Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

piles of dredge parts, two wall tents, and a large blue plastic tarpaulin strung between them as an awning. Underneath the latter was a fireplace made of stones, around which were arranged a few threadbare aluminum lawn chairs and a couple of ice chests.

"They owe us," said O'Leary, steering toward the camp.

Before we got closer than seventy-five feet, two dogs, a massive Great Dane and a hulking mongrel, emerged from the campsite and charged us, barking furiously. I looked at O'Leary. He sighed and stopped the truck. The dogs circled us, barking and snarling through the open windows. O'Leary didn't look particularly alarmed. Apparently this was normal.

A man in his early thirties appeared from the campsite and ambled toward us, yelling at the dogs. His long brown hair was tied in a ponytail down his back. He wore a broad-brimmed cowboy hat over a red muscle T-shirt. His jeans were stuffed into cowboy boots. From a cowboy gun belt festooned with bullets around his waist hung a holster containing a huge, long-barreled revolver. The holster was tied to his lower thigh with a leather thong, gunfighter-style.

One fundamental of all parks, state and national, is that they exist to preserve wildlife. Further, parks are used intensively by hikers, horseback riders, mountain bikers, and boaters, and this kind of recreation is generally inconsistent with gunfire. Most park system regulations are designed to promote civility between users and make casual visitors feel at ease. So, not surprisingly, it's illegal to walk around wearing a pistol at almost every park in the United States—outside of Alaska, where subsistence hunting is common and some people feel the need to have a ready defense against grizzly bear attack.

When an armed man approaches you on foot, you don't stay in your patrol car. Perhaps counterintuitively, two armed men in a stationary motor vehicle are no match for a single man on foot. Wedged between your seat, dashboard, steering wheel, and doors, you make a fatally predictable target. It's surprisingly difficult to draw your weapon from the type of holsters we use when seated in a vehicle. If you do manage to get your gun out, seated facing forward, your field of fire is extremely limited. You are entirely visible to your opponent through the glass, but fire a single round from your own gun through one of those windows and immediately you will be deafened, and your aim may be warped by the bullet's impact with the glass. And the thin steel of an automobile body affords little actual protection from modern firearms fired from outside. You had better get out.

I watched O'Leary for a signal. He sat quietly with both hands on the steering wheel, watching the man with vague interest as the latter approached his open window. The Great Dane and the huge mongrel raced back and forth from one side to the other, pawing at the doors. Arriving at O'Leary's window, the miner grabbed at the Dane, and I saw his shoulder jerk as the animal strained against his grasp on its collar. It was still barking furiously.

"Buck! Shut the fuck up!" the miner yelled down at the dog.

"How you doing today?" O'Leary said casually to him. The dog whimpered. The other one was over at my window, showing me its teeth.

"Okay, I guess," the miner replied to O'Leary. "What's goin' on?" Now both dogs were barking again.

"Buck! Moocher! No!" the miner yelled, swatting at the Dane below O'Leary's window.

O'Leary reached for a clipboard between us on which he recorded who had paid and who hadn't. He showed it to the miner. "Seems like you haven't given us any camp fees for a while."

"Yeah," replied the miner. "I was gonna take care of that, but my check hasn't come yet. Scott went up to Georgetown to get our mail. Maybe you can come back."

As this exchange took place I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I couldn't see the gun or the miner's right hand. It just didn't seem dignified to offer ourselves up for slaughter like this. Even if things remained friendly and the gun never came out, we were at a conversational disadvantage, because everyone knew we were in no tactical position to make any demands.

"Well, let's get this taken care of or you'll have to leave pretty soon," O'Leary was saying to the miner. He reached for the gearshift on the column. The miner nodded and stepped back, and O'Leary turned the Jimmy toward the river. The gunman watched us for a moment, then began trudging back to his campsite. Turned loose, Buck made one more charge, barking at our rear bumper, then bounded after his master.

Down along the riverbank, we found another camp. Nearby, in the river, two men were running a suction dredge. The dredge was like a small barge on two metal pontoons about ten feet in length. On its deck were mounted a gasoline engine driving a powerful water pump and a sloping aluminum trough. One wet-suited miner was working face-down in the water as we drove up, his mask supplied with air by a small hose from another pump on the dredge's deck. He was maneuvering a much larger, ribbed hose like a giant vacuum cleaner along the river bottom, sucking up rocks and sand. The other man stood on deck watching the material the first miner sucked up rattle down the trough and back into the water, where it formed a muddy plume downstream. Apparently the gold had a way of settling out behind ridges in that trough. The motor and the rattle of the stones made an unholy din. When the miner on deck saw us coming, he yanked on one of the hoses, and when the other surfaced he shut the machine off. The two men waded ashore to meet us. I noted with satisfaction that they were armed with only diver's knives.

O'Leary got out of the Jimmy and collected some damp dollar bills. Then he asked to see their dredge permit. One of the