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windshield wiper.”
    â€œI declare, this life is sure fraught with trouble, ain’t it?” he said. He wadded up the ticket and tossed it on the sidewalk.
    You didn’t get the last word with Wyatt Dixon.
    Â 
    I WAS TIRED of feeling like the odd man out, somehow allowed to know only the edges of a situation that even a morally insane person like Dixon seemed privy to. I called the Phoenix office of the FBI and told an agent there who I was. He did not seem impressed. I asked if he would call Seth Masterson in Missoula and tell him I’d appreciate his contacting me immediately.
    â€œI’m not real sure where he is. But I’ll see if I can get a message to him,” the agent said.
    â€œThat’s really good of you. Keep up the fine work,” I said.
    Fifteen minutes later Seth called my office. “Trying to light up my colleague’s pinball machine down in Arizona?” he said.
    â€œWhy do federal agents always sound arrogant over the phone?” I said.
    â€œSearch me.”
    Seth was notorious for his laconic speech and his reticence about his job. In fact, a joke about him in the Phoenix office went as follows: There were three words in Seth’s vocabulary—“Yep,” “Nope,” and, when he was in a talkative mood, “Maybe.” But Seth also had a weakness.
    â€œWant to meet a rainbow trout I know up Rock Creek?” I asked.
    â€œThat’s a possibility,” he replied.
    An hour later he met me outside my office, dressed in khakis, a fly vest, and a bill cap with a green visor on it. We drove east up the Clark Fork in my Tacoma, through Hellgate Canyon, past the confluence with the Blackfoot River and into alluvial floodplain dotted with cottonwoods and bordered by thickly wooded mountains whose slopes were already dropping into shadow.
    We turned off the four-lane at the juncture of Rock Creek and the Clark Fork and entered a long, steep-sided valley where the afternoon light had turned gold on the hilltops and the meadows were full of grazing deer and the creek was steaming in the cooling of the day.
    Seth rode with the glass down, the wind in his face, as we passed beaver dams, flooded cottonwoods, and dalles where the creek coursed over boulders that were larger than my truck. I almost felt guilty at the pastoral deceit I had perpetrated on him.
    â€œGonna ask me a question or two?” he said, looking straight ahead, his eyes twinkling.
    â€œYou working the home invasion at Johnny American Horse’s place?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œBut his spread isn’t on res land. He’s an independent ranch owner.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter. The perps were crossing and recrossing a federal reservation during the commission of a felony,” he replied.
    â€œSo the Phoenix office is now investigating reservation crimes in the Northwest?” I said.
    He grinned at me. “Think a wooly worm might bring those big ones up?” he asked.
    Trout season had not opened yet, so we released the half-dozen rainbows and the one bull trout we caught, and walked back up through fir trees toward the truck. The sun had dipped down through a crack in the mountains, and the water and the rocks in the creek were bathed with a red glow. Upstream, a moose clattered across the stream and chugged huffing uphill into woods that were now black with shadow.
    I unlocked the shell on the bed of my Tacoma and put my fly rod, vest, and waders inside. Seth was quiet for a long time, his eyes obviously troubled by an unresolved conflict inside himself. “I’ve been thinking about taking early retirement,” he said.
    â€œDoesn’t sound like you,” I said.
    â€œI don’t always like the cases I catch anymore. Get my drift?”
    â€œI’m kind of slow sometimes,” I said.
    â€œYou’ve stepped into a pile of pig flop, Billy Bob. I’d get a lot of gone between me and Johnny American