Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

Sage set off in the light of the half-moon, just now peeking over Sacajawea Mountain. The valley sparkled below in the light of Mother Moon. Not a single electric light burned in the valley. Like everywhere else, they’d lost electricity when the grid went down in early October. Unlike everyone else, the Wallowa Valley didn’t seem to care. They’d switched over to oil lamps and solar camping lights, and carried on. At two in the morning, even those lights were extinguished. The valley probably didn’t look much different than it had a hundred years before.

The moon painted the fields of snow-dappled prairie in sapphire blues, interrupted only by the black speckles of thousands of cattle, motionless in the cold night. Sage breathed in the cleanness of the scene.

He’d asked Aimee Butterton a lot of questions about Wallowa. It’d become an obsession with him—a romantic affection for them after having a burger with Commissioner Pete. It was likely three parts personal uneasiness over the mission, and one part hope for the future.

The people of Wallowa lived in quiet balance with their mountain home, Sage had learned from Aimee. They raised cattle amidst a tremendous herd of elk, trading range lands, hunting and beef harvest in a careful dance that preserved the prairie, their livelihood and the elk herd. Under the winter moon, Sage sensed the people and the land, linked together through generations like star-crossed lovers.

His mission felt like the opposite of that. He came as a thief in the night, seeking to take—to reap where they hadn’t sown. Yet, he’d made a promise to his father: he would do everything necessary to survive, and this reconnaissance fell neatly on the list. It was survival—serving a police captain and a county that had its share of corruption; Sage couldn’t deny it, not in the honest moonlight and not standing in this valley, cloaked in its naked grandeur. The city of La Grande had side-stepped chaos, but it echoed the brokenness of Seattle.

La Grande P.D. walked the same paths of old government. Reaping where a man hadn’t sown had been the disease, and someday, honesty might be the cure. Sage knew Mother Earth well enough now to say for certain, she would not stop her onslaught until men won back their souls. For him, that meant keeping his word to his father, whatever the discomfort.

With that thought, he trudged down out of the foothills, toward the ranch he thought belonged to Commissioner Pete. If he could locate the family snow machines, it’d make for a lightning-fast getaway when they came to ambush the Commissioner.

The next nearest ranch was a quarter mile away. It’d be lots easier if they could just take Commissioner Pete’s snowmobiles.

The snowshoe down from Sage’s camp seemed like a couple miles, but snowshoeing downhill was almost like skiing. He closed the distance to the ranch in less than twenty minutes.

The snow didn’t thin out until Sage reached the prairie flats. He found a prominent pine, shucked off his snowshoes and stabbed them into the snow that’d tumbled off the boughs. He walked the rest of the way to the cluster of barns in his boots.

Sage passed by the tall barn and headed straight for the low barn he took as the motor pool. The big, sliding doors were open, and nothing stirred as he slipped inside. He stopped and waited, just inside the doors for his eyes to adjust. He carried a head lamp in his pocket, but he dare not use it, now just a hundred feet from the ranch house.

A dozen snow machines sat in rows along both walls of the motor pool. He retrieved his headlamp and cupped his hand over the bulb, then turned it on. With the thin light shining between his fingers, he looked over each machine, checking for a key and examining the gas gauges. They all had keys in the ignition and none had less than half a tank of gas. Sage had no idea how much gas it’d require for a snow machine to run twenty-five miles back to the county line.

He noticed many of the machines appeared to be old, the vinyl on the seats cracked and brittle, with the rotting, yellow foam poking through. There were eight, though, that looked like later models—maybe no more than a couple years old. Sage recounted the machines, and re-checked the keys on each of the newer machines. He clicked off his light. Mission accomplished.

The screen door of the ranch house banged shut. Sage froze. A dog woofed, then a man mumbled.

Sage picked his way to the edge of the sliding doors and peered around the rolling door toward the house. The figure of a man stood at the edge of the porch, staring out at the half moon.

The dog woofed again, and a stream of piss pattered off the porch into a pile of snow. The man mumbled again to the dog and chuckled, low and quiet. He finished peeing, zipped up his pants, and sat down on a wooden bench. The dog thrust his head onto the man’s lap and the man chuckled again, lavishly scratching the dog’s furry head. The dog whined, pulled away, then looked directly at Sage and the motor pool.

The wind blew down-slope and would carry his scent away at a ninety-degree angle from the ranch house. But breezes swirled and did funky things around buildings and stands of trees. The dog must’ve caught puffs of Sage’s scent on the wind’s unpredictable dance.

Sage could tell from the voice that it was Commissioner Pete, but the man obviously thought himself alone and safe. He ruffled the dog’s head and spoke nonsense to it.

It wasn’t much of a dog—one of the breeds his own dad called “useless, old lady dogs.” Maybe a Maltese. Sage imagined that the dog belonged to the Commissioner’s daughter. The more useful dogs would be inside, sleeping off the cold. Sage could see that Pete had a secret adoration of the tiny dog,