"Come on, Sue Lynn," Lucas said.

I got to my feet and put my hat back on. The hills across the river were velvet green and rose abruptly into the sky and ponderosa pine flowed from the crests down into the arroyos.

"My apologies to you, Ms. Big Medicine. Y'all have a fine day," I said, and walked back to my truck.

I saw Lucas running to catch me before I got out on the highway. I winked at him and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

That night Lucas played at the Milltown Bar. The tables and dance floor were filled, the crowd happy and drunk and raucous. When Lucas came to the microphone to sing his first song of the evening, his eyes were watering from the cigarette smoke and the heat of the stage lights that shone upward into his face. He clicked the floor switch with his boot and the banks of white lights died and cooled, and he clicked a second switch and four overhead flood lamps wrapped with tinted cellophane came on and bathed the stage with a soft reddish-blue glow.

He blotted the sweat out of his eyes and the room came into focus, then he looked down into a face that made him twitch inside.

"During your break I'd like to compare notes with you on Sue Lynn. She can really rise to the occasion if you can get down past that wore-out part," Wyatt Dixon said.

The next evening Doc and I attended a town meeting hosted by the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation at the Holiday Inn in Missoula. The crowd was a hostile one. Things had not been going well for Phillips-Carruthers. The previous day a famous female country singer had agreed to visit the mine site. Perhaps because of the fact she chain-smoked cigarettes and looked as if she had just been blown through the doors of a beer joint, the mine operators thought they had a sympathetic vehicle for their message. Also, like most greedy and obtuse people, they believed news media existed for no other purpose than to promote their business interests. Hence, they arranged for both print and television journalists to be at the mine site when the singer was escorted from a company helicopter to the water processing shed that supposedly neutralized any contaminants that might leak into the ecosystem.

On camera, a smiling company executive filled a drinking glass from a tap and offered it to the singer.

"It's as clear as spring water, ma'am. I'd give it to my grandchildren," he said.

"Thank you, sir. But I don't care to have nuclear-strength spinach growing out of my lungs," she replied, and smiled sweetly at him.

Probably due to the influence of a PR person with a brain, tonight the mine operators played over the heads of the audience and made use of their hostility. There was no shortage of fanatics and professional naysayers in the crowd, people who wore their eccentricity like a uniform and loved conflict and acrimony so they would not have to contemplate the paucity of significance in their own lives. The mine operators paraded working people in front of the microphone, both men and women who spoke sincerely about their dependence upon the mine for their homes and livelihoods. You could almost feel the mine executives praying under their breaths for a catcall from the audience.

But it didn't happen. The audience was respectful, the occasional dissenting moan in a listener hushed by those around him. Then Carl Hinkel, the militia leader from the Bitterroot Valley, rose from his chair in the third row and gave the mine operators what they needed, a dignified presentation that belied his agenda, that mixed patriotism and blue-collar attitudes with positive economic statistics and Montana traditions.

He wore a western-cut sports coat with pads on the elbows and a maroon shirt and a flowered tie and charcoal slacks. His beard was freshly clipped, his shoulders straight, his corncob pipe cupped in his palm. His Tidewater accent, empty of anger or malicious intent, was both foreign and intriguing to the audience. Their faces seemed to be reconsidering all the impressions they had previously formed about him.

"You're not going to spike this guy's cannon?" I said to Doc.

But Doc just looked at his feet.

"The Earth was put here for a purpose, to nurture and sustain us. The minerals we take from the ground are like the vegetables we grow on our farms. They're all gifts of the Lord," Hinkel said. "It seems to me a terrible arrogance to reject that gift. I don't mean to offend anyone here. I love this state. I think it's our charge to be good stewards of the land. I appreciate the opportunity you've given me to speak here tonight. God bless every one of you, and God bless these working folks who need their jobs."

When Hinkel sat down no one rose to rebut him. A long-haired kid in a fatigue jacket with a feather dangling from one earring stood up and made a rambling speech about Native Americans and wind power and the timber industry and missile silos east of the Divide. People's eyes crossed with boredom. Carl Hinkel now seemed like Clarence Darrow. "Say something, Doc."

"Fuck it. If they need the likes of me for a leader, they're not worth leading," he replied.

The sky was still bright when the meeting broke up and the audience drifted outside. The clouds were mauve-colored in the west and the rain blowing in the canyon at Alberton Gorge looked like spun glass against the light. I could smell the heavy, cold odor of the Clark Fork and the wetness of the boulders in the shadows along the banks and the hay that someone was mowing in a distant field. The riparian countryside, the purple haze on the mountains, the old-growth trees that were so tall they looked as if they lived in the sky, were probably as close to Eden as modern man ever got, I thought. But this wonderful part of the world was also one that Carl Hinkel and his friends, if given the opportunity, would turn into a separate country surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.

People who should have known better had stopped to chat with him. He was obviously a strong man physically, and he demonstrated his strength by picking up a plump little girl of ten or eleven and holding her out at arm's length.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hinkel," I said.

"Yes?" he said, turning toward me, his eyebrows raised.

"I keep having trouble with Wyatt Dixon. I don't think he does anything without your permission. The next time he bothers my son, I'm going to be out to your place and kick a nail-studded two-by-four up your sorry white ass."

"I'm afraid I don't know who you are," he said. "Oh, really?"

"I'm sixty years old, sir. It seems to me you embarrass your son and degrade yourself. But if you wish to physically attack me, do it and be done," he said.

The conversation died around us and every person on the motel's grass swale and tree-shaded driveway was now staring at me. Carl Hinkel waited, then put his pipe into his mouth and drew a thumbnail across the top of a match and lit the tobacco in his pipe bowl and gazed into the distance.

My face was red with shame. I turned and walked away, unable to believe my own vanity and stupidity. I heard Doc at my elbow.

"You're going about it the wrong way, bud. These guys don't fight fair," he said. "Tell me about it."

"My father always said God loves fools. Join the club. Don't worry. They're all going down," Doc said. He cupped his hand around the back of my neck like a baseball catcher mothering a pitcher who had just been shelled off the mound.

I turned and looked into his face.

"All going down?" I said.

I GUESS I had misjudged Doc's potential. Or at least Wyatt Dixon had.

The next night he was at home in the small log house Carl Hinkel had given him to use on the back of Hinkel's property. The moon was up and from his window he could see the lines of cottonwoods along the Bitterroot River and the monolithic shapes of the mountains against the sky and the thick stands of timber that grew into the canyons. A star shower burst above the valley and Wyatt Dixon wondered if the tracings of light across the darkness of the heavens were a sign, perhaps an indicator that an enormous historical change was at hand for him and his kind.