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“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.

Thirteen

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.

He trudges uphill through a valley framed by dark gray magma cliffs, some uplifted, some half-sunken in a spectacular collision ten thousand years ago. He has to watch his footing. The porous rocks are sharp. He’s lost the horses in the folds of the hills, but he knows they like to shade up under the junipers, where he saw them through the field glasses. When he gains the rise, he sees their colors in the bluebunch wheatgrass a hundred yards away. He smiles at their placid grazing and begins to circle slowly upwind.

He spirals closer. His training as a sniper in the Army keeps him low. In the deep spaces of the canyon, the animals must seem to jump-cut to a larger size with every turn—from tiny toys to very large and present as he drops behind the willows and observes. The weather is changing fast. Over the butte to the west, a pulsing cloud like a black jellyfish is trailing dark ribbons of rain. The wind has shifted and the mustangs know he is there; finely muzzled heads rise and point alertly in his direction. He has come upon a band of thirty or forty—pintos, duns, and chestnuts, with half a dozen foals. Every individual is strong and perfectly formed, the essence of natural beauty.

Or maybe he is thinking about bloodshed. Dinnertimes at the farm he would lecture us assembled radicals on how the Spanish horse—the bloodline of these mustangs goes