Loren Pope is a detective with the Christian County Sheriff's Department, which patrols a rustic stretch of country just south of Springfield, Missouri. Most folks just call him "Stash," in honor of his Yosemite Sam-style mustache.
In Christian County, more than a third of the local economy is tied to animal production, meaning most honest men's hours are hitched to daylight. But still, many farms, like the one Pope is guarding, belong to commuter farmers who live elsewhere and often hold full-time jobs.
It's a few hours before daybreak on a frigid night in February 2006. The only sound, aside from the pickup truck, is the crackle of ice on the nearby marsh as it freezes. Stash listens as the truck gets closer. This is the third night that he has shivered against the trunk of a wide tree in this small stand of oaks near the intersection of Snowdrop and Spring Creek roads. He wears camouflage and a hydration backpack. His badge and pistol hang on his left hip. In the grass nearby, he has concealed a sack with toilet paper and granola bars. Among his gear is his weapon of choice, an AR-15 assault rifle.
Pope radios his stakeout team, which consists of another deputy hunkered on the other side of a field, two men in a squad car concealed behind a nearby barn and a deputy cruising in a patrol car about a mile away.
He tells them to hold their positions until the truck gets closer. He dusts frost from his fatigues and swivels to check the bait in his trap: a pen of about 10 head of cattle.
Earlier in the week, Pope had received a call from the owner of this farm reporting the unbelievable: An entire herd had somehow ended up in the wrong pen. Overnight, they had migrated from their usual metal-barred warrens to a barbed-wire-lined pasture across the street. Pope figures this wasn't the work of drunken teenagers. It was the first step in a notorious operation hailing from pioneer days: cattle rustling.
Remember those old Westerns in which horse-riding desperados break into barns to drive pilfered livestock across the open plains? They're back, but with a modern twist. Hustlers now use paved roads, heavy-duty trucks and trailers to make cleaner getaways. In 2004 and 2005, there were 82 reports of cattle theft in Missouri. But Cattle Theft Task Force members say some cattle thefts may go unreported in rural areas.
This sting operation is Pope's solution. For four years, he worked for an anti-drug unit called the Combined Ozarks Multi-jurisdictional Enforcement Team (COMET). He had learned that druggies could be shaken down at any hour because they usually kept contraband on them. Cattle thieves are different. You have to catch them in the act. Missouri doesn't require beef haulers to show proof of ownership for their herds or to mark them with brands or radio chips. Thieves simply pull out the animals' ear tags — the cattle equivalent of a license plate — and they can move meat freely on the open market.
Pope watches the truck pull close to the driveway of the farm. But his heart sinks after one of his men radios the pickup's license-plate number: It is the owner of the cattle. The farmer had simply come to check on his herd.
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