I found the elk carcass on a Tuesday in late October. Three days into a solo backcountry

patrol in the thorough far region of the Shoshone National Forest. The animal had been dead for

less than 24 hours. The blood pooled beneath its opened belly was still tacky, not yet dried to black crust,

and the eyes had not yet gone to milk. What bothered me was not the kill itself. I had been a game

warden in northwestern Wyoming for 11 years. I had seen hundreds of gut piles and carcasses, legal

and otherwise.

What bothered me was how the animal had been opened up.

The cut ran from the sternum to the pelvis in one clean line.

No hesitation marks, no sawing.

The hide had been peeled back and folded, almost neatly, and the organs had been removed

and placed in a row on the ground beside the body.

Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, all of it arranged in order, left to right

on a bed of flattened brown grass, like a diagram in a veterinary textbook.

I crouched beside the carcass and studied the ground.

No tire tracks. No boot prints other than my own. The nearest road was 14 miles to the east,

and the trail I had ridden in on was the only maintained path within 10 miles. My horse, a 12-year-old

buckskin named Dale, stood tied to a lodgepole pine 30 feet away.

He was watching me with his ears pinned back, which I did not care for.

I pulled out my handheld GPS and marked the coordinates.

Elevation was just under 9,000 feet.

I was camped two miles north at the confluence of two unnamed creeks that fed into

Thorough Fair Creek, in a drainage so remote that the nearest permanent human structure

...