The Hunting Party

Chapter 1: The Party

The morning Ed Buckner loaded the last of the gear into the truck bed, the thermometer on his cabin porch read thirty-one degrees. He could see his breath in the half-light before dawn, and the mountains to the west were black shapes against a sky that was just beginning to remember it could be blue. He cinched the canvas tarp over the coolers and dry bags and stood back to look at his work. Everything in order. Everything where it should be.

He was forty-eight years old, lean in the way that men who work outdoors their whole lives are lean — not from discipline or vanity but from the accumulated erosion of weather and labor. His face was brown and creased, and his hands were rough, and he wore a canvas jacket that had been patched twice at the elbows. He'd been guiding hunts in the Guadalupe Mountains for twenty-two years, ever since he'd come back from a stretch in the Army and realized that the only thing he was good at — really good at, in the way that matters — was reading land and moving through it quietly.

The clients were due at seven. Four men from Houston. A private elk hunt, five days in the backcountry. The booking had come through his website, which his niece had built for him three years ago and which he still didn't fully understand. The deposit had cleared. The man who'd made the arrangements, a fellow named Pete Stoltz, had been polite on the phone and specific about what he wanted: remote terrain, no other parties, a genuine wilderness experience. Ed had heard versions of this request a hundred times. City men wanted to feel like they were stepping outside the known world. They wanted to believe, for a few days, that the land was untouched and that they were the first ones to walk it. Ed didn't mind the fantasy. He was selling it, after all.

He went inside and poured the last of the coffee from the pot on the stove. His cabin sat on four acres outside the town of Pine Springs, at the eastern base of the Guadalupes. The town wasn't much — a gas station, a post office, a diner called Rosie's that served passable biscuits and gravy. The nearest real grocery store was forty-five minutes south in Van Horn. Ed had lived here long enough that the isolation had stopped being a condition and had become simply the texture of his life. He didn't think about it anymore, the way a fish doesn't think about water.

He drank his coffee standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the scrub and the highway beyond it. A truck passed, heading south. Then nothing. The sky was lightening.

At ten minutes to seven, a black Suburban pulled into his drive, followed by a silver pickup with a rental sticker on the bumper. Ed set down his mug and went out.

Pete Stoltz was the first one out of the Suburban. He was maybe fifty-five, broad-shouldered, with silver hair cropped close and a face that had the well-fed solidity of money. He wore new boots — Danner, expensive — and a Patagonia shell that still had the creases from the package. He crossed the gravel with his hand extended.

"Ed Buckner? Pete Stoltz. Good to finally meet you in person."

Ed shook his hand. Stoltz had a firm grip, the kind that was practiced rather than natural. "Welcome. You made good time."

"Left Houston at midnight. Drove straight through." Stoltz turned and gestured to the other men climbing out of the vehicles. "Let me introduce the group. This is Roger Bergmann."

Bergmann was tall and thin, mid-fifties, with wire-rimmed glasses and the slightly distracted air of a man whose mind was always running calculations. He shook Ed's hand with a brief, dry grip. "Pleasure," he said. His eyes were already moving to the mountains.

"And this is Gene Fawcett."

Fawcett was younger than the others, maybe forty, with a ruddy face and an easy grin. He had the build of a former athlete — thick through the chest and shoulders, just starting to go soft around the middle. "Hell of a drive," he said, stretching. "But hell of a view."

"And Dale Northcutt."

Northcutt was the quietest of the four. He was about Ed's age, compact, with a weathered face that suggested he'd spent more time outdoors than the others. He nodded at Ed but didn't say much. Ed noted the way he moved — deliberate, unhurried. A man who was comfortable in his own body.

"Gentlemen," Ed said. "Glad you're here. Let's get your gear sorted and I'll run through the plan."

They unloaded in the gravel lot beside Ed's cabin. The men had brought too much, as clients always did — oversized duffel bags, cases of specialty ammunition, a cooler full of steaks and bourbon that Gene Fawcett had apparently insisted on. Ed didn't comment. He helped them consolidate, showed them what would fit on the pack horses and what would have to stay behind, and went over the route on a topographic map he'd spread across the tailgate of his truck.

"We'll head up McKittrick Canyon and then cut northwest into the high country," he said, tracing the route with his finger. "There's a basin up here at about seven thousand feet where I've been seeing elk sign all fall. Good water, good cover. We'll set up a base camp and hunt from there."

"How far in?" Northcutt asked.

"About twelve miles. We'll take it in two stages — camp tonight at the canyon mouth, then push to the basin tomorrow morning."

"Twelve miles with full packs?" Fawcett said, grinning. "Pete, you didn't mention this was going to be a fitness test."

"The horses carry the heavy loads," Ed said. "You just carry yourselves and your rifles."

"I can manage that," Fawcett said.

Pete Stoltz had been studying the map. He looked up. "How remote is this basin? I mean, are there other hunters, hikers, anyone else we might run into?"

"Unlikely," Ed said. "This time of year, the park sees some traffic on the main trails, but where we're going is outside the park boundary on state land. I've got the permit. We shouldn't see another soul."

Stoltz nodded, apparently satisfied. Ed had the impression that this mattered to him — the privacy, the isolation. Some clients wanted witnesses to their adventures. Others wanted the opposite. Ed didn't ask why.

They loaded the horses — Ed kept four at a small stable in town — and set out by nine o'clock. The morning was cold and bright, and the trail wound up through stands of juniper and madrone, the rock faces on either side turning from gray to rust as the sun climbed. Ed led on foot, as he always did, with the pack string behind him and the four clients strung out along the trail.

He'd been doing this long enough to read a group within the first hour. The dynamics were always there if you paid attention — who deferred to whom, who talked too much, who was genuinely comfortable and who was performing comfort. In this group, Stoltz was clearly the center of gravity. The other three orbited him. Fawcett was the court jester, keeping the mood light with a steady stream of observations and jokes. Bergmann was quiet, attentive, the kind of man who listened more than he spoke. And Northcutt was the odd one — present but slightly apart, as if he'd been invited to fill a seat rather than because he belonged.

They stopped for lunch at a flat spot where the canyon widened and a thin stream ran over red rock. Ed built a small fire and heated water for coffee. The men sat on rocks and ate the sandwiches Ed had packed.

"So how'd you all know each other?" Ed asked. It was a standard question, part of the guide's toolkit. Get them talking about themselves and they relax.

Stoltz answered. "Business. Roger and I go back twenty years — we were at Lehman Brothers together before the crash. Gene came on board at my firm about ten years ago. And Dale here is an old friend of Roger's."

"College roommates," Northcutt said. "A long time ago."

"Ancient history," Bergmann agreed.

"And you all hunt?" Ed asked.

"Roger and I have done a few trips," Stoltz said. "South Texas, mostly. Whitetail. Gene's hunted some. Dale's the real outdoorsman in the group."

Northcutt shrugged. "I grew up in East Texas. My daddy had me in a deer blind when I was six."

Ed nodded. He could tell. Northcutt handled his rifle — a well-used Remington 700 — with the unconscious ease of long familiarity. The others carried newer, more expensive guns that they treated with the careful reverence of things recently purchased.

"Well," Ed said, "elk are a different animal than whitetail. Bigger, smarter, and they live in tougher country. But that's what makes it worth doing."

They pushed on through the afternoon. The trail climbed steadily, switchbacking through stands of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. The air thinned and cooled. By four o'clock they'd reached the first campsite, a flat bench above the canyon where Ed had camped many times before. There was a fire ring made of stacked stones and a view down the canyon to the desert floor, which was already turning gold in the late light.

Ed set up camp with practiced efficiency — tents, a cook fire, a rope line for the horses. The clients helped where they could. Fawcett proved surprisingly useful, and Northcutt clearly knew his way around a camp. Stoltz and Bergmann were less handy but willing.

That first evening set the tone. They ate well — Fawcett's steaks, grilled over mesquite — and drank moderately. The bourbon came out, but nobody overdid it. The conversation was easy, the kind that happens when men are away from their offices and their families and the obligations that define their daily lives. They talked about football and fishing and the best meals they'd ever eaten. They told stories about previous hunts, some of them probably true.

Ed sat slightly apart, as he always did, tending the fire and listening. He was not part of their world and didn't pretend to be. He was the guide. His job was to get them into the country, put them on elk, and get them out safely. Everything else was their business.

But he noticed things, because noticing things was what he did. He noticed that Stoltz and Bergmann, despite their long friendship, had a tension between them — nothing overt, just a slight formality in the way they spoke to each other, as if there were subjects they were carefully avoiding. He noticed that Fawcett watched Stoltz the way a younger employee watches a boss, always gauging the mood. And he noticed that Northcutt, for all his quiet competence, seemed watchful in a way that went beyond the normal alertness of a man in unfamiliar country.

None of this concerned Ed particularly. Every group had its undercurrents. He'd guided parties through divorces, business disputes, old grudges, and once, memorably, a situation where two of the clients were sleeping with each other's wives. The wilderness had a way of surfacing things. Ed's job was to keep everyone safe and focused on the hunt. The rest was not his problem.

He banked the fire at nine o'clock and told them they'd be up at five. The men retired to their tents. Ed sat alone for a while, listening to the wind in the pines and the distant, descending call of a screech owl. The stars were thick and close, the way they only are at altitude, away from any light. He thought about the route for tomorrow — the push to the basin, the ground he wanted to glass for elk sign. He thought about the weather, which was supposed to hold clear for three more days.

He did not think about the men in the tents or what had brought them here or what lay between them. That would change. But on that first night, under those hard bright stars, Ed Buckner's world was still simple, still ordered, still his own.