Open Season (32 page)

 

Annabel told Stewie
that their honeymoon was quite unlike what she had ever imagined a honeymoon to be, and she contrasted it with her first one with Nathan. Nathan was about sailing boats, champagne, and Barbados. Stewie was about spiking trees in stifling heat in a national forest in Wyoming. He had even asked her to carry his pack.

Neither of them had noticed the late-model black Ford pickup that had trailed them up the mountain road and continued on when Stewie pulled over to park.

Deep into the forest, Stewie now removed his shirt and tied the sleeves around his waist. A heavy bag of nails hung from his belt and tinkled while he strode through the undergrowth. There was a sheen of sweat on his bare chest as he straddled a three-foot thick Douglas Fir and drove in spikes. He was obviously well practiced, and he got into a rhythm where he could bury the 6-inch spikes into the soft wood with three heavy blows from his sledgehammer; one tap to set the spike and two blows to bury it beyond the nail head in the bark.

He moved from tree to tree, but didn't spike all of them. He attacked each tree in the same method. The first of the spikes went in at eye level. A quarter-turn around the trunk, he pounded in another a foot lower than the first. He continued pounding in spikes until he had placed them in a spiral on the trunk nearly to the grass.

“Won't it hurt the trees?” Annabel asked as she unloaded his pack and leaned it against a tree.

“Of course not,” he said, moving across the pine-needle floor to another target. “I wouldn't be doing this if it hurt the trees. You've got a lot to learn about me, Annabel.”

“Why do you put so many in?” she asked.

“Good question,” he said, burying a spike in three blows. “It used to be we could put in four right at knee level, at the compass points, where the trees are usually cut. But the lumber companies got wise to that and told their loggers to go higher or lower. So now we fill up a four-foot radius.”

“And what will happen if they try to cut it down?”

Stewie smiled, resting for a moment. “When a chainsaw blade hits a steel spike, the blade can snap and whip back. Busts the saw-teeth. That can take an eye or a nose right off.”

“That's horrible,” she said, wincing, wondering what she was getting into.

“I've never been responsible for any injuries,” Stewie said quickly, looking hard at her. “The purpose is to save trees. After we're done here, I'll call the local ranger station and tell them what we've done. I won't say exactly where we spiked the trees or how many trees we spiked. It should be enough to keep them out of here for decades, and that's the point.”

“Have you ever been caught?” she asked.

“Once,” Stewie said, and his face clouded. “A forest ranger caught me by Jackson Hole. He marched me into downtown Jackson on foot during tourist season at gunpoint. Half of the tourists in town cheered and the other half started chanting, ‘Hang him high! Hang him high!' I was sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins for seven months.”

“Now that you mention it, I think I read about that,” she mused.

“You probably did. The wire services picked it up. I was interviewed on
Nightline
and
60 Minutes. Outside Magazine
put me on the cover. My boyhood friend Hayden Powell wrote the cover story for them, and he coined the word ‘eco-terrorist'.” This memory made him feel bold. “There were reporters from all over the country at that trial.” Stewie said. “Even the
New York Times
. It was the first time most people had ever heard of One Globe, or knew I was the founder of it. Memberships started pouring in from all over the world.”

One Globe
. The ecological action group that used the logo of crossed monkey wrenches, in deference to late author Edward Abbey's
The Monkey Wrench Gang
. One Globe had once dropped a shroud over Mount Rushmore for the president's speech, she recalled. It had been on the nightly news.

“Stewie,” she said happily, “You are the real thing.” He could feel her eyes on him as he drove in the spiral of spikes and moved to the next tree.

“When you are done with that tree I want you,” she said, her voice husky. “Right here and right now, my sweet, sweaty . . .
husband
.”

He turned and smiled. His face glistened and his muscles were swelled from swinging the sledgehammer. She slid her T-shirt over her head and stood waiting for him, her lips parted and her legs tense.

 

Stewie slung his
own pack now and, for the time being, had stopped spiking trees. Fat black thunderheads, pregnant with rain, nosed across the late-afternoon sky. They were hiking at a fast pace toward the peak, holding hands, with the hope of getting there and pitching camp before the rain started. Stewie said they would hike out of the forest tomorrow and he would call the ranger station. Then they would get in the SUV and head southeast, toward the Bridger-Teton Forest.

When they walked into the herd of cattle, Stewie felt a dark cloud of anger envelop him.

“Range maggots!” Stewie said, spitting. “If they're not letting the logging companies in to cut all the trees at taxpayer's expense, they're letting the local ranchers run their cows in here so they can eat all the grass and shit in all the streams.”

“Can't we just go around them?” Annabel asked.

“It's not that, Annabel,” he said patiently. “Of course we can go around them. It's just the principal of the thing. We have cattle fouling what is left of the natural ecosystem. Cows don't belong in the trees in the Bighorn Mountains. You have so much to learn, darling.”

“I know,” she said, determined.

“These ranchers out here run their cows on public land—our land—at the expense of not only us but the wildlife. They pay something like four dollars an acre when they should be paying ten times that, even though it would be best if they were completely gone.”

“But we need meat, don't we?” she asked. “You're not a vegetarian, are you?”

“Did you forget that cheeseburger I had for lunch in Cameron?” he said. “No, I'm not a vegetarian, although sometimes I wish I had the will to be one.”

“I tried it once and it made me lethargic,” Annabel confessed.

“All these western cows produce about five percent of the beef we eat in this whole country,” Stewie said. “All the rest comes from down South, in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana, where there's plenty of grass and plenty of private land to graze them on.”

Stewie picked up a pinecone, threw it accurately through the trees, and struck a black baldy heifer on the snout. The cow bolted, turned, and lumbered away. The rest of the herd, about a dozen, followed it. The small herd moved loudly, clumsily cracking branches and throwing up fist-sized pieces of black earth from their hooves.

“I wish I could chase them right back to the ranch they belong on,” Stewie said, watching. “Right up the ass of the rancher who has lease rights for this part of the Bighorns.”

One cow had not moved. It stood broadside and looked at them.

“What's wrong with that cow?” Stewie asked.

“Shoo!” Annabel shouted. “Shoo!”

Stewie stifled a smile at his new wife's shooing and slid out of his pack. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the last ten minutes and rain was inevitable. The sky had darkened and black coils of clouds enveloped the peak. The sudden low pressure had made the forest quieter, the sounds muffled and the smell of cows stronger.

Stewie Woods walked straight toward the heifer, with Annabel several steps behind.

“Something's wrong with that cow,” Stewie said, trying to figure out what about it seemed out of place.

When Stewie was close enough he saw everything at once: the cow trying to run with the others but straining at the end of a tight nylon line; the heifer's wild white eyes; the misshapen profile of something strapped on it's back that was large and square and didn't belong; the thin reed of antenna that quivered from the package on the heifer's back.

“Annabel!” Stewie yelled, turning to reach out to her—but she had walked around him and was now squarely between him and the cow.

She absorbed the full, frontal blast when the heifer detonated, the explosion shattering the mountain stillness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer bludgeoning bone.

 

Four miles away,
a fire lookout heard the guttural boom and ran to the railing with binoculars. Over a red-rimmed plume of smoke and dirt, he could see a Douglas fir launch like a rocket into the air, where it turned, hung suspended for a moment, then crashed into the forest below.

Shaking, he reached for his radio.

Eight miles out
of Saddlestring, Wyoming, Game Warden Joe Pickett was watching his wife Marybeth work their new Tobiano paint horse, Toby, in the round pen when the call came from the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff's office.

It was early evening, the time of night when the setting sun ballooned and softened and defined the deep velvet folds and piercing tree greens of Wolf Mountain. The normally dull pastel colors of the weathered barn and the red-rock canyon behind the house suddenly looked as if they had been repainted in acrylics. Toby, a big dark bay gelding swirled with brilliant white that ran up over his haunches like thick spilled paint upside down, shone deep red in the evening light and looked especially striking. So did Marybeth, in Joe's opinion, in her worn Wranglers, sleeveless cotton shirt, and her blond hair in a ponytail. There was no wind, and the only sound was the rhythmic thumping of Toby's hooves in the round pen as Marybeth waved the whip and encouraged the gelding to shift from a trot into a slow lope.

The Saddlestring District was considered a “two-horse district” by the Game and Fish Department, meaning that the department would provide feed and tack for two mounts to be used for patrolling. Toby was their second horse.

Joe stood with his boot on the bottom rail and his arms folded over the top, his chin nestled between his forearms. He was still wearing his red cotton Game and Fish uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on the sleeve and his sweat-stained gray Stetson. He could feel the pounding of the earth as Toby passed in front of him in a circle. He watched Marybeth stay in position in the center of the pen, shuffling her feet so she stayed on Toby's back flank. She talked to her horse in a soothing voice, urging him to gallop—something he clearly didn't want to do.

Persistent, Marybeth stepped closer to Toby and commanded him to run. Marybeth still had a slight limp from when she had been shot nearly two years before, but she was nimble and quick. Toby pinned his ears back and twitched his tail but finally broke into a full-fledged gallop, raising the dust in the pen, his mane and tail snapping behind him like a flag in a stiff wind. After several rotations, Marybeth called “Whoa!” and Toby hit the brakes, skidding to a quick stop where he stood breathing hard, his muscles swelled, his back shiny with sweat, smacking and licking his lips as if he was eating peanut butter. Marybeth approached him and patted him down, telling him what a good boy he was, and blowing gently into his nostrils to soothe him.

“He's a stubborn guy—and lazy,” she told Joe. “He did
not
want to lope fast. Did you notice how he pinned his ears back and threw his head around?”

Joe said
yup
.

“That's how he was telling me he was mad about it. When he's doing that he's either going to break out of the circle and do whatever he wants to, or stop, or do what I'm asking him to do. In this case he did what I asked and went into the fast lope. He's finally learning that things will go a lot easier on him when he does what I ask him.”

“I know it works for me,” Joe said and smiled.

Marybeth crinkled her nose at Joe, then turned back to Toby. “See how he licks his lips? That's a sign of obedience. He's conceding that I am the boss. That's a good sign.”

Joe fought the urge to theatrically lick his lips when she looked over at him.

“Why did you blow in his nose like that?”

“Horses in the herd do that to each other to show affection. It's another way they bond with each other.” Marybeth paused. “I know it sounds hokey, but blowing in his nose is kind of like giving him a hug. A horse hug.”

“You seem to know what you're doing.”

Joe had been around horses most of his life. He had now taken his buckskin mare Lizzie over most of the mountains in the Twelve Sleep Range of the Bighorns in his District. But what Marybeth was doing with her new horse Toby, what she was getting out of him, was a different kind of thing. Joe was duly impressed.

A shout behind him shook Joe from his thoughts. He turned toward the sound, and saw nine-year-old Sheridan, five-year-old Lucy, and their seven-year-old foster daughter April stream through the back yard gate and across the field. Sheridan held the cordless phone out in front of her like an Olympic torch, and the other two girls followed.

“Dad, it's for you,” Sheridan called. “A man says it's very important.”

Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks and Joe took the telephone. It was County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum.

There had been a big explosion in the Bighorn National Forest, Barnum told Joe. A fire lookout had called it in, and had reported that through his binoculars he could see fat dark forms littered throughout the trees. It looked like a “shitload” of animals were dead, which is why he was calling Joe. Dead game animals were Joe's concern. They assumed at this point that they were game animals, Barnum said, but they might be cows. A couple of local ranchers had grazing leases up there. Barnum asked if Joe could meet him at the Winchester exit off of the interstate in twenty minutes. That way, they could get to the scene before it was completely dark.