James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

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.

The next day, he saw no sign of gopher activity. With a happy heart he strung water hoses and sprinklers over his property, raked grass seed into the serpentine lines of sterile dirt and rock that now networked his entire lot, and drove home whistling a song.

When he returned the following week, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The combination of chemical, igneous, and rodent damage was incredible. Grass that had not been eaten at the roots had been cooked by the rockets, firecrackers, and sulfur bombs. The grass was yellow or dying, the field pocked with collapsed areas larger than his car, his well water contaminated. He saw a solitary gopher sitting on the edge of its hole and emptied the magazine of his nine millimeter at it. Some of the bullets ricocheted off a rock and hit a neighbor’s truck across the river.

The following week, Darrel determined the flaw in his strategy. He had waged a war of aggression and superior force against a wily creature that had survived millions of years by using its wits to outsmart both primitive and modern man. Power and success had their origins in guile and deception, not in force and weaponry. How had the famous North Vietnamese general Giap once put it? He had defeated the French not with the gun but with the shovel. Darrel had tried to defeat the gopher with the gun.

What was the answer?

Give the gopher what it wanted.

Darrel fixed a huge salad of scallions and the tender root systems of alfalfa and Canadian bluegrass. He wore rubber gloves so as not to get his scent on the salad, then soaked it overnight in poison. The next morning he packed the salad down the burrows of every pocket gopher on the property. His gopher problem disappeared.

Give your enemies what they want, he told himself. With Greta and her friends, that was easy.

Greta wanted Wyatt Dixon dead and the goods from the Global Research robbery back in the company’s possession.

Before he went to her house that afternoon, he gargled with whiskey, swallowing none of it, and dabbed some on his cheeks and shirt. When she opened the door, she caught a load of his breath and said, “I thought you’d given up getting hammered for a while.”

“What’s a guy going to do on a Saturday afternoon?”

“Come in and I’ll show you,” she said, pulling him by the arm.

He feigned a smile and sat down heavily in a chair. “Got a cold beer? I smell like a smoked ham. The fire on Black Mountain blew out last night,” he said.

She unscrewed the cap on a long-necked bottle and handed it to him. “Want to take a shower?” she said.

“Got to work tonight. I think I’ll be scrubbing a couple of your problems off the blackboard.”

“Like what?”

“Know why the Feds haven’t found the goods from the Global Research break-in?”

“The Feds are bozos?”

“No, they’re smart guys. At least most of the time. They just didn’t figure Wyatt Dixon as a serious player. They marked him off as a psycho because he writes letters to the President.” He upended his beer and smiled at her over the top of the bottle.