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Bad Dirt : Wyoming Stories 2 by Annie Proulx

Curve-billed Thrasher, Alamogordo NM, November 12, 2011

The first story, The Hellhole, begins:

On a November day Wyoming Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski was making his way down the Pinchbutt drainage through the thickening light of late afternoon. The last pieces of sunlight lathered his red-whiskered face with splashes of fire. The terrain was steep with lodgepole pine giving way on the lower slope to sagebrush and a few grassy meadows favored by elk on their winter migration to the southeast. Occasionally, when the sight lines were clear, he caught the distant glint of his truck and horse trailer in the gravel pullout far below. He rode very slowly, singing of the great Joe Bob, who was "... the pride of the backfield, the hero of his day"; in front of him walked the malefactor without hunting license who had been burying the guts of a cow moose when Creel came upon him. The man's ATV was loaded with the hindquarters. The rest of the carcase had been left to rot.