C. Box: Savage Run

Stewie moved from tree to tree, but didn’t spike all of them. He approached each tree using 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, spiraling them down 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 as he spoke 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 deep in the tree as he spoke. “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 either 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 sawteeth. 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 isn’t to hurt anyone. The purpose is to save trees. After we’re finished here, I’ll call the local ranger station and tell them what we’ve done-although I won’t say exactly where 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 at gunpoint during tourist season. 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. Hayden Powell, who I’ve known since we were kids, wrote the cover story for them, and he coined the word ‘ecoterrorist.’ ” This memory made Stewie feel bold. “There were reporters from all over the country at that trial,” he 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. After that, memberships started pouring in from all over the world.”

Annabel nodded her head. 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. She recalled that One Globe had once dropped a shroud over Mount Rushmore right before the president was about to give a speech there. It had been on the nightly news.

“Stewie,” she said happily, “you are the real thing.” Her eyes stayed 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 .”

Stewie turned and smiled at her. His face glistened and his muscles were bulging 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 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 that after they hiked out of the forest tomorrow, they would get in the SUV and head southeast, toward the Bridger-Teton Forest.

When they walked into the herd of grazing 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 principle of the thing. Cows don’t belong in the trees in the Bighorn Mountains-they’re fouling up what is left of the natural ecosystem. 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 taxpayers but of the wildlife as well. 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 only about five percent of the beef we eat in this whole country,” Stewie said. “All the rest comes from down South, from 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 bellowed in protest, then turned and lumbered away. The rest of the small herd, about a dozen head, followed it. They 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 about twenty degrees in the last ten minutes and rain was inevitable. The sky had darkened and black roiling clouds enveloped the peak. The sudden low pressure had made the forest quieter, the sounds muffled and the smell of the 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 amiss.

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 its back that was large and square and didn’t belong; the thin reed of an 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 Stewie 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 of the lookout tower with binoculars. Over a red-rimmed plume of smoke and dirt, he could see a Douglas fir launch into the air like a rocket, where it turned, hung suspended for a moment, then crashed into the forest below.