"I've caught people shooting, you know, seven, eight, deer. Umm... sometimes the only thing that stops people is a little jail time, " Riding along the backroads of Lewis & Clark County, It's clear Brian Golie takes his job as a Fish, Wildlife and Parks game warden seriously. His district covers about eighteen hundred square miles and he's on-call all the time, "today, alone, i've had five calls and its nine twenty two a.m," he says.

Golie is on his way to check out one of those calls, a landowner along a private drive off Little Wolf Creek Road reported someone possibly hunting with a spotlight about four o'clock this morning, "there's been other calls up here, so we'll just see what's going on and maybe we'll get lucky."

With abundant wildlife in the state, Montana is a hunter's paradise; most respect the state's hunting and fishing laws, but a small subset of hunters ignore them altogether. Its up to the game wardens to keep their numbers as small as possible. According to the Department of fish, Wildlife and Parks, poaching investigations have nearly doubled since the 1990s. Several poaching operations have been stopped in recent years, large ones like that run by Dean Ruth and his wife Renita, convicted in two thousand three on state and federal poaching charges to isolated incidents such as the three Hi-Line youths arrested late last year

In 2004, Gary Motarie pleaded guilty to possessing unlawfully taken wildlife after being arrested for fishing at night near Cascade. It was not his first run-in with game wardens - an illegal hunt two years earlier harvested this trophy bull elk from the Sun River Wildlife Management Area near Augusta. According to Warden Golie, "he was caught on several occasions and through a lengthy investigation we were able to determine after he killed this elk, he killed many more."

Motarie was charged with poaching this elk after several calls to the state's anti-poaching hotline led to his arrest. In an interview and re-enactment filmed for the F.W.P, Motarie explains how he would go about his illegal hunts, "I found a nice bull and I shot the bull...so what I would do - I knew right from the get-go I was doing wrong, so I would just shoot the elk and I'd walk away from it; I wouldn't even go touch it...and then I would wait until after dark and I'd dress the animal out."

Back at that investigation in Lewis and Clark County, Golie says, "well, last night, I got a spotlight call at four o'clock in the morning." After surveying the hills along gladstone road, Golie doesn't find any evidence the alledged spotlighter made a kill, but the previous night's investigation did yield a suspect, "there's frost on the road...I can see fresh tracks...then I follow the tracks out all the way to this residence, this cabin," but it's not poaching the suspect is accused of - at least not this time.

Two brothers, Devin and Daryl Piper, now face multiple charges following a marijuana bust as a result of Golie's poaching investigation. The two face charges of criminal manufacturing, criminal intent to sell. Golie says its no uncommon for game wardens to stumble upon other crimes while investigating poaching calls, "just because you break fish and game code doesn't mean you don't break criminal codes."

On the way out, we passed the landowner who called in the spotlighting activity from the night before, Golie says the public's keen eye, like this landowners, helps ensure montana's wild beauty stays available to all it's residents.