The novel Open Season launched author CJ Box's series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett
If you'd prefer to set aside city or suburban life for descriptions of rugged landscapes--winding rivers, wooded foothills, herds of antelopes and deer, all in the shadows of mountain peaks--a ride along with Joe Pickett might be for you.
Wyoming--the setting for Open Season--is a big place (over 100,000 square miles). With just barely more than fifty game wardens, each has a lot of ground to cover, and much of it is accessible only by horse. Game warden Joe Pickett's days are full of checking licenses and chasing poachers, while trying to spend time a little time at home with his growing family.
Let me stop here to say, I love this book. I knew it would be a great one for this blog, and we'll get to the key storyworld questions shortly. It was worth some extra time since my last post, because it's such a good fit (and I just sent my own book back to the editor!). A reminder that what follows is a spoiler-rich discussion, so if you plan to read Open Season, go and do so now and then come back here.
All of that to say that Open Season isn't a perfect novel and a few aspects will be problems for some readers. Which brings us to the first important topic.
Guns
Everyone has an opinion on guns, but they're essential for Joe Pickett's job. Everyone he runs across in his job is armed and his role in ticketing hunters for their missteps means he's not always popular with the locals in Twelve Sleep county.
Joe's skills as a marksman are debatable, but his sterling reputation as a straight-shooter in life is well known. This extends to an incident where while in training to be a game warden, he ticketed the governor of the state of Wyoming.
But the real trouble for Joe Pickett begins while making pancakes on a weekend morning. His daughter Sheridan tells him about a dream she had about a monster coming out of the mountains and crash through their fence. This dream becomes real when Joe goes outside to find a trail of blood on the ground, leading to a dead man in sprawled out in his backyard.
Murder
That man is Ote Keeley, a local outfitter with whom Joe has a past. Keeley disarmed Joe while Joe was citing him, in his first days on his permanent post in Twelve Sleep county. That news spread quickly and led to questions about Joe's fitness for his job as game warden, a role he's only had for a short time.
When Joe contacts the local sheriff's office to report the dead man on his government owned property, turns out they're already out in the field investigating the report of a man with a gun and a plastic cooler riding on horseback through a local campground the night before. That man is dead in his yard, with a horse waiting nearby. Also in the yard is the plastic cooler, with the lid off and little inside but some scratches and scat.
What might have been in that cooler has the potential to upend the entire community, and quickly does just that to Joe's life. One of the criticisms of Open Season is that with it's frequent references to the Endangered Species Act, it's easy to see what's coming, but that just makes it a thriller rather than a traditional mystery. Box does an outstanding job or raising the stakes and turning up the heat in section after section.
Which brings us to the first storyworld question. Joe Pickett loves his job. He's wanted to be a game warden since he read about the job in a magazine when he was a boy. The reality is tougher, because while it's great for him, the state owned house and low pay puts a strain on family life with his two daughters and wife Marybeth, with another child on the way. Marybeth's mother arrives soon after the body is found to remind her daughter she could have done much better after college--at least financially--if she hadn't married Joe. When we learn their credit cards are almost maxed out, the financial strain is obvious.
Life in Saddlestring, Twelve Sleep County
Every story has to be set somewhere, and while Box has taken time to describe the beauty of Wyoming landscape, when he turns to the lives of its residents, they're darkened by this same financial strain. The dead man Keeley, makes his living as an outfitter, guiding out-of-state tourist hunters to places where they can bag game. But Box shares little romance over Keeley's lifestyle. The outfitter has a family to worry about himself, and when Joe gives him a ticket, it's for hunting out-of-season. Joe suspects that the man is poaching to resell the valuable animal horns overseas, but Keeley claims that it's just "meat for the pot", suggesting that either way, when out of season, the man has trouble feeding his family.
The town of Saddlestring has many local businesses and Box includes in the local economy a lumber mill, logging truck drivers, outfitters, cowboys, and multi-generation ranchers. While most of these folks are offstage, they're the stakeholders in the future of the community. Yet it doesn't appear as though anyone is really thriving, and eventually the author gives a nod as to why.
The Oil and Gas Industry
What's disappeared are the oil jobs. The boom and bust cycles of the oil industry largely led to the area's prosperity and subsequent economic woes. Oil wells were capped when the industry experienced a downturn, and the good paying jobs that brought people to the area were lost. The construction of a new oil pipeline promises to bring new jobs to the area for a lucky few, which Joe learns from the former game warden and Joe's mentor Vern Dunnegan, a man who now works for the pipeline company itself. But Joe knows the benefits of the pipeline will pass by most of his neighbors. This puts families on the margins, and those already on the margins into rough territory.
No one exemplifies this more than local eccentric, Clyde Lidgard. After the murdered man Keeley rode down the mountain to Joe's house, the local sheriff suspects that he was killed by his outfitting companions. Joe and two other lawmen ride deep on horseback to the "Elk camp" high in the hills. In a shootout, Clyde Lidgard is killed. Afterward, the bodies of two other men are found murdered, by a gun matching the caliber of a gun found on Lidgard's body.
The sheriff declares the case closed. Joe has little authority to investigate further, but pulls on several of the many hanging threads, including the cooler found in his yard. Why die bringing it down the mountain, Joe wonders? Also, when Joe goes to Lidgard's home, a cluttered trailer off a remote road, he doesn't find any ammunition matching the gun with which he allegedly murdered three men. Joe comments that no one knew Lidgard well, but he wasn't considered dangerous:
"Joe thought about the fact that men like Clyde LIdgard were not the aberration in places like Saddlestring that many might think. Mountain towns and out-of-way rural communities all had men like Clyde Lidgard in and around them. Stops at the end of the road collected Clyde LIdgard's like dams collected silt."
Economic Power and Indifference
Does anyone in Wyoming have the good life? As it turns out, there's one group in particular who's doing quite well. As a favor to Joe, former game warden Dunnegan arranges for Joe's family to stay at the Eagle Mountain Club overlooking the Big Horn river. Not a hotel or resort, but an enclave of wealth. While the club is located in the community, it's cut of from any real contact or any stake in the goings on. The private golf club has only 250 members, and the only way to join is to pay a $250,000 fee and then annual dues. Slots only open up when a member dies. Mostly a fly-in-and-out crowd, membership is kept secret, as is the very existence of the club to the outside world.
Which isn't to say the outside world has no influence on this corner of Wyoming. In addition to the lost oil jobs, coal mines with their high paying (and dangerous) jobs had closed a decade before. Meanwhile, out-of-state investors have bought up agricultural land for tax write-off purposes, with many ranches left empty, eliminating more jobs. And when outsiders with little stake in a community hold undue power over it it, that often leads to one thing.
Corruption
Joe keeps pulling on threads in the outfitter murder case. At first, he's mocked by the local sheriff when he asks about the "status of the investigation." The sheriff tells him to leave it alone. Instead, he takes the little bit of animal droppings from the plastic cooler and sends them to the division headquarters. He also wisely sends a sample to a college friend in another state who has a job in wildlife management.
Joe calls the state office several times to get the findings, but instead gets called in for an investigation into the gun incident with Keeley months before. At that meeting, held at the last minute on a Friday when the state office is empty, Joe is suspended.
Stripped of his power to investigate for simply asking questions, Joe realizes he has only the weekend to find the truth.
As it turns out, there's not one, but two pipelines being built across Wyoming. Both running from Canada and heading to California, the first to cross the Rocky Mountains will make billions. Joe's predecessor, Vern Dunnegan traded his connections in the county to his new employer, Interwest, for a good salary and stock options in the pipeline company. But Joe has something that Vern thinks he may need, and early in the story, he tries to buy it from Joe.
Joe Pickett's Trusted Reputation
Joe is broke, and has very little power. Yet, early in the book, Vern Dunnegan comes to Joe's hospital bed, after Joe's injured in the shootout with Lidgard.
Dunnegan gives Joe the facts. Vern's aligned himself with the oil pipeline folks and thinks Joe should too. If Joe were to leave his job as game warden (something he trained years for), he could triple his salary with a company like Interwest.
With the resources of a giant company behind him, what does Joe have that Dunnegan and Interwest might want?
Dunnegan lays it all out:
"You've got a wife and kids, Joe. You're a nice wholesome guy. You're a goddamned hero right now. No one could ever doubt your sincerity when you talk to them. You deserve a lot better. You're working for nothing. You have a family, a picket fence, and a dog. You...are an endangered species. There aren't many like you, Joe."
Dunnegan is a powerful man in the county, using his connections to enrich himself. He's a drinker and a womanizer, and dangles a similar lifestyle to Joe, who doesn't take the bait. When it becomes clear that Joe's not easily tempted, he becomes an obstacle instead of an asset, and steps are take to destroy Joe's reputation and strip him of his job.
The Other Currency
So Joe actually possesses something of great value, and this is largely what Box is writing about. Joe's reputation as a good man--as a person that can be trusted--isn't something that can be manufactured by those who could profit from it. With all the headwinds the people of Twelve Sleep county face, Joe and people like him trade in a currency ordinary people all need.
Integrity.
Especially from someone in a position like Joe. The contrast between the people who hunger for power and the people who won't sell out their values is one that needs to be told, again and again.
The rest of the novel goes heavily into thriller territory and that's beyond the scope of this blog.
But it's a great read.
So if you want to happens next, please pick up a copy. Also, this book features a 'child in peril'. Normally I wouldn't recommend a book with that feature, but Box handles it well and gives the child a lot of agency. Just wanted to disclose this.
Next up, I'll talk about a book by Brian Freeman.