Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward
bosses on such jobs paid cash. He could live well enough and never pay taxes. And his formally declared income was so low he qualified for an assistance grant for his so-called ranch. Changing tires was a cover. Riding for Bunny Cleaver was his first love. He could play cowboy with real guns and feel like a patriot to boot but extermination was his bread and butter.
The best thing about Nolan, according to those who hired him, was that he could keep his destructive adventures secret. It wasn’t that hard to do since he’d run out of friends several fistfights and betrayals ago. So it was not characteristic when he stopped at the Lazy-O bar, ordered a beer, and told the bartender that he stunk because he’d spent the whole damn weekend hunting beavers.
“Aren’t you supposed to trap them?” said the bartender. “I thought they were protected or something.”
“Was nobody protecting them little fuckers yesterday,” Nolan boasted and then laughed a little too loud. He lowered his hat closer to his eyes, chugged the rest of his beer, and muttered, “If it ain’t legal to shoot them fuckin’ water rats then you can take it up with the fuckin’ irrigation company that fuckin’ paid me. I just do whatever the fuck I get paid for.”
He chugged one more for the road and walked to his truck. His cell phone was ringing. It said the caller ID was unavailable but he recognized the numbers. Orin Bender hadn’t called him since that last job when some damn tortoise got in the way of a pipeline that Bender’s company was laying.
He listened and his face tightened and his lips pursed. “I don’t know, Mr. Bender, I don’t do people. I mean I haven’t done anything like that before. Animals in the way, sure, but a person?”
He stared at the ground in front of the truck tire, spit, and pushed his hat up. “How much?”
He whistled and took his hat off.
Chapter 7
Upon their release from jail, Hip Hop Hopi and Luna Waxwing retreated to a favorite campsite in Cistern Canyon to find out if they were sexually compatible. They tried every position their small tent would allow and then ventured outside for more athletic congress. They discovered that moss was a wonderful platform for lust but sand was irritating and tended to go into places that were hard to reach later on. Sandstone was definitely out as it left an abrasive rash on knees and rumps. They tried balancing in a cottonwood tree but that was too tricky and disturbed the squirrels. So, back to the tent. After two days the results were unanimous—yes, they clicked.
Hoppy had vagabonded around the West since he was expelled from a small liberal arts college in Colorado after the entire Young Republican Club was admitted to the emergency room complaining of giant wasps, women with scissors, and “invisible negroes.” At a fundraising party for a candidate who opposed legalizing marijuana, Hoppy had infiltrated the group and spiked their bourbon with LSD. He and Luna had that in common: dramatic acid turning points.
After that, Hoppy made a pilgrimage to Portland, then San Francisco, Patagonia, and finally an ashram in Canada. It was in Canada that he saw what tar sands mining meant, a vast and wild landscape sacrificed for a fuel that was choking the planet. Two years later he was busing tables in a saloon in Stony Mesa and sleeping in his truck when he heard about the tar sands mine in Boon County and its ragtag band of ardent resisters. He left in the middle of his shift and didn’t look back.
Hoppy had never met anyone like Luna. She amazed him. Smart, beautiful, warm, both serious and funny . . . she was the ideal woman he thought didn’t really exist. He fell for everything about her: her voice, her laugh, her walk, the way her eyebrows danced along her brow when she was telling a story, even the smallest gesture like the way she brushed away that stray lock of hair that kept falling across her face.
Luna’s attraction to Hoppy was harder for her to define. This wasn’t a casual fling. There was no mistaking the chemistry. When he held her she swam in a pheremonal tide she could not resist. But the rest of him? He was not what she had imagined her dream mate would be and she was puzzled by her attraction to him. She questioned her feelings. Is this a revelation or an ambush?
After their second night together Hoppy had to leave because he had signed up to help transport beavers to a creek on the far side of Sleeping Maiden Mountain. Luna was supposed to be back at the office that served as a headquarters for the Sea Ledges Tar Sands Alliance, a converted shed behind the home of one of the members. She planned to consult the lawyer who had volunteered to represent them. There were press releases to write and she was asked by the others who had gone to jail to conduct a postmortem on the demonstration and get back to them. She wanted to review media coverage and the legal issues raised by their lawyer. In her head, she had already started to compose a summary to communicate to a large following on a Facebook page and the Sea Ledges blog.
She was eager to get to work but was also reluctant to leave. The bond between her and Hoppy was powerful and the project with the beavers sounded fascinating. Beavers had lived all over the southwest but were mostly trapped out decades ago. Unlike the millions of beavers that were killed across the continent for their pelts to make warm hats and coats for humans, the beaver colonies on Sleeping Maiden Mountain were removed by settlers who considered them pests. Cattlemen had dammed and drained every water source they could find on what the locals still called Sleeping Squaw Mountain several years after the official name had been changed to make it less offensive. Beavers clogged irrigation ditches and disrupted the plans of the irrigation company’s engineers by building their own dams where they saw fit. Beavers, or dumb fucking rodents as they were called by irrigation maintenance workers, were messy and unpredictable so they had to go.
Years later, the Forest Service understood that the land suffered their absence and decided to reintroduce them on Sleeping Maiden Mountain where only a single remnant colony remained. Luna decided she could take care of most of the Alliance business that evening and the following morning, leaving just enough time to make the drive to the trailhead where the beavers would be carried to their new home.
It wasn’t much of a trailhead. If it hadn’t been for the Forest Service trucks parked on the side of the gravel road, she would have missed it. She jumped into the truck with Hoppy, who had arrived a few minutes earlier. Together they waited for the buck-toothed guests of honor to arrive in a separate truck that was specially equipped to be a safe water-rodent taxi.
“Okay,” Hoppy said to Luna, “what do you know about beavers? You studied that, right?”
“Well, I studied wildlife and ecology generally and voles in particular. I never did fieldwork with beavers.”
“So, tell me what you know about beavers.”
She tilted her head back, arched her brows, brushed a loose lock of hair from her eyes, and smiled demurely. “Uh, that’s slang for . . .”
“I meant the mammals.”
She brushed herself off and straightened her posture. She was a student giving a report in front of a one-man class. “Alright, this is what I know. Beavers are like the original geo-engineers. They were once everywhere, at least a hundred million of them, across North America where they shaped the land. Then we trapped them out for pelts and they almost disappeared entirely. Now we are putting them back because the forests are dry. Burning up. The stick and mud dams that beavers build slow mountain runoff in the spring and recharge aquifers underground. Runoff water lasts longer when beavers are doing their thing. The ponds and wetlands they make eventually silt up and become rich meadows. In the meanwhile, they’re habitat for fish, frogs, salamanders, and for all sorts of insects, like dragonflies. Birds are drawn to beaver-made wetlands for food. They enable water-dependent trees like willows that are food for elk. So add it all up and a landscape shaped by beaver colonies is more biologically diverse than land where they have been exterminated. A beaver-maintained watershed is healthier and more resilient, too . . . oh, and they’re vegetarians.”
Her performance over, she mock curtsied, grinned, and winked. Hoppy stared at her in disbelief, then laughed. He was attracted to smart women but this one was unique blend of intelligence and sass. Luna, he was discovering, was an erotic geek in gypsy