Open Season (31 page)

During the first month and a half when Marybeth returned home from the hospital, the situation had been difficult for all of them. Joe, Marybeth, and Sheridan had all been through separate but connected ordeals. Marybeth focused her hate on Vern Dunnegan, and Sheridan raged about Wacey Hedeman. Marybeth tried to explain to Joe how she felt about losing a child, how the feeling would never go away, how she would forever blame herself as a mother for allowing it to happen. There were many long nights when Joe held Marybeth while she cried. There were other nights when he held Sheridan.

Joe knew that he would never really fathom the depths of feelings both Marybeth and Sheridan had about what had happened. All he could do, he concluded, was what he did: be there and listen.

Joe had become concerned that both of them would be bitter, but it hadn't happened. Instead, they had become even closer as a family.

 

After breakfast, Joe
and Sheridan put the remaining pancakes and bacon into a sack and went outside into the backyard. They walked around the house and sat in two lawn chairs facing the back of the garage. The morning had become warm, and the sun was out. Yesterday's snow was already melting. Muscular rivulets of runoff rushed down the Sandrock draw.

Sheridan broke off pieces of the pancakes and bacon and scattered them on the ground near the foundation of the garage. Joe cut up a couple of small chunks of meat from the haunch of a road-killed cow elk he had stored in the freezer and tossed them out. It didn't take long for the Miller's weasels to zip out of their den and clean up the food. Joe and Sheridan exchanged conspiratorial smiles while they watched.

There was a good reason why the Miller's weasels had moved from the woodpile to the roomy cavern beneath the garage. It turned out that, while Sheridan had been right about Lucky being a male and Hippity-Hop being a female, she was wrong about their “son,” Elway. This spring, Elway had produced 10 babies (Joe had learned from the biologists in the canyon that the young were called “kits”), and eight had survived.

The kits were fascinating to watch because, although they were a quarter the size of their parents, they were just as fast when they shot out from beneath the foundation, grabbed food in their forepaws, and flashed back into the den. When Joe pointed a flashlight into the den, the weasels were a mass of writhing, chirping, long, brown bodies equally annoyed at the intrusion. The kits would sometimes come out into the sun and try to stand on their hind legs like their parents, and Joe and Sheridan would laugh as the kits would lose their balance, fall over, and scramble upright again until they could hold the famous pose.

“They're getting big,” Sheridan said, nodding at the kits and tossing small pieces of food.

“Yes they are,” Joe replied.

“Dad, what do you suppose would happen if anyone found out about these little guys?” Sheridan asked. He could tell she had been contemplating the question for a while. Joe had been amazed when Sheridan told him the entire story about the weasels, and she and Joe had promised each other not to tell anyone. As far as anyone knew, the Miller's weasels that Ote Keeley had brought down the mountain with him had died in the woodpile fire, just as Wacey said they had.

“Well, I don't know for sure,” Joe answered. “I'm pretty certain that what we're doing isn't legally the right thing. There's some biologists who would go berserk if they found out. A lot of other people, too.”

“But aren't they the people who are at the colonies where the Miller's weasels keep dying?” Sheridan asked.

Joe chuckled. “That's them,” Joe said.

Sheridan dutifully scattered the remains of the food near the den.

“You're doing this for me, aren't you?” Sheridan asked.

Joe nodded. “Yup.”

Sheridan settled back into the lawn chair.

“You know, Dad, these critters remind me of our family,” Sheridan said. “They were in great danger, and now they're doing okay. They're a family again.”

Joe nodded. This was the kind of conversation that made him uncomfortable.

“We're sort of like them, aren't we, Dad?”

Joe reached over and squeezed Sheridan's hand. “Sheridan, sometimes we see things in animals that aren't really there. It's called transference, if that makes any sense.”

Sheridan was studying him now. “That's okay, isn't it?” she asked.

“As long as we admit it to ourselves, I think it's okay,” Joe said. “I think there are a lot of people who say they do things for animals when they're really doing it for themselves. They see things in animals that might not really be there. I think sometimes that hurts the animals in the end, and it hurts other people, too.”

Sheridan thought it over. “Transference,” she repeated.

“There are people on both sides of the issue who think animals are more valuable than people are,” Joe said. “That's what's happening here.”

Joe stopped speaking. He thought maybe he had said too much.

Joe was well aware of the fact that by keeping the Miller's weasels and not reporting their existence, he was breaking more regulations and laws than he could count. And he knew that what he was planning to do with the creatures could probably land him in a federal prison. He could be accused of playing God. It could be construed as scandalous behavior by the Defenders of Nature—an offense worthy of at least a death sentence. He didn't try to justify his reasons, even to himself. He
was
playing God, after all. He was making a judgment simply because he thought it was the right one, and one that might somehow benefit his daughter.

“How long can we do this?” Sheridan asked. “Help the Miller's weasels, I mean.”

“As long as you want to,” Joe said. “As long as you feel it's important to you.”

“They might be ready in a couple of weeks,” Sheridan said, holding back a tear. She was admitting something. “We probably won't have any snow after that.”

Joe told her about where he would want to transplant the animals. He had found a small, protected valley high in the Bighorns miles away from roads or trails. The valley lay in a natural elk migration route, and it was filled with mule deer. It was about 10 miles from the perimeter of the Miller's Weasel Ecosystem.

She sniffed and asked him if she would ever see them again.

“This summer,” Joe promised, “you and I will put the panniers on Lizzie, and we'll horsepack into the mountains together. I'll take you to where the weasels are if you promise never to tell anyone about it.”

“Of course, I promise,” she said. “I can keep a secret.”

He laughed. “I know you can.”

 

On the third
day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride Annabel Bellotti were spiking trees in the Bighorn National Forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.

They met by chance. Stewie Woods had been busy pouring bag after bag of sugar and sand into the gasoline tanks of a fleet of pickups that belonged to a natural gas exploration crew in a newly graded parking lot. The crew had left for the afternoon for the bars and hotel rooms of nearby Henry's Fork. One of the crew had returned unexpectedly and caught Stewie as Stewie was ripping off the top of a bag of sugar with his teeth. The crewmember pulled a 9mm semiautomatic from beneath the dashboard and fired several wild pistol shots in Stewie's direction. Stewie had dropped the bag and run away, crashing through the timber like a bull elk.

Stewie had outrun and out-juked the man with the pistol and he met Annabel when he literally tripped over her as she sunbathed nude in the grass in an orange pool of late afternoon sun, unaware of his approach because she was listening to Melissa Etheridge on her Walkman's headphones. She looked good, he thought, strawberry blond hair with a two-day Rocky Mountain fire-engine tan (two hours in the sun at 8,000 feet created a sunburn like a whole day at the beach), small ripe breasts, and a trimmed vector of pubic hair.

He had gathered her up and pulled her along through the timber, where they hid together in a dry spring wash until the man with the pistol gave up and went home. She had giggled while he held her—
this was real adventure,
she'd said—and he had used the opportunity to run his hands tentatively over her naked shoulders and hips and had found out, happily, that she did not object. They made their way back to where she had been sunbathing and while she dressed, they introduced themselves.

She told him she liked the idea of meeting a famous environmental outlaw in the woods while she was naked, and he appreciated that. She said she had seen his picture before, maybe in
Outside Magazine
?, and admired his looks—tall and raw-boned, with round rimless glasses, a short-cropped full beard, and his famous red bandana on his head.

Her story was that she had been camping alone in a dome tent, taking a few days off from her freewheeling cross-continent trip that had begun with her divorce from an anal retentive investment banker named Nathan in her home town of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She was bound, eventually, for Seattle.

“I'm falling in love with your mind,” he lied.

“Already?” she asked.

He encouraged her to travel with him, and they took her vehicle since the lone crewmember had disabled Stewie's Subaru with three bullets into the engine block. Stewie was astonished by his good fortune. Every time he looked over at her and she smiled back, he was pole-axed with exuberance.

Keeping to dirt roads, they crossed into Montana. The next afternoon, in the backseat of her SUV during a thunder-storm that rocked the car and blew shroudlike sheets of rain through the mountain passes, he asked her to marry him. Given the circumstances and the supercharged atmosphere, she accepted. When the rain stopped, they drove to Ennis, Montana, and asked around about who could marry them, fast. Stewie did not want to take the chance of letting her get away. She kept saying she couldn't believe she was doing this. He couldn't believe she was doing this either, and he loved her even more for it.

At the Sportsman Inn in Ennis, Montana, which was bustling with fly fishermen bound for the trout-rich waters of the Madison River, the desk clerk gave them a name and they looked up Judge Ace Cooper (Ret.) in the telephone book.

 

Judge Cooper was
a tired and rotund man who wore a stained white cowboy shirt and an elk horn bolo tie with his shirt collar open. He performed the ceremony in a room adjacent to his living room that was bare except for a single filing cabinet, a desk and three chairs, and two framed photographs—one of the judge and President George H. W. Bush, who had once been up there fishing, and the other of the judge on a horse before the Cooper family lost their ranch in the 1980s.

The wedding ceremony had taken eleven minutes, which was just about average for Judge Cooper, although he had once performed it in eight minutes for two Indians.

“Do you, Allan Stewart Woods, take thee Annabeth to be your lawful wedded wife?” Judge Cooper had asked, reading from the marriage application form.

“Anna
bel
,” Annabel had corrected in her biting Rhode Island accent.

“I do,” Stewie had said. He was beside himself with pure joy.

Stewie twisted the ring off his finger and placed it on hers. It was unique; handmade gold mounted with sterling silver monkey wrenches. It was also three sizes too large. The judge studied the ring.

“Monkey wrenches?” the judge had asked.

“It's symbolic,” Stewie had said.

“I'm aware of the symbolism,” the judge said darkly, before finishing the passage.

Annabel and Stewie had beamed at each other. Annabel said that this was, like, the
wildest
vacation ever. They were Mr. and Mrs. Outlaw Couple. He was now
her
famous outlaw, although as yet untamed. She said her father would be scandalized, and her mother would have to wear dark glasses in Newport. Only her Aunt Tildie, the one with the wild streak who had corresponded with, but never met, a Texas serial killer until he died of lethal injection, would understand.

Stewie had to borrow a hundred dollars from her to pay the judge, and she signed over a traveler's check.

After the couple had left in the SUV with Rhode Island plates, Judge Ace Cooper had gone to his lone filing cabinet and found the file. He pulled a single piece of paper out and read it as he dialed the telephone. While he waited for the right man to come to the telephone, he stared at the framed photo on the wall of himself on the horse at his former ranch. The ranch, north of Yellowstone Park, had been subdivided by a Bozeman real estate company into over thirty 50-acre “ranchettes.” Famous Hollywood celebrities, including the one who's early-career photos he had recently seen in
Penthouse
, now lived there. Movies had been filmed there. There was even a crackhouse, but it was rumored that the owner wintered in LA. The only cattle that existed were purely for visual effect, like landscaping that moved and crapped and looked good when the sun threatened to drop below the mountains.

The man he was waiting for came to the telephone.

“It was Stewie Woods, all right.” He said. “The man himself. I recognized him right off, and his ID proved it.” There was a pause as the man on the other end of the telephone asked Cooper something. “Yeah, I heard him say that to her just before they left. They're headed for the Bighorns in Wyoming. Somewhere near Saddlestring.”