Open Season (30 page)

Vern continued to walk along the back of the house.

“Honey, turn your head,” Joe said sternly to Sheridan.

“No, I want to see this,” Sheridan said.

Sheridan reluctantly obeyed.

Joe raised the shotgun and waited until Vern was far enough away that the shot pattern wouldn't be tight. Then he shot him in the hip. Vern dropped like a rock.

“Jesus!” Vern cried, writhing on the ground. “I can't believe you
shot me in the ass
!”

“It was the least I could do,” Joe said. “If you try to get up, I'll shoot you again.”

Joe found Wacey's pistol in the grass, and tucked it in his belt. He walked back to the porch and squatted on the pavement. Wacey was balled up with his back against the door. His good arm was pulling a smashed leg to his chest. His wounded arm, now a hamburger-like stump pulsing gouts of arterial blood, flopped about like a broken wing. Wacey's eyes were wide, and his mouth was fixed in a waxy snarl.

“Can you hear me, Wacey?” Joe asked.

Wacey grunted and nodded through the pain.

“Wacey, the only reason I didn't kill you for what you've done to my family is because if you were dead, you wouldn't think about it much,” Joe said. “Do you understand what I'm saying? I want you to be able to think about what you've done to my family, and to me, and to those outfitters. Not to mention the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.”

“Get an ambulance!” Wacey hissed through chattering teeth. “I'm bleeding to death!”

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” Joe asked again, calmly.

“Yes! Goddamn you!” Wacey spat. He was trembling violently.

“No,” Joe said, standing. “
Goddamn
you
to hell,
Wacey. And take Vern Dunnegan along on the same horse.”

Joe picked up Sheridan and carried her around the house and through the front yard to Bighorn Road. He put her down near the gate.

“Dad, look,” Sheridan said, pointing down the road toward Saddlestring.

Evelyn had done what she said she would. County sheriff's vehicles were roaring down the road from town, Barnum's Blazer in the lead with the siren and lights on.

Joe leaned his shotgun against the picket fence and stepped out onto the gravel road. Sheridan stayed with him. She was his shadow. He guessed that she might be his shadow for a very long time.

. . . Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

No living man will see again the long-grass prairie, where a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer . . .

No living man will see again the virgin pineries of the Lake States, or the flat-woods of the coastal plain, or the giant hardwoods . . .

 

Or at least what passed for spring in Wyoming, a place with only three legitimate but not independent seasons: summer, fall, and winter. Spring was something that occurred in other places, places where flowers pushed up from the soil during May when it warmed, places where leaves budded and opened on hardwood trees, places where flowers exposed themselves like sacrifices to the sun. Places where it was unlikely that after those leaves and flowers emerged, 10 inches of heavy, wet, and unpredicted snow would fall and would cynically, sneeringly, kill every living thing in sight and stop all movement.

Through the slush, Joe drove home on the Bighorn Road from the Crazy Woman Campground and thought that in his entire life in the Rocky Mountains he had never really experienced what spring was in other places, or truly appreciated what it stood for.

To him, and to the big game animals he was in charge of, spring was a particularly cruel natural joke: a season created and devised to remind living beings that things were often not what they seemed and that they had no real power or influence over it no matter how well educated, technologically advanced, or intuitive they had become. It was a season designed to remind the living that it wasn't safe to presume anything.

He entered the house as silently as he could, taking off his Sorel packs in the mudroom and exchanging them for his fleece slippers, hanging his parka, muddy Wranglers, and red chamois shirt on the nail in exchange for his robe, and tossing his Stetson onto the closet shelf.

It was Sunday, and it was his job to make pancakes.

He had left the house very early in response to a cellular telephone request from the campground, where the Defenders of Nature group had called him in a panic to report that “a hyped-up black or grizzly bear” was rooting around their tents. He had responded and arrived at the camp and quickly determined that the bear was actually a moose and that the moose was gone. The Defenders of Nature were dissatisfied with his conclusion, and they had tried to convince him that the snuffling sounds they had heard around their dome tents meant danger and not mere curiosity, but with a flashlight Joe had shown them the moose hoofprints and the still-steaming moose excrement near the fire pit, evidence that had led to his determination. The Defenders were outraged at the sudden heavy snow, and they seemed to blame Joe for it since he was a local. The Defenders—based in Arlington, Virginia, and encamped for nearly two weeks to monitor Miller's weasel recovery efforts and wholly suspicious of anybody or anything local (this was, after all, the backward land of miners, loggers, ranchers, developers, and hunters)—had grudgingly accepted Joe's hypothesis and had returned to their $800 sleeping bags.

With a whisk, Joe mixed eggs, flour, baking soda, and buttermilk into a bowl. He tested all of the heating elements to make sure the ones he replaced were now working. He greased the cast-iron skillet and set it on the stove to warm up.

 

Once the remains
of the Miller's weasels had been confirmed, just about everything that Vern Dunnegan had predicted would happen was taking place in the mountains of Twelve Sleep County.

A moratorium on any kind of activity or recreation was quickly handed down by federal judges following scores of faxed legal briefs by dozens of environmental groups. Friend of the Court briefs appeared from organizations headquartered in Europe, Canada, Greenland, and Asia. The listing of Miller's weasels as an endangered species was petitioned for and granted in record time. The God Squad was convened to ram it through. Biologists, scientists, journalists, and environmentalists descended on Saddlestring, occupying every hotel and motel room as well as the campgrounds. Teams of agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service helicoptered in to the site of the killing field and beyond, and they soon discovered two more small colonies of Miller's weasels. Studies showed that the creatures had, in fact, evolved from subsisting almost entirely on buffalo to a diet of primarily elk. One of the colonies was dubbed the Cold Springs Group and the other the Timberline Group and the names became well-known in the media. Several networks broadcast the find live via satellite trucks during the evening news. It was, by one celebrity reporter's account, the “feel-good story of the year.”

The heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior flew into the Saddlestring Airport in Air Force Two and were photographed sneaking up on the Cold Springs Group with binoculars. Television viewers delighted in videotaped footage of Miller's weasels standing upright and chirping on their dens with their backs to one another. The Wyoming legislature, after a nasty floor fight, declared the Miller's weasel the “Official Endangered Species of Wyoming,” beating out grizzly bears, Wyoming toads, and transplanted wolves.

Joe worked very hard to avoid being interviewed by anyone. The murder of the outfitters, the injuries and threats to his family, the death of Clyde Lidgard, and the arrests of Wacey and Vern were treated as sidebar stories that had led to the discovery of the Miller's weasels—if they were mentioned at all.

 

One of the
colonies, the Timberline Group, which was made up of 18 Miller's weasels, died out literally in front of the cameras, and a nation mourned their loss. Autopsies revealed that the animals had contracted a viral infection, probably from one of the researcher's dogs. The Cold Springs Group declined from 28 animals to 13 for no traceable cause. A debate was raging whether the remaining Miller's weasels should be transplanted to a breeding facility or left alone. Biologists were in a dither over what to do. An additional 80 square miles were added to the newly designated Miller's Weasel Ecosystem. Everyone had an opinion, including the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which was fighting in the courts for “custody” of the remaining animals.

The
Saddlestring Roundup
newspaper estimated that the discovery of the Miller's weasels had resulted in at least 400 local jobs lost in the lumber, grazing, agriculture, and recreation industries. Every day there were stories of families who were simply dropping off their house keys at the bank as they left town.

The trials for
Vern Dunnegan and Wacey Hedeman had been postponed until summer. The rumor in town was that they had turned on each other and each was willing to implicate the other for every count of the charges. Vern had become a kind of far-right-wing media darling and was often interviewed in his cell talking about the Endangered Species Act. He was so glib and so capable of usable sound bites that his opinions were quoted by both sides of environmental controversies.

Wacey, however, had been shunned. A story leaked out from the federal detention facility in Cheyenne that Wacey had attacked a group of prisoners who were chiding him about his former profession and his new handicap and referring to him as “The Lone Arm of the Law.”

Assistant Director Les Etbauer resigned from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department the day after Vern was arrested. The official statement from the department was that Etbauer had committed a serious lack of judgment when he suspended Joe Pickett and that Warden Pickett's position had been restored immediately with no further action required. There was even a commendation and a small increase in salary for Joe. Etbauer was then immediately hired as a consultant to the governor to serve as a liaison between the state and various federal land management agencies. Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum won reelection with 87 percent of the vote with the remaining 13 percent going to write-in candidates that included pets, Marshal Matt Dillon, and two votes for Joe Pickett.

Joe had followed the news reports of how the pipeline that InterWest Resources had been building was capped and abandoned 50 miles from the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains. Despite congressional investigations, no credible evidence had been found linking InterWest with the webs Vern had spun on their behalf. InterWest eventually merged with CanCal to help build a single natural gas pipeline to Southern California, but market conditions were such that analysts were predicting that the project might be put on hold for years.

 

Marybeth came in
from her walk with an armful of Sunday newspapers. She planned to start taking Maxine with her again in a couple of months, once she had built up her strength. Now though, she was walking with the aid of a cane and with a painful limp. The rigors of holding the Labrador back were too much for her. Marybeth's progress from wheelchair to walker to crutches to assisted walking on her own had all occurred before the doctors had said it would be possible. They marveled at her strength—and at her will. A full recovery was predicted. Joe had never doubted it.

Once they had moved back into the house from the Eagle Mountain Club, Missy Vankeuran had fled back to Arizona, saying she was needed to lend support for her new husband's run for the U.S. Senate.

There were now three children at the table for pancakes. Sheridan, now eight, and Lucy, now four, shared the table and the family with April Keeley, their foster child. It had been Marybeth's idea, and she had pursued it, even while she was in the wheelchair, after she had learned that Jeannie Keeley, Ote's widow, had left the county after she had given birth, taking only the baby with her. The youngest child had died of pneumonia. April, the sick child Joe had seen at the Keeley's home, had been left behind in Saddlestring. She was between Sheridan's and Lucy's ages, and she was slowly discovering that she could trust both of them. Marybeth had explained to Joe that April Keeley, likely to be a bundle of problems, would be the focus of all of the love and mothering that had been stored in her for the new baby. April was beginning to open up to Marybeth and Joe, although she was painfully shy and ashamed of her situation. Marybeth spent hours with her. Lucy was of course a little jealous, but Sheridan seemed to understand.