FINDING A $40,000 PAIR OF JEANS requires luck and daring, but, most important, it requires leads. Brit collects leads while talking to people in bars, cafés, hotels, gas stations, and antique shops. Good leads include the phone numbers of multigenerational ranch families, addresses of small-town historical societies, favorite saloons of modern-day miners, and even descriptions of landmarks leading to the properties of crazy old hermits who live up in the hills with collections of junk and arsenals of weapons.

As he follows these tips, Brit sometimes stumbles into a series of unusual events that cascade along for days. Before we even made it to the Meathook Ranch, where the lion had been trapped inside a fence, we had stopped in western Utah to visit the home of a retiree named Theo who spends his days tinkering with a vast collection of antique steam-engine tractors and compressors. Brit suspected that there might just be some old denim mixed in with all that old iron.

Theo was skeptical. "If it had been around that long, I would have sopped up some grease with it by now," he said. His comment reminded me of something Brit had told me earlier: "My number-one rule in this business is to never believe anything I hear. The more someone tells me they don't have anything, the more I know they do." Sure enough, Brit reached beneath a leaky outdoor spigot and picked up a small-game item that I would become very jealous of. It was a black T-shirt with macbeth printed on the front in an ominous font, and it resembled the faux-faded, distressed T-shirts that college freshmen buy at Urban Outfitters. Except this shirt's fading had happened thanks to endless doses of sun and occasional spurts of water, so it was infinitely cooler. Clutching the ten bucks that Brit gave him, Theo was beginning to agree. "It was all just rags to me," he said. "Not no more!"

We spent much of the next day at the Meathook Ranch, where Mike the rancher segued seamlessly between searching for the lion and telling stretchers. "My grandfather didn't buy this ranch," he bragged. "He just paid the outlaws and murderers who were living here to move along." As we walked around, Mike pointed to various places where he'd allegedly killed 250 lions over the years. Brit scurried behind us like an unleashed dog, prying and poking into every trash pile, junked car, corral, smokehouse, and outhouse. After an hour of searching, he realized that the good stuff was long gone, having met its usual fate over the years in burning barrels and county dumps. "I was dying to get in here," he whispered in my ear. "Now I'm dying to get outta here."

When we finally shook free of the Meathook, we stumbled into a coyote trapper outside Modena whose trailer home fronted a collection of ramshackle log cabins. Right away, I saw the waistband of a pair of jeans stuffed between two cabin logs as chinking—a common frontier use for old rags. The jeans had a buckle and straps riveted into the waistband in the back. Known as "bucklebacks," such work pants were prevalent from the earliest days of jeans until about 1940.

We were on the right track. We crawled down into a root cellar and found banks of shelves still stocked with the fractured remains of canning jars. An ancient shirt was wedged into a doorjamb, but it turned to powder when Brit tried to carefully pull it free. When I creaked open the door of a neighboring cellar, I was greeted by the unmistakable snicker of a rattlesnake. I eased the door shut and remembered a story Brit had told me about the time he crawled into a mine and heard the hissing sound of a snake coming from the vicinity of his crotch. He retreated from the serpent with a mad dash while an excruciating burning sensation spread across his groin. Once outside, he realized that he'd actually been "bitten" by a canister of pepper spray he'd pocketed in order to defend himself against cave-dwelling beasts.

After Modena, Brit swore me to secrecy about the places we'd be visiting in "the vintage happy-hunting grounds." We were on our way to visit a man I'll call Cowboy, who lived on the outskirts of a small mining town whose claim to fame is that, during its infancy, 75 citizens died in gunfights before a single person died of natural causes. Brit wanted to question Cowboy about a rumor he'd heard from the man's ex-wife that involved a mysterious building full of 1920s clothing.

"Cowboy is six-four and weighs 270 pounds," said Brit. "He's a Korean War vet and a mountain man and, well, basically a hobo junk collector." We found Cowboy at the center of the vast, moatlike collection of junked cars he uses as a security barrier around a small refuge of trashed camping trailers. His specific location inside an aluminum motor home was betrayed by a rising column of smoke out front where a pot of coffee was resting on a Weber grill packed full of smoldering sagebrush. Cowboy was passed out, his head propped on a stack of rags near an open window. Brit yelled inside to wake him, which startled the hell out of the man. He was drunk, or seemed to be, and he ranted and raved for a few minutes while expressing an intense lack of interest in talking about old clothes.

Brit and I drove into town and parked in front of the diner where Cowboy gets his mail. We went inside and took a seat next to Uncle Teddy, a man in his seventies with a severe comb-over hairstyle. Brit introduced Uncle Teddy as someone who'd once sold him a buffalo-hide jacket. As they talked, Brit made the mistake of dropping the name of his associate, Cowboy. "He wouldn't make a pimple on a cowboy's ass," said Uncle Teddy. Then he told us that Cowboy had recently been prosecuted for stealing another man's outhouse.

"What was so special about the outhouse?" I asked.

"What was special is that it didn't belong to Cowboy," said Uncle Teddy.

We had just enough daylight for one more lead, and we headed to a mining camp occupied by an old man who was sacked out in another trailer. It was getting dark. There was no immediate reply when Brit honked his truck's horn and rapped on the door, but a frantically barking dog suggested that someone was around. After about 15 minutes, the man revealed himself by kicking open the trailer door from the inside. He had a long white beard and screamed "What's going on out here?!" in a voice that would have made John Wayne soil his pants. He was toting a shotgun, and he detained us at gunpoint while shouting indecipherable commands. It took a few moments for us to realize that he was stone deaf. Brit started yelling, "We'll never come back!" while we walked backwards with our hands in the air and then eased into the truck and sped off.

We settled into a bar that I'll call the Peephole and had a couple of shots to toast that the man hadn't pulled the trigger. When I lifted my third vodka, an hour later, my hand was still shaking. Brit was at the end of the bar talking to a drunken man who was covered in coal ash and wearing a denim chore coat. "This guy's got great leads," he said.