Book Review

By Derryll White

Box, C.J. (2024).  Three-Inch Teeth.

Anyone who reads John Sandford, and there are many more out there than will readily admit it, will appreciate his cover endorsement of this novel – “Joe Pickett is the one man you’d want by your side in a crisis.” Obviously this is a Joe Pickett novel.

C.J. Box tells a straight story that captures Wyoming’s expanse of space and history of resource extraction. The abandoned mining towns in the story echo our own East Kootenay towns such as Tracy, Wild Horse, Loco, Lumberton and Canterbury. Box does a great job of selecting very provocative bear quotes to begin each chapter. They ranger widely but always focus the reader’s attention.

The main focus of the story is also an East Kootenay monument – grizzly bears.  We have them, live with them and embrace our awareness of them. Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden, isn’t quite as familiar with the subject as the bears have been pushed back into the Yellowstone wilderness.

C.J. Box touches on many issues faced in East Kootenay, from a Wyoming perspective. Re-introduction of predatory species, work to preserve large carnivores such as grizzlies, and the alienation of public lands are some of the hot buttons he pushes.

This is an engaging story about good and evil, family values, rodeoing and ranching, and the increasing pressures we bring to bear on our own environment. C.J. Box has pretty much something for everyone with this story.  It is a quick and enjoyable read.

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Excerpts from the novel:

THE JOB – He was exhausted, but pleasantly so, and the morning had gone smoothly.  He’d witnessed no violations and issued no warnings or tickets and made no arrests.  The camps he’d visited were generally clean and the hunters he met were friendly and ethical.  Their food was hung from trees to discourage bears and no one had reported any large carnivore or wolf sightings.  He was still a little surprised by the four young men he’d met early on in his rounds: hipsters from Jackson Hole with long beards and blaze-orange porkpie hats, who were hunting elk not for trophy racks but to fill their freezers for the winter.  It was good to meet younger hunters keeping the local traditions alive, he thought.  It encouraged him to keep doing what he was doing and knowing it was right.

PUBLIC ACCESS – The Pennsylvania hunters had made it clear to him that they intended to “corner-cross” from the parcel they were on to an adjacent public parcel by means of a ladder they had built specially for the purpose and brought with them to Wyoming.  The plan, they explained, was to move across the checkerboard of public lands without stepping foot on private.  The hunters showed Joe the extremely accurate GPS mapping apps they’d put on their phones to make sure they stayed legal.

    Joe had warned them that corner-crossing was a complicated issue, and a newly contentious one.  There were laws that allowed citizens to access all public lands, as well as laws that said that even entering the airspace of private land was trespassing.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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