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TROPHY HUNT
by C. J. Box
Putnam, June 2004
323 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0399152008


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Wyoming fish and game warden Joe Pickett is fly-fishing with his young daughters on a rare day off. He has taught them how to release fish they catch without harming them and that they must keep only enough to eat. Sheridan, Joe's older daughter, points out a dead trout in the stream, and then, a few minutes later, another.

They follow the trail upstream and come across an arrogant man, Jeff O'Bannon and his trophy girlfriend, Cindy, fishing. Joe has a short discussion with him. Joe and the girls notice an acrid smell coming from the nearby forest. Jeff tells him it is a dead moose. Joe follows his nose and finds the butchered animal in a clearing. All the glands have been removed from the moose, as well as half his face. A strange smell pervades the dead animal and only insects have infested the body. Scavenging animals have left it alone.

A little later, a small herd of cattle is found mutilated in the same way as the moose. The local task force formed to study the deaths is convinced that a grizzly bear is the culprit. Joe, having seen the animals shortly after death, is equally convinced that something else is at fault. And, to add to the confusion, there seems to be a poacher in the neighborhood.

When two men are killed and butchered many miles apart on the same day, the residents of Saddlestring, Wyoming, are sure that a spaceship has landed and aliens are intercepting their brain waves. A self-styled psychic researcher sets up his caravan in town at about the same time. Are the mutilations really caused by little green men or is there a rational explanation?

Joe Pickett is not your run-of-the-mill western hero type. He tries to teach his daughters the fine edge between greed and necessity. He is paid a subsistence wage, and given a small house to live in, but he knows that some people kill animals in order to eat, and he sympathizes with those people. He also knows that some people hunt in order to kill, and those he watches carefully.

I've never been hunting and rarely been fishing. I don't own a gun and am generally against gun ownership, but out west, in CJ Box country, it is almost essential He carefully treads between environmentalists and survivalists. TROPHY HUNT, like the three that came before it, shows a man with a conscience trying to do his job and raise a family on a limited income, and is set against the beautiful, unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. The other books in the series are: OPEN SEASON, SAVAGE RUN, AND WINTERKILL.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, July 2004

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