Half Yellow Face was six foot seven inches tall, had haunted, recessed eyes, had done time in both Vietnam and Deer Lodge Pen, and towered over the government men around him. “This guy got loose from a federal pen?” he said.
“His name is Johnny American Horse. He’s wanted on a murder warrant. You don’t watch the news?” an FBI agent said.
Half Yellow Face stared at his feet, cleared his mouth, and spat, grinding the saliva into the dust with his boot. He stared up at the gray cliffs that rose straight into a sky sealed with smoke and rain clouds. The only access to the head of the canyon was a dry streambed cluttered with slag. On one bank, among cottonwoods, were the remains of a deer that had been killed by either a cougar or a grizzly, the desiccated hide as taut as a lampshade on its ribs.
“You ain’t gonna catch him,” Half Yellow Face said.
“He’s got no back door up there. If he comes out from under the canopy, our choppers are going to grease him all over the rocks,” the agent said.
“American Horse has medicine. He don’t need doors. I’m going back home.”
“Sounds like you guys are old buddies at the bar. I thought the Crows didn’t have much use for the Sioux,” the agent said.
“ ‘Crow’ is the white man’s word for us. I’m a member of the Absarokee. That means ‘Children of the Large Beaked Bird.’ The Absarokee lived in the sky until the white man penned them up. American Horse can turn himself into a hoofed or winged creature. You ain’t gonna see him.”
“I’ll make a note of that and fax Washington right away,” the agent said.
Ten minutes later, as the sun disappeared beyond the mountains and the temperature dropped precipitously, the sheriff’s deputies and government agents along the road heard the popping sounds of large-caliber ammunition up on the cliffs. They took cover in the trees while a helicopter roared over the canyon, searchlights on, sharpshooters positioned in the doors.
The sound of firing went on intermittently for five minutes. The helicopter reported campfire smoke in the trees at the top of the canyon, and federal agents and county lawmen worked their way up the streambed, clattering over the slag, crouching each time a round popped on top of the cliff. Finally they lifted one another nine feet up a sheer stone wall onto the pine needle floor of the forest and crawled through timber shaggy with moss to Johnny’s campsite.
Inside a clearing, a big steel skillet sat in a campfire that had crumpled into ash. Empty.308 casings that had been dumped into the skillet and left to explode as the skillet heated stuck out of the ash like brass teeth. The wind blew through the clearing and feathered the smoke in the trees. From the cliff the agents could see their vehicles parked on the canyon road, their tires flat, the valve stems slashed off with a trade ax.
The farthest vehicle from the cliff, a U.S. Forest Service crew bus, had been moved and parked at an angle across the road and was now burning brightly in the dusk. Johnny was nowhere in sight. No one could explain how he had descended from the mountain and circled behind his pursuers. He had not stolen a vehicle, nor did he leave any scent for bloodhounds on the vehicles he had vandalized.
The agents and country deputies watched a solitary blue heron fly the length of the road, then lift on extended wings in the sunset and soar toward the wetlands in the Swan River drainage. The country deputies, most of whom had lived all their lives in that area, said herons did not fly into the high country and could offer no explanation for the blue heron’s presence in the canyon.
That night Half Yellow Face burned wet sage on a rock behind a bar in Seeley Lake and sang the loon’s song to the wind, sure in his heart that Johnny American Horse, wherever he was, could hear the Children of the Large Beaked Bird talking to him.
THE FBI MEN were not interested in the attempt on my wife’s life or the cruel death imposed on my buckskin gelding, but I didn’t fault them for it. They had their own problems, and I was not reporting the commission of a federal crime. But I did resent their bureaucratic single-mindedness, which in this instance I believed masked political convenience. They did not want to consider the possibility that a large conspiracy was at work to hide the history of Global Research, Inc.
When I left the Federal Building I felt like a man who had just filed a report on an alien abduction. Back home, I sat by myself a long time in the backyard, then went inside and returned with L.Q.’s revolver, a box of shells, a pair of ear guards, and two empty peach cans. At twenty-five yards I blew the cans skittering across the arroyo, banging them off rocks, knocking them in the air, twice hitting them on the fly. I loaded and reloaded and continued firing until my palm tingled and the grass was littered with shell casings.
I did not allow my thoughts to dwell on either my actions or the strange sense of serenity I experienced when I felt the heavy weight of L.Q.’s revolver in my hand. I cleaned the revolver with a bore brush and an oil rag, reloaded the chambers, and put it back in my desk drawer. Through the window I watched the light die in the valley and the flames on Black Mountain, just north of us, gusting three hundred feet into the sky.
SATURDAY MORNING, Darrel McComb made several entries in his home computer, all of them indicating his inability to deal with Greta Lundstrum’s treachery. Over and over he relived his birthday celebration at her house, the dessert she had prepared especially for him, the fine watch she had given him, the way she had made love to him and then talked secretly on the phone about him with a dirt bag after she thought he was asleep.
How bad could one guy get taken?
But he didn’t know what to do about it. She had used him for a dildo, pumped him for information, and helped him paint himself into a corner so he couldn’t explain the nature of his problem to either the D.A. or the sheriff without admitting he was a professional idiot.
It was a collection of pocket gophers that gave Darrel a plan. Darrel had bought a five-acre lot up on the Swan River years before hoping eventually to build a cabin there. The grass was tall and emerald-green in the spring, interspersed with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and harebells, shaded by cottonwoods and birch trees, a virtual fairyland. Then a family of pocket gophers moved in, burrowing under the sod, eating the root systems, covering the terrain with barren, serpentine mounds that looked like calcified scar tissue.
Darrel had thought the problem could be easily handled. A rodent was a rodent, food for owls and coyotes, hardly worth the price of a.22 round. He sprayed pesticides and dropped strychnine down their holes and saw no effect. So he called the county agent and was told to cover all the holes around the burrow except one, then flood the burrow with a garden hose. Darrel pumped enough water into the ground to float Noah’s Ark and managed to push one gopher to the surface. He flattened it with a shovel. In the morning, fresh dirt piles exploded all over the lot.
He moved on with exhaust fumes that he piped from his car into the ground. He could smell the carbon monoxide rising from the dirt mounds, even hear tiny feet running under the sod. But at sunrise the next day fresh piles stood at the entrance of every burrow and not one dead gopher lay in sight.
Darrel drove to a fireworks stand in Seeley Lake and loaded up with M-80s, cherry bombs, Roman candles, and devil-chasers, which fired like rockets down the passageways and exploded deep inside the burrows. The upshot was that he set his own field on fire.
Darrel upped the stakes with gopher bombs that looked like half-sized sticks of dynamite, a combination of sulfur and sodium nitrate that created curds of thick yellow smoke and an unbearable stench. He spaded open the burrows, lit the fuses, then packed the dirt tightly on top of the openings and stood back to watch his handiwork. He could hear the bombs burning underground and the roots of the grass and wildflowers frying in the heat, and see tongues of sulfurous smoke rising out of the sod all over the field.