Ralph McCaig had been born over in Dolan Springs, to a father who had worked at the Tennessee Schuylkill Mine and a mother who mostly drank and complained, especially after the old man died in a mining accident and the pension check's never quite made it to the end of the month. Except for a hitch in the army during the Gulf War, in which the closet he had been to action was a street brawl outside a bar in Frankfurt, Germany, he'd always lived in Arizona's high country, land of canyons and plateaus, evergreen trees, mule deer, and tourist's.
On the back bumper of his Chevy pickup, which had been new before that war but old by the time he bought it in 1998, he had a sticker that said, if it's tourist season, why can't we shoot'em? A gun rack over the rear window held a twelve- gauge and a 30.06, and he had actually used the ought- six once to fire at a BMW that whipped around a blind curve at eighty or more, startling him so much as he relieved himself beside the road that he peed on his Justin work boots. By the time he zipped up, scrambled to the truck, and yanked down the gun, though, the Beemer had been nothing but a pair of distant taillights, and he didn't think he came anywhere near hitting it.
Didn't mean he wouldn't try again in a similar circumstances. He made his living with a small salvage logging operation, so unlike some of his neighbors, his paycheck didn't depend on the tourist trade. At the moment, he was between contract's, but that wouldn't last long. The people who hired him were the ones who had to deal with the environmental impact studies and logging permits and all of the bureaucratic paperwork, all he had to do when they gave the word was gather a crew and go into the woods and take out the downed trees and the slash, or the skinny striplings that would never gain purchase there. Land managers liked neat, clean forests these days, big trees with plenty of space around them.