Three-Inch Teeth

Game warden Joe Pickett is enjoying a relatively peaceful morning, not having had to issue tickets for illegal hunting or trespassing on private ranches so far. He is especially buoyed to have met four young men who were out hunting only to fill their freezers, as per local tradition, rather than for trophies.

Joe gets a call from Clay Hutmacher, Sr., the foreman of the Double Diamond Ranch. He wants to know if Joe knows his son’s whereabouts. Clay Jr. did not return home from his fishing trip yesterday. Joe promises to check with his daughter Sheridan, who has her own apartment in the city, and get back to Clay Sr.

Hours later, Joe gets another call from Clay Sr., who is now panicked. He has found Clay Jr.’s severed leg by the river, with an animal’s bite marks. Joe races toward the woods in his truck, alerting the Game and Fish Department over the transmitter about a possible grizzly attack.

In the woods, Joe finds a traumatized Clay Sr. sitting on a rock. He confirms that Clay Jr. was torn apart by a grizzly and says that his remains are close by. Joe finds Clay Jr.’s mutilated body in a mound, his clothes wet, suggesting that the bear killed him in the water and dragged him to the mound to eat later. Promising to cull the grizzly who killed Clay Jr., Joe persuades his grieving friend to go home. As he leaves, Clay Sr. mutters that Clay Jr. was going to be Joe’s son-in-law. Joe calls his wife, Marybeth, to give her the terrible news of Clay Jr.’s death.

The same day on which Clay’s body is discovered, Dallas Cates is in the process of being released from Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. In prison, he is a leader of the far-right white supremacy group WOODS—“Whites Only One Day Soon” (36). Correction Officers (COs) Ryan Winner and Connie Egleston accompany Cates to the outtake room. Winner taunts Cates throughout, hoping to get a reaction from him. Cates knows that Winner wants to goad him into attacking him so that Winner has an excuse to thrust Cates back into prison. Unlike the other COs, Winner genuinely likes confronting and tormenting the felons.

Winner and Egleston bring out Cates’s clothes and belongings, which were seized when he was sent to prison. The belongings include $1,800 in cash. Cates knows that Winner would have taken the money were it not for Egleston’s presence. The clothes are now too tight for Cates, who has spent his years in prison building an extremely muscular physique. Cates’s rodeo championship buckle and the belt, which was a gift from his mother, are missing. When Cates asks for the belt, the COs taunt Cates for having an unhealthy fascination with his mother, Brenda. Cates has Brenda’s face tattooed on his shoulder.

Cates swallows his anger and puts on the gag clothes that Winner gets him: white skinny jeans, a pink hoodie, and a dinosaur belt. As he grabs his meagre effects and walks out, he tells Winner that he has added him to his “list of special people” to whom he sends Christmas cards (42). Cates meets Bobbi Johnson, the girlfriend he met online while in prison. She and Cates head to a motel in her truck.

Joe is fatigued from the day’s trauma by the time he gets home to meet Sheridan, Marybeth, and Sheridan’s bosses, Nate and Liv Romanowski. Joe comforts Sheridan, after which she retires to her room. The rest of the group discusses the grizzly attack, the fifth in Wyoming that fall. Joe tells Nate that a widespread panic has gripped both hunters and Game and Fish personnel, with hunters cancelling their trips to Wyoming parks. Meanwhile, a command center has been set up at the river. Snares and floodlights have been installed to trap the bear, which is expected to return to feed on its kill. The attack was strange because it is unlikely that Clay Jr., a seasoned fisherman, would have done anything to provoke the bear.

The conversation turns to Sheridan, who works for Yarak, Inc., the bird abatement business run by Liv. Nate wants to send Sheridan to Colorado with some birds for an assignment but wonders if she would be up for it during such a difficult time. Joe tells Nate that Sheridan would probably want to go, as she is a resilient person.

Later, Joe and Marybeth leave Nate and Liv to discuss the loss of Clay Jr. with Sheridan. Sheridan confesses that she feels guilty about Clay’s death because she was not as deeply in love with him as he was with her. She had been dreading his proposal. Although his death is horrifying, a part of her feels relieved that she will not have to let him down and disappoint him. Joe and Marybeth reassure Sheridan that she has no reason to feel guilty.

Cates and Johnson are in bed in a motel in Rawlins, with the television playing in the background. Cates shows Johnson his new tattoos, a bear’s top and bottom jaws on the underside of each arm. When he joins his elbows together, she can see a bear’s mouth open in a roar.

Cates also has six boxes tattooed on the back of his left hand, each representing a person who he believes led to his family’s destruction. These include Joe Pickett and Nate and Liv Romanowski (all of whom he clashed with in previous books of the series). Cates plans to add another box tattoo for Winner, the CO. Cates tells Johnson that his enemies first broke his father’s neck, leaving him to die in a sewer pit. They turned his mother into a quadriplegic and sent her to a women’s prison, where she died. The enemies killed his brothers Bull and Timber, too. Cates had promised his mother that he would get his revenge on the enemies.

After Cates and Johnson have sex, they discuss their plans. Johnson wants to head to California, picking up her sister Carmin and her kids on the way. She wants to start a new life in California, as everyone knows her and Cates in Wyoming. Johnson has served a term in county jail for urinating in the soups of four city council members at the diner where she worked because the members had opposed a petition to legalize weed. Cates agrees to the plan. However, when the TV news catches his attention, he has a change of heart. The news shows Joe talking to reporters about the latest bear attack in Wyoming.

Cates tells Johnson that they need to leave for Saddlestring immediately to first settle unfinished business with Joe. To execute his plan against Joe, Cates needs to contact someone in Wyoming and then head to Colorado to meet his former cellmate, a man of unique abilities.

The Predator Attack Team—four armed wardens from around Wyoming—arrive in town to help the local authorities catch the grizzly that killed Clay Jr. Joe is impressed by the group, which comprises regional Game and Fish Department Supervisor Brody Cress, Dubois game warden Tom Hoaglin, Cody game warden Bill Brodbeck, and large-carnivore specialist Jennie Gordon. Though she never talks about it in public, Gordon has actually faced a bear attack. A sow bit her legs and hips in Yellowstone National Park, leaving her with a slight but permanent limp.

Joe accompanies the group to the site where Clay Jr.’s remains are still intact. Gordon tells Joe that because Clay was attacked in water, his blood would have been washed away, compromising the DNA sampling. Further, though grizzlies are hardwired not to attack humans, once a bear crosses the line, it is likely to repeat the behavior. Therefore, they have no option but to identify and kill the bear that attacked Clay. Cress tells Joe that the harm the grizzly can do is enormous, as its jaws can exert a pressure of over 1,100 pounds per square inch (PSI). In contrast, human jaws have an average PSI of a little over a hundred.

The team arrive near the river and collect DNA samples before Clay’s remains are exhumed and removed by the sheriff’s office. Gordon and Cress note that the bear tracks suggest that it was a sow that attacked Clay. Since most bears in Wyoming national parks have been either collared or tattooed with a number, Gordon hopes that they will be able to find the bear fast.

As the group explores the area for bear tracks, a white SUV pulls up. Gordon groans in irritation, as she recognizes this as the car of the “Mama Bears” (74), an animal rights group.

Brodbeck tells Joe that the Mama Bears are well-meaning activists but often lose sight of the larger picture in their pursuit of animal rights. They consider the wardens the enemy for trying to trap and cull a killer bear, forgetting that if the bear lives, it is bound to attack and kill more humans. Married to multimillionaires, the two women who head the Mama Bears are powerful, as they organize Hollywood fundraisers for animal rights and use their resources to interfere in Game and Fish operations, such as removing animal snares and destroying fences.

Joe and the others greet Lynn Fowler and Jayce Calhoun, the Mama Bears. Fowler tells Joe that they’re there to save the bear that the wardens plan to kill. Fowler and Calhoun believe that this bear is a sow tattooed with the identifying numbers 413. The Mama Bears have named her “Tisiphone,” after a Greek fury. They say that Tisiphone does not deserve to be killed because she turned violent only after a man, distracted by his phone, ran over her three cubs in Yellowstone National Park. Fowler asks Joe if he, too, wouldn’t reach a murderous frenzy if all of his children were killed at once.

Gordon asks Fowler to calm down since they don’t even know if the grizzly involved in the current case is 413. He also points out that suggesting that the sow went “insane” with grief after losing her cubs is attributing human behavior to an animal. Grizzly sows do not behave in the way that Fowler suggested. As the group argues with the Mama Bears, Brodbeck heads off to investigate the area further, carrying his rifle.

Minutes later, Joe hears a sharp sound of a branch cracking. As he turns in the direction of the sound, he sees a massive grizzly lunge at Brodbeck. As the bear snaps its jaws around Brodbeck, viciously mauling him, Joe and the other rangers shoot at it. Undeterred, the bear drags Brodbeck into the stream. By the time Joe and the others scramble to the stream, the Mama Bears have driven off, the bear is retreating, and Brodbeck is nearly dead.

The wardens call for emergency services. They know that they’ve hit the bear, possibly in its leg, because there is a trail of blood leading away from Brodbeck. Through their binoculars, they spot the bear running up a slope, breaking down the trees in its way. Asking Joe and Gordon to guard Brodbeck until the EMTs arrive, Cress and Hoaglin go off into the woods to chase the bear. As they await the EMTs, Gordon tells Joe that what they just witnessed is not normal bear behavior at all.

Cates instructs a reluctant Johnson to drive them toward Hanna, a small town in Wyoming, where he wants to visit an old railroads museum. As they pull into the museum compound, Cates tells Johnson to keep watch in the car outside while he meets his mysterious contact. Johnson is unaware that Cates does not plan to meet anyone at all but to steal a taxidermized bear called Zeus from the building. He’d heard of Zeus from his old rodeo mate Cody Schantz, whose mother, Peggy, was the volunteer director at the museum. Zeus is a famous bear, having been killed by a local in the 1900s after it went rogue killing cattle and elk. Its death was celebrated, and the townspeople had it mounted for posterity.

Cates steps into the museum and sees Zeus, mounted in an attacking position. He grabs a saw from the tools section, accidentally turning on the lights. He turns them off quickly, topples over the eight-foot bear, and begins to saw it into parts so that he can take it away. Meanwhile, the briefly turned-on lights alert police officers nearby, and an officer arrives at the museum to investigate what is happening. Johnson comes to the window to warn Cates. Cates keeps quiet, but the officer comes into the museum to investigate. Cates ambushes the officer and grabs his gun. When he recognizes Cates, Cates shoots him dead. He tosses the bear’s head and paws out of the window, dunks the museum in alcohol, climbs out of the window, and tosses in a match. He and Johnson drive away with the officer’s gun and the bear’s head and paws.