April Smith - Judas Horse

“Hi, Megan!” I say brightly, nodding affirmatively toward my partner. “What’s up?” Megan Tewksbury is calling from the farm to tell her friend Darcy the secret location of the action to free the wild mustangs. On the first day of the gather, protesters from across the Northwest will meet in a campground behind a grocery store, at an old stage stop in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

I promise to be there.

Closing the phone, I grin at Donnato. “I can walk on water with these people.”

In the high desert, where winters are cold and dry and spring winds whip across the flats, evaporating moisture from the earth, herds of wild horses roam free.

This is the big country, where you can drive for hours on empty road and never turn the wheel. The gently rolling hillsides covered with silver sage are speckled with hard chunks of snow — a painted pattern in which pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, quail, and pinto mustangs can easily disappear. Gray mist overhangs the rim rock to the east, silhouetting pointed junipers in a shifting white glow; to the west, the sun is bright and there are fluffy clouds.

You are traveling across an ancient lake bed of frosty green that is hundreds of square miles wide. Beyond it is another ancient lake, and another, and in between, great volcanic buttes of obsidian and cracked basalt, witness to unthinkable power. Time is also a kind of power in the big country. It suspends the human brain in wonder.

By afternoon, when the temperature has dropped to thirty-five degrees and the sporadic sun has given way to sleet, three small armies — the wranglers, the radicals, and the law — have mobilized in the struggle for the destiny of the wild horses, because genuine wonder — full-blooded and pure — is a rare and valuable commodity.

The wrangler outfit is a contractor hired by the BLM. They bring their own helicopter. The law is made up of undercover cops from the county sheriff’s department and the Portland police, supervised by the FBI. The radicals are a group of maybe fifteen — mainstream true believers from rescue groups all over the state; you’d have to be, to drive almost to the freaking border of Idaho.

We, the radicals, arrive within the hour and park our vehicles at a stage stop built in 1912, now a tiny grocery store where you might get a packet of trail mix, if the snaggletoothed proprietress doesn’t shoot you first. She doesn’t like strangers, and she sure as hell doesn’t like them using the privy, a hole in the ground out front, with a hand-lettered sign that advises, succinctly, CLOSE DOOR — KEEP OUT SNAKES.

The wind is cutting as the rescuers of lost animals gather around a picnic table adjacent to the parking lot. I scan the reddened faces squinting against splatters of rain. These are your good citizens, eminently sane. They believe in the sanctity of life. They want to be seen as compassionate. Middle-aged and mostly female (two lesbian couples), they are “guardians”—not owners — of hordes of abandoned dogs and cats, lizards and rabbits, and their phone numbers are always the ones on the oil spill emergency list. There are graying braids and nose rings, hiking boots and ponchos. You have to like a bosomy grandma wearing a cap that says Meat-free zone.

The dangerous element is Bill Fontana. Even in the stormy desert his lean figure — the stomp-ass boots, a camouflage parka and watch cap — radiates a concentrated black energy. He works the eclectic crew gathered around the picnic tables with a sense of his own celebrity, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. I want to say, Ladies, he is not worthy of you. But he plays to their vanity, and they adore him like a son.

“We stand for the essence of nonviolence.”

Fontana speaks intimately, drinking in eye contact with each one. “This is an evolutionary moment. To make nonviolence an organizing principle. We are the people. This is the time.” I wish I could turn away. I have read so many transcripts of taped phone conversations of Fontana spreading the gospel that I know the rhetoric by heart. But I am nodding gravely, pitying the well-intentioned troops about to be led into a trap. They must know they cannot get away with this.

There are no cars on the highway. Probably none for fifty miles. You can hear the drops of ice plinking softly on woven nylon hoods and shoulders. Behind the stage stop the proprietress keeps an aviary of chicken wire and tin. Red-and-yellow house finches hop and dive. Unsmiling, she flicks a pan of scraps into the snow.

“You found it!” whispers a familiar voice, bringing with it the scent of almond soap.

I turn to see that it is Megan, hurriedly zipping up a yam-colored parka. Flakes of frozen rain have gathered in her silver hair.

“Hi!” I squeal. “Great to see you.”

She gives me a motherly hug. “I’m glad I’m not late.” “No, we’re just getting started.” I look around. “Where is Julius?” “He drove to the preserve to scout out the horses.” “What about Slammer and Sara?”

“Someone has to watch the farm.”

“Are you scared?” I ask, lowering my voice.

“Bill just said this is a nonviolent action.” “It’s just that I’m tired of empty gestures,” I say. “I want to do something that will make an impact.” Megan puts the collar of the parka up and snaps it into place. The wind blows her turquoise earrings. Her look becomes distant as she gazes toward the flatland.

“You should be careful.”

“Why?”

“The FBI is here.”

“Are you sure?”

Megan: “Count on it.”

“Seriously?”

“They keep files on us. They come to our conventions, too. They think we don’t know who they are.” A strange paralysis kicks in, like hearing two radio stations at once. Which one to listen to? I become momentarily unbalanced. This is not playing a role in a bar. I am alone, in a windblown god-awful patch of nowhere at the end of time, eye-to-eye with someone who has placed her trust in me.

“The FBI had someone spying on Julius,” she says.

“I don’t believe it.”

“He came up to Julius at the bar at Omar’s — this was months ago — a guy nobody ever saw before, and tried to sell him drugs. Julius said he should have had a sign on his back that said ‘Pig.’” Skeptically, I say, “How could Julius know he was from the FBI?” “The guy was an obvious asshole.”

Acid burn creeps through my gut, like when you hear someone slur your religion.

“Then what happened?”

“He kept hanging around,” she says incredulously. “Julius wouldn’t talk to him. Nobody would. So I guess he left. Listen.” Fontana is giving orders: “We don’t want a lot of cars, so you’ll have to buddy up. Dress warmly and make sure you wear gloves. Eat. Rest. Meditate. Pray. We go in after dark.” I take in a draft of dry, cold air. It comes out as a sigh.

“It’s all a game, isn’t it?”

“No,” says Megan. “It’s a difficult and spiritual calling. To care about another species is the hardest thing to do.” Water drips off the tin roof of the aviary. The red-and-yellow finches peck in the snow.

Dick Stone has them in his sights. Hard to discern in the distance in a basin of bunchgrass. So far, he’s had no luck — the brown dots he spotted through the Army-issue field glasses turned out to be cattle. But these, at the limit of his vision, move like horses.

He swerves off the highway into a gravel turnout, gets out of the truck and opens a gate in the barbed-wire fence that leads to hundreds of thousands of federally protected acres.

He loops the gate closed and drives a slow half mile past markers that warn RESEARCH AREA — NO TRESPASSING, where he cuts the engine and eases the door shut. A ground squirrel streaks by. The quiet is a muffled roar, tangible, as if he’d plugged his ears with silence. Soon the crunching of the bandit’s boots on the granular volcanic dust becomes not his; nor does he care if the white wool Pendleton jacket with the colorful Navajo design draws attention from some nervous BLM patrol. It is not likely that they’d throw him against the hood of the Suburban, pat him down, and find the Colt.45 where he’s holding it right now, deep inside his jacket pocket.