Page 10 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

Colt turns the laptop toward me. "Ridgecrest Holdings. Development company registered in Portland eighteen months ago. Single-purpose LLC, no public-facing projects, no website. Their sole activity in the state filing records is land acquisition." He taps the map. Red circles mark properties along the state forest boundary, running north and south of my twelve acres. "They've bought every parcel of state-adjacent timber in the region. Fourteen properties. All within the past eighteen months."

I look at the map. My land sits in the middle of the red circles.

"It's an acquisition corridor."

Colt's head comes up.

"I spent eleven years in environmental consulting before I moved here. I sat in rooms where they drew maps like this one." I tap the gap where my twelve acres should be. "Buy the perimeter, squeeze the holdout, wait for the price to drop."

"Every property bordering the state forest," Colt says. "Except one."

"Mine."

He nods. "I ran the plates you photographed on the white Dodge. Both trucks registered to a contracting company out of Bend. The contracting company has one client." He flips a page in the county records. "Ridgecrest Holdings."

My hands press against the table. I feel the grain of the wood under my palms.

"The poachers aren't independent operators," Colt says. "They're contractors. Paid to work your land and the boundary around it. Snare lines, camera destruction, tire slashing, the carcasses. All designed to make the property unworkable. Dangerous. The kind of place a person sells because it stopped being worth the fight."

Nobody moves.

"Eight months." My voice comes out flat. "They've been doing this for eight months. Everything I reported, every incursion, every escalation—it was engineered."

Colt pushes his glasses up. "The trail camera footage from the state forest boundary shows the same two trucks running your east perimeter on a schedule. Tuesdays and Fridays. The snare lines go in the night before your Monday and Thursday checks. They've been mapping your routine since at least February."

I think about my Tuesday supply runs. My Monday perimeter drives. The notebook on my desk where I log patrol times and feeding schedules because I keep everything written down and organized and predictable.

They read my notebook through my routine. They didn't need to break into my office. They just watched.

"The dead coyotes weren't a warning about pulling snare lines," I say.

Knox meets my eyes. "No. They weren't."

"They were a message. Leave, or it gets worse."

"Which means they'll escalate," Knox says.

I push my chair back and stand. Not because I'm leaving but because sitting with this feels wrong, and my body needs to move. I cross to the window and look out at the compound lot, at the garage where Tom set up temporary cages for the hawk and the owl, at the gravel where his truck is parked.

Six years I put into that land. And behind it, the whole time, someone with a checkbook and a map, working to take it apart.

The fury settles in my gut and stays there.

I turn back to the table. "So, what do we do about it?"

Knox and Colt exchange a look that tells me they've already had that conversation.

"Colt keeps building the paper trail," Knox says. "County records, registered agents, financial connections. When we know who's behind Ridgecrest Holdings, we'll pay them a visit." He taps the map. "I've got respect for the Sheriff. He's fair. But fair and fast aren't the same thing, and the law doesn't always show up before the damage is done. So we hand him the paper trail and let the county do what the county does, and in the meantime, the club handles what's in front of us." He looks at me. "Your reports. Every one you filed. They matter now."

I nod. My throat tightens, and I swallow against it, because I'm not going to stand in this room and feel emotional about the fact that those reports finally mean something.

Knox calls a meeting—someone called it church—that afternoon.

I sit in Tom's apartment with the hawk on the windowsill in his travel cage, the bird screaming at a moth on the other side of the glass, and I listen to the low rumble of voices through the floor.

The meeting breaks. Boots on the stairs. I hear Finn's voice first, then Rex, then the heavier tread of bodies moving with purpose. Not the loose, scattered sound of men heading to the kitchen for coffee, but directed, each step carrying weight.

I go to the hallway and look over the rail.