The peace of the wintry woods was shattered by rifle shots – a series of them. Game Warden Joe Pickett follows the sound and is stupefied to find the county’s leading forest service officer  massacring elk, surrounded by seven massive corpses and an ample supply of tequila. The man is not in a right state of mind, but no sooner does Joe have him arrested with plastic ties than the fed has wriggled free and run into the forest, where Joe finds him dead – shot with arrows.   As a savage snowstorm moves in, Joe struggles to get the body of the man to his truck, and barely gets to the safety of town before several feet of snow are deposited on Saddlestring and the surrounding country.   The snowstorm makes it difficult to mount an investigation, and by the time things begin moving Joe realizes that this strange murder, coupled with the presence of  a caravan of ‘sovereign citizens’ in the mountains, is going to grow into a nightmare, one spurred on by the presence of a unstable careerist in land management.   Although Joe is a good man who hates abusive authority figures, he has an especially personal stake in the drama developing on ‘Battle Mountain:  one of the sovereign citizens is the biological mother of his adopted child, April. WInterkill  is a compelling thriller marked by natural and character drama,   one that is especially fascinating because of the moral wringer it puts Joe through. 

Winterkill makes a formerly subtle aspect of these books more obvious: the land itself is a force, almost a character, powerfully shaping the story itself and the characters enmeshed in the landscape.  As with Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, the land is not a painted background, but a living presence that participates in the story.  Several of the dramatic arcs in Winterkill owe entirely to geography, especially the mountain scenes where Joe’s options are  tightly constricted by both the restricted access and the continuing snowstorm.  Speaking of the mountain, I was very intrigued by some of the characters connected to the ‘sovereign citizens’, and impressed by Box’s depiction of them,  which makes them human, if a bit paranoid. Joe’s ability to try teaching out to them despite his loathing of one of their members is admirable, and that makes his increasingly emotional battle all the more compelling towards the end, where circumstances  and his desperation to defuse a potential Waco/Ruby Ridge situation see mild-mannered Joe replaced by someone altogether, someone he barely recognizes. Box’s ability to create a story with believable humans who have different values and flaws, then throw them off one another, is quite impressive and bids me to keep reading this series.

Quotes:

“They take a woman who hates people and put her in charge of a task force to go after rednecks who hate the government,” Nate said. “This is what I love about the Feds.”

“But if you don’t start telling me the truth, and I mean every bit of it, things are going to get real Western real fast.”