to slide the device over the top of the frame rail and felt the tactile click of the powerful magnet as it took hold on the steel. Brushing the dried dust and dirt from her hand on her pants leg, she rose and continued her walk as casually as possible.
* * *
Halfway around the globe, Oliver Grey remotely activated the GPS tracking device on his desktop terminal and waited several seconds before the software triangulated the transponder’s location. The image on his screen blurred and then settled on the northwestern United States, the pixelated image clarifying as it zoomed into the town of Whitefish, Montana. A blinking red indicator signaled the location of the Iridium GPS tracking device from James Reece’s vehicle. The software program overlaid the vehicle’s location on existing satellite imagery from Google Earth, providing real-time location data.
After what seemed like an eternity, the dot began to move, slowly at first and then more rapidly as the vehicle left the confines of the small town and reached the highway. The dot slowed several miles out of town and turned onto an unpaved road. After winding through timber and open meadows, gaining altitude as it progressed along its path, the dot stopped at the edge of a large lake and made no other movement for the remainder of the day. Grey scrutinized all of the available imagery of the location, and it was clear that there was a cabin or house there.
Grey reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of vodka and a glass, and poured himself a shot. Raising the drink to the dot on his screen, he smiled. He’d found the son of his first betrayal and current tormenter of his dreams. Montana is where they would strike.
CHAPTER 20
Kumba Ranch, Flathead Valley, Montana
“I DON’T SEE HIM,” Reece said, scanning across the valley with his Swarovski range-finding binoculars.
Raife held his older Zeiss binos to his eyes, his hands cupped across the brim of his ball cap to stabilize the 10-power image. “See the rocky face to the left of the pines, giant pile of rocks?”
“Check.”
“Come down one hundred meters and you’ll see some smaller boulders with a clump of green brush in front of it. See it?”
“I see the brush.”
“See his tines?”
“No… wait. I see him,” Reece said, with excitement in his voice as his brain separated the deer’s velvet-covered antlers from their nearly identical surroundings. “He’s huge!”
“He’s a good one. Let’s put the scope on him.” Raife let his binoculars fall to his side on their long leather strap and began unstrapping a tripod and spotting scope from the outside of his Stone Glacier internal frame pack. He and Reece had hiked up the ridge before dawn, hoping to catch the wise old buck out feeding before he snuck back into the safety of his bedding. The morning air was cool, and steam rose from both men’s bodies after the tough vertical climb.
They knelt just below the ridgeline opposite the mule deer, glassing him from a safe distance across the canyon. Raife had been watching the buck all summer and, when the opening day of archery season came on the first of September, he would make this same journey with his primitive recurve bow. He efficiently set up the spotting scope, quickly locating the animal through the heavily magnified glass. The slightest touch of the spotter or tripod would knock the 60-power image from its target, so he carefully backed away from the scope without disturbing it, motioning for Reece to take a look.
Though the deer was more than eight hundred yards away, Reece could see every detail through the optic. The sun was just beginning to break over the tops of the tall pines, bathing the buck in shadowless light that a photographer would kill for. He probably weighed three hundred pounds, and his thick body was dwarfed only by the size of his headgear. The summer had been a wet one, even by local standards, and his antlers had grown to their full capacity thanks to the lush mountain grasses. He would rub off the velvet soon, exposing the hard, bonelike tangle beneath. The rack was as thick as a man’s wrists at each base, and spanned out nearly three feet. Each side of the buck’s antlers held four points plus a smaller brow tine, making it a “four point” in western parlance. Its forks were deep, its points long.
The deer was a living symbol of Raife’s family’s conservation efforts. He was old and