Open Season

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When a high-powered rifle bullet hits living flesh makes a distinctive-- pow WHOP sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance.  There is rarely an echo or fading reverberation or the tailing rumbling hum that is the sound of a miss.  The guttural boom rolls over the terrain but stops sharply in a close-ended way, as if jerked back.  A hit is blunt and solid like an airborne grunt.  When the sound is heard and identified, it isn't easily forgotten.

When Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett heard the sound, he was building a seven-foot elk fence on the perimeter of a rancher's haystack.  He paused, his fencing pliers frozen in mid-twirl.  Then he stepped back, lowered his head, and listened.  He slipped the pliers into the back pocket of his jeans and took off his straw cowboy hat to wipe his forehead with a bandanna.  His red uniform shirt stuck to his chest, and he felt a single, warm trickle of sweat crawl down his spine into his Wranglers.

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