slings and send him off to the rez. Let him out to stud, like he deserves. Seems like the right thing to do.”
“You don’t understand his value, Alex,” she said. “If one of the Montana permit auction winners comes here to shoot, and Junior can help him get Horace—who is really a prized animal—well, that can save a lot of other sheep. It gives us half a million dollars to work with.”
Naming the poor beast—identifying him and tracking him for years—made me feel even worse about the doomed Horace.