Trophy Hunt by C. J. Box Page B

away forever. But I’ve never seen peregrines just take themselves out of the hunt altogether.”
    The falcons dropped as if they were about to strike targets—wings tucked, talons out and balled—but they suddenly flared at treetop level. She could hear the urgent whispering sound as their wings shot out and caught the air to slow them down. Seconds later, both birds flapped noisily and their feet outstretched before descending into the tall grass. She watched as Nate approached them. When he bent and lowered his thick, leather welder’s glove, the birds refused to mount it, and stayed hunkered down in the grass.
    Nate said, “This is not normal.”
    “Why don’t they come to the fist?” Sheridan asked.
    “I don’t know,” Nate said. “It’s like they’re afraid to show themselves.”
    Sheridan walked slowly across the opening, toward where the birds had landed.
    “Feel it?” Nate asked, his eyes narrowed. “There’s something in the air. Low pressure or something.”
    Sheridan stopped again. Her heart was beating fast, and she did feel it, although she couldn’t describe what it was. It was like pressure being applied from above, from the sky. In a fog, she watched Nate bend over and physically place one of the peregrines on his fist. Usually, they were eager to hop up on it. He straightened up with the falcon on his arm, only to have the bird release its grip and drop to the side. The leather jesses that were tied to its talons were grasped in his fist, and the bird flopped upsidedown, shrieking and flapping violently. Sheridan felt a puff of air from them as the falcon beat its wings.
    “Shit,” Nate cursed, lowering the bird to the ground. “He’s going to hurt himself.”
    “Be careful with him.”
    “I will, and sorry about saying shit. ”
    “It’s okay.”
    Nate met her eyes, then slowly looked up at the sky.
    Sheridan also looked up, but could see nothing in the clouds. She felt the pressure on her face, a kind of gravity pull on her skin as if she were on a fast ride at the county fair.
    “I don’t know what to tell you,” Nate said, his voice thin. “It’s like there is something up there the birds are afraid of. They refuse to fly.”

9
    A N HOUR LATER and twenty miles away, a man named Tuff Montegue clucked his tongue to get his horse moving and pointed the gelding north, toward the timber. It was nearly dusk, and Tuff had the blues. He sang “Night Riders’ Lament,” his favorite cowboy song:
While I was out a-ridin’
    The graveyard shift midnight till dawn,
    The moon was as bright as a reading light
    For a letter from an old friend back home. . . .
    Despite his current profession, which was ranch hand for the Longbrake Ranch, Tuff despised riding horses. He had nothing against them personally, and enjoyed singing and listening to songs about them, but he preferred tooling around in a ranch pickup. Nevertheless, he was a cowboy. A real one. In his mid-fifties, he looked the part, because he was the real number. Droopy mustache that curled to jawline, sharp nose, weatheredface, sweat-stained Gus McCrae hat, Wranglers that bunched on his boottops and stayed up as if by a trick of magic over his nonexistent butt.
    He liked to tell people, especially tourists who bought him a whiskey in the Stockman’s Bar, that he was the only bona-fide cowboy left in the Bighorns that spoke American. It was sort of true, since most of the ranchers couldn’t find cowboys anymore except from Mexico, South America, or wannabes from former East Germany and the Czech Republic. Even when he left the profession, as he often did, he found himself coming back. Between stints at five different ranches in Park, Teton, and Twelve Sleep Counties, Tuff had been a satellite-dish salesman, a mechanic, a surveyor’s assistant, a cellular-phone customer-service representative, and a mountain man in a chuck-wagon dinner theater in Jackson Hole, where his job, every night, was to ride a horse into the tent