Two Farewells and an Abject Goodbye: Another Day and Night with Possemen

I’ve known some of you through this forum a long time, others only a few months. Still others, lurkers, I don’t know at all, though you know me somewhat—at least the version of myself I present here.

To all of you: farewell.

This post will be my last, at least my last as a Westerner and my last long piece for a while. As I said, I am taking a job and moving East, for family reasons. While I may offer updates on my life now and then, I won’t be prattling on about things anymore.

I’m getting this out of the way up front because the post to follow is long, and because I suspect that by the end of it I’ll have lost some of you to boredom and pissed off a lot of others. Before that happens I wanted to thank all of you for being such an exciting, supportive community for the last few years, thank you for all the work we’ve done together and all the opportunities you’ve given me to feel useful. And thank you for all the advice, down to the fifteen or so of you who offered your opinions of whether or not I should take this job—I may not have asked for that advice, but I do appreciate it. I will miss you all.

*********

Early yesterday afternoon a husband-and-wife pair—not Posse directly but somehow affiliated—came to my hotel in a minivan and picked up me and the woman reporter I’ve been traveling with. (Margaret Anthony, for those of you who’ve been guessing in the comments. “Meg” from now on.)

I didn’t know what was up at the time. Meg asked me to come but didn’t tell me where we were going. I had an idea, and it turned out I was right, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

They drove us straight to Circus Circus. I don’t know if any of you have read the classic of Postmodern architecture Learning from Las Vegas, but if so, Circus Circus is a perfect example of what Robert Venturi calls the “decorated shed,” a plain white box with pink circus-font letters and a giant clown.

We went around back, where sometime after the hotel was built someone stuck on a giant dome of reflective pink glass. Fifteen big trucks were ranged beside it. We parked beyond them, among the flaking white columns of the garage, climbed a set of stairs to one of the dome’s fire doors, and entered at the end of a line of plastic “adobe” kiosks that used to offer the games of state fairs and ocean boardwalks. In the middle of the dome was a big pile of plastic rocks, with low plaster walls showing where stairs and walkways went up its sides and through it. A pink roller-coaster track wrapped around that pile like the Ouroboros.

Meg and I had already been to one bankrupt casino on the Las Vegas Strip. It was smashed and chaotic, showing evidence that first it had been looted, then used as a squat till it was fetid with piss and garbage, and then finally left. This place had been looted and smashed up some, but it didn’t seem to have been a squat, and it was obvious why: it far hotter in here than outside, probably near 90 degrees. Without air conditioning the glass dome became a huge greenhouse. I’d brought a jacket and had to take it off immediately, tie it around my waist by the sleeves.

We could hear a crowd and advanced toward it as well as we could, following a walkway around the fake rockpile. Within minutes we were pouring sweat. So were the Possemen, apparently: we came out of a plaster tunnel twenty feet from the lot of them and their smell landed on my face like a damp washcloth. There were a few hundred packed together there in a kind of plaza by a low stage, in a corner of the dome by the hotel wall, and the few I wrote about before who’d cleaned themselves to pass unnoticed in town, those were clearly the exceptions. It smelled of the festering rot from thousands of creases of skin where sweat had pooled and cooked over and over into a slimy mix of dust, bacteria, and dead cells. It smelled of hair grease gone clumpy and rancid. It smelled like foul meat, cabbage, and sex.

The only other time I’d been around a big group of Possemen was back in their cave. I don’t think I mentioned how bad those guys smelled; in any case this was far worse. That Sheriff kept horses and hawks indoors with his men, and both emit heavy, musky odors stronger even than Possemen. Healthy stinks, the stinks of nature. With no natural smells to mask them, these filthy men shut in this hot room smelled wrong, simply unnatural. I could feel it clambering up my nose and crawling down my throat like a live thing that wanted to dirty my insides, smear shit and maggots on the clean lining of my mouth and lungs.

Not to get all college-theoretical, since I know you guys hate that, but Julia Kristeva called this kind of thing the “abject”: what comes from us that we have to reject with all our souls in order to be civilized.

A man I recognized took the stage. The story with him is bizarre. I referred to it obliquely in my last post when I talked about a reason one old Sheriff gave for why there were so many Posses in town at the time. I didn’t want to reveal it then, as I said, in case it was true. Well here it is: he’d told me that those Possemen I saw had gathered in Vegas for a big, kamikaze raid on Area 51, the secret Air Force base out in the middle of the desert. That guy on stage had convinced them, apparently, that the Feds are in cahoots with space aliens. How he’d done that, well, I’ll come back to. Gary Shecker was his name and he’d been trying to convince Meg and me to cover his big scoop: he wanted real, legitimate national press to back him up when he proved once and for all that aliens are real. We thought he was nuts, of course.

So why were we there? Because the Sheriff who’d kidnapped us—Carson Cutt—was supposed to be as well. We’d been trailing him for a week, across three states. He was supposed to have freed our Sad Betty friend a few days after he let me and Meg go, but she hadn’t been where he’d promised. We were hoping to get her back.

I might as well admit now that her editor (and now my boss) had insisted that wherever she and I went, I must call him and report. I couldn’t say no for reasons I don’t want to get into. (This is where I start to lose some of you, I’m sure. That’s okay, I respect it. Hate me if you have to.)

Shecker read a pair of names and fifty or so Possemen filtered back the way we’d come in, toward the rear of the dome and the fire exits. Ten minutes later he read three more and another big group left. The third time he read I recognized a name and realized he was calling out counties. After the fourth about half the crowd was gone and Meg started to get nervous because she couldn’t locate Cutt. We went up front to ask Shecker himself.

“Is he already gone?” Meg demanded when we reached the edge of the stage.

Shecker said he wasn’t even there yet, and Meg pinched up her face to look disbelieving and threatening. Shecker swore he’d show up but not until later. He promised to buy us dinner and explain, if we would wait.

He went back to calling roll, Possemen kept leaving, and I kept sweating. At last the three of us—me, Meg, and Shecker—were left alone.

“So when will Cutt be here?” Meg demanded again.

Shecker checked his watch. “Not for another couple of hours,” he said. “There’s two stages to this thing. These men were all in the first, but Sheriff Cutt volunteered for the second. He’ll meet us later. Meanwhile, I’ve got to eat and you’re invited.”

We left the dome. Intense relief. Ignoring that stench and heat was like ignoring a whining fluorescent bulb at the office: it took a constant, involuntary effort, just enough to be draining, and when that bulb went off, even if you’d mostly stopped hearing it, you blessed the silence. It was a perfect 65 degrees outside and cooling fast. The air smelled delicious, so good that I waved my arms a bit and turned my body side to side to let it wash away any lingering funk I’d carried with me.

Shecker led us up the casino’s private road to the Boulevard and we headed south. The sun had nearly gone, which made one landmark ahead stand out long before we reached it: the lit green, gold, and red neon sign of the Peppermill 24 Hour Restaurant and Fireside Lounge.

Even these days, with the electric grid full of holes, it’s not a total surprise to come on a lit beacon of a restaurant in an otherwise dark small town. I visited one such place a couple of weeks ago, as you may remember. But it’s unheard of to find one in a darkened portion of a partly lit city like Las Vegas. Diesel generators aren’t cheap and neither is diesel; I have to imagine it’s a big disadvantage to rely on one when your in-town competitors don’t have to. If nothing else a generator makes a whole lot of noise. We heard when all we could see yet was the peak of the restaurant’s roof, set thirty feet back from the road.

The place did a brisk business, though. The parking lot was full, and inside you could barely hear the generator at all, especially once the hostess took us to our table in the sound-damped back room.

It was plush and low-lit. To the left of the entryway a half-circle of benches surrounded a six-foot pool, in the middle of which a flame burned directly from the water’s surface. Other semicircular booths proceeded deep into the room. Impossible to tell just how deep from the entryway because at their corners rose mirrored columns heavily vined with artificial roses; the walls were mirrored and vined the same, so that booths and flowers multiplied endlessly. It was at once cozy and infinite, the lounge from Frank Sinatra’s vision of Heaven, and the waitresses all wore floor-length black cocktail dresses.

We ordered burgers and cocktails. Meg gulped at her vodka-tonic as soon as it arrived, which worried me a little. I understood the need for Dutch courage and was drinking Scotch myself, but I didn’t want her to be drunk if things got dangerous. I’ve seen Meg drink. The woman can swill with the best when she wants to.

We ate and made small talk about every Westerner’s favorite topic, the good old days before Occupation. Shecker once sold electronics, I once lived with my wife and taught freshman lit and comp, and Meg once hustled for interviews with councilmembers and DAs on the local crime politics beats.

“You wouldn’t think I was any less crazy, would you, if I told you I don’t actually believe I’ve seen a UFO?” Shecker asked at one point. “I used to go to the ridges near Area 51 years ago, before the Air Force restricted them. Folks would always claim to see UFOs but really it was the landing lights on the commuter 737 from McCarran.”

“Only a tiny bit less,” Meg said.

Toward the end of the meal Shecker started a sentence about Sheriff Cutt that I thought might end with more details on the night’s operation. I interrupted him before he’d gotten through five words and excused myself to use the toilet. The bathrooms were in the front half of the restaurant, out of sight of our table, and on the way in I’d noted a pay phone right next to them. If I had to tell my editor what I knew, I wanted to do it before I knew too much.

I hesitated by the phones probably a minute before I called. I wrote that leaving the West feels like a betrayal; well, this was a literal betrayal, and in truth I already knew enough that if my editor got off the phone with me and decided to call the Army, dozens of Possemen might even get killed. And as I said last time, I might deplore their tactics but I recognize that they’re my side far more than any Fed or pro-Fed editor will ever be. So I stood there, staring at the phone, numb and helpless.

I’m not recounting this to you to lessen what I did—“at least I felt bad about it for a solid minute, your Honors, before I picked up the knife and stabbed the Western movement in the back.”

No, I’m writing it to indict myself more fully. I knew the disaster I was about to cause, and yet when I was done vacillating I chose to go through with it. I needed to for my wife. And that taught me an important lesson that at the very least I feel bound to pass on to you, my readers: if you engage in illegal resistance—and depending on the situation nearly any resistance could be classified as illegal these days—don’t ever trust a man in a desperate marriage.

I made the call and told my editor what we’d seen and what I thought it meant: that a battalion’s worth of Possemen were already on their way to Area 51 for the “first part” of whatever it was; that Cutt and his men were in the “second part”; and that we hadn’t yet seen him.

“The guy wants us to see proof,” I said, “so they might make us go with them. Meg says you’re going to call the Army—please don’t. If you do we could be in there with the Posses when they get strafed or whatever happens.”

“Then get out!” he yelled. “Get out now!”

“You know Meg better than to think that could work,” I told him.

I returned to the table and learned from Shecker that what he’d been about to say was that it was time to make contact. Cutt would meet us behind the restaurant in ten minutes.

“I thought it would be hours,” I said.

Shecker shrugged and paid our check. Meg finished her second drink. We went outside.

The plate windows of the diner’s front and the sign by the road lit the parking lot well, but as we went around the side it got dark fast. Out back there was barely enough light to see. Up close the trailer-sized portable generator sounded like several outboard motors lashed together and tipped over to chop their screws against each other and the ground.

As my eyes adjusted I saw a man’s shape coming to meet us. He shouted hello over the racket and I recognized the voice as Cutt’s. He was no longer wearing his duster. Two more shapes trailed him. He dismissed Shecker like an underling and Shecker hesitated a moment to show he wasn’t one, then left Meg and me and Cutt alone.

Cutt waved his hand for us to follow and we did, across the lot of the empty strip mall that hooked around the restaurant in an L shape. There was a little more light here, enough to see that both Cutt’s men carried rifles. Beyond that minimall, hidden from the Boulevard entirely, waited a beige Ford Bronco.

When he opened the Bronco’s door I saw his face clearly in the dome light. He’d trimmed its beard to about half its former bush and cut his hair unevenly, and had changed his furs, boots, Carharrts, and flannels for a pair of wool slacks with knife-edge creases and a checked office shirt. He could have passed for a supply manager or a bank teller at the tail end of a long bender, except for something in his slight frown, the fractionally-slower-than-average movements of his hands, or the jut his hips took when he stood at rest—something subtle yet pervasive in his whole carriage that identified him as wild and Western. I believe Carson Cutt could stride the boardwalk of Venice Beach in trunks and sandals and still carry that air.

The two others were filthy as ever, and their smell just as strong when we got into the truck with them. One, a fat man in a stained Denver Broncos sweatshirt, I recognized as one of Cutt’s chief lieutenants.

As for me, when I got into the passenger seat beside him, Cutt said: “You shaved your mustache. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

He paused until my friend had settled in back, then twisted in his seat. “I saw the article you did,” he said. According to you I’m a bad wolf shitting heroin and your Feds are a bunch of Little Red Riding Hoods. And you didn’t quote one thing I said about why we do it.”

“Editors.” Meg shrugged. “Now we’ve got another chance.”

“No,” he said, “no interview. We’re going to show you things and you’re going to write about them, that’s all.”

“Of course,” Meg said. “The aliens.”

Cutt was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

And there it is. That’s how an electronics salesman from Moab, Utah convinced hundreds of Possemen to mount a raid on Area 51 to prove the existence of space aliens: he just never mentioned the aliens. In Carson Cutt’s mind, Area 51 was an Air Force base cum secret prison for abducted kids. All he wanted us to see was the federal government mistreating them. (Which was almost shockingly naïve of him. Meg had been in Fed encampments before. She must have seen Army abuse. Yet as far as I know, the Post Times has never published a word on it.)

Cutt sat behind the wheel awhile in silence after he and Meg sorted that out. Then he started the engine. “Fine. He thinks there are aliens,” he said. “We’re still not going back to that forest to fight the same as before.”

We turned south onto Paradise Road, which parallels the Strip a quarter-mile to the east, and after a few minutes turned off it again and parked behind the Flamingo Hotel. We went through an archway to a pool deck. Possemen lay on deck chairs and sat around plastic tables. In the bottom of the empty pool itself, six of them surrounded two more wearing the serious frowns of real boxers and punching at each other crudely. All eight were almost certainly high; those on the deck chairs were passed out drunk or still drinking from bottles they passed hand to hand. Around one of the tables, five men played cards for small amounts of loose change. Four more around another covered a map with their arms to hide it from Meg and me.

“Where’s Veronica?” Meg blurted out.

“Your violent friend?” Cutt said. “I left her right where I said I would. You weren’t there and she got mad as a swarm of bees; last I saw she was trying to thumb a ride. Probably she got picked up by the soap bus I saw about twenty minutes later. I wouldn’t bet my own life on it but maybe the neighbor’s cat’s that she’s in there with the kids we’re breaking loose tonight. Or someplace like it.”

Meg scanned the crowd again, as if despite what Cutt said Veronica might be there somewhere. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Your friend Jack said you never had a girl with you.”

“I dropped her before I saw him.” Cutt waved his hand to take in all those gathered there. “Look, I don’t really give an owl’s fart if you believe it, but the fact is this is everyone who rides with me, minus the phantom-limb duo who stayed to tend the horses. And you know I couldn’t have left that girl alone with just them. She tried to fight just about all of us at once, twenty to one, and still near blinded one of my boys.”

Meg sat on a chair, face set, intercepted one of the bottles going around, and took a drink. I sat beside her. She offered to share the liquor, I declined, and she tucked it under her arm.

“If she’s not here, she’s dead,” Meg whispered as soon as Cutt moved away. “She must be.”

I tried a little to argue that the Feds really might have picked her up just after Cutt put her down, but I couldn’t sustain it. It was a hell of a lot easier to see how her fight with these men might have just turned out wronger than Cutt was admitting.

So now we were stuck. Again. They were killers; we didn’t dare try to run away, not with all of them watching. We waited for opportunities, but none came. After an hour Cutt ordered his men to stop drinking and take no more drugs, saying he wanted them more or less straight before he gave them back their guns. That made them all cranky, more so the more they dried out, scaring us a little worse—no, more than a little. We were trembling nearly the whole time, partly from the cold ut partly from nerves. Meg less than I, since she kept drinking, which helps with both.

A half moon rose a little after midnight. At around 2:30 a.m., Shecker joined us. At 3:00 the man in the Broncos shirt drove a van up the drive and halfway through the archway and began distributing automatic rifles, some with grenade launchers slung underneath their barrels. The Possemen, who’d started the night partying and brawling, were by then either sober or simply worn out; they took their weapons silently.

A handful crossed the driveway to the garage and returned driving three Suburbans, two Broncos, and a Tahoe. The others loaded in. Meg and I were put in the backwards-facing seat of the rearmost truck.

At around 3:30 a.m., the caravan rode north. Just shy of dawn we turned west from U.S. 93 onto the Extraterrestrial Highway. I saw the sky lightening before any of the men facing forward; when they did see the driver began to sing the old cowboy tune O Bury Me Not. (Lyrics below) He didn’t sing it all the way through but he knew a fair number of the verses, and two of the others joined on some of them.

Eventually we slowed, took a left onto a dirt road, and stopped. The others got out. Meg and I did too. Neither of us had a plan; I think it was just the hope that if we got out of the truck, maybe, maybe they wouldn’t make us get back in.

The sun had risen most of the way above the horizon. We were on a well-graded dirt road pointing straight as a plumb line for a small mountain range. A boxy old gray notchback sedan sat parked across it, fifteen feet beyond the lead Bronco, the one Cutt drove. Our editor was beside it, hands in the air, shaking his head. He wore a sport jacket, and raising his arms like that pulled the shoulders and neck up around his chin while six inches of forearm extended from the sleeves, straining at the buttoned cuffs of his shirt. Since he had a round face and a mostly bald head to begin with, the overall effect was to make him look like a doll.

He’d come to save us. Meg rushed toward him and I went after.

“Here she is, then,” Cutt was saying. “Now dig up your goddamn keys and get out of my goddamn way.”

My editor lowered his hands at the same time Meg reached him. “My hero,” she said semisarcastically. “You’re a complete fucking idiot.” She hugged him, pressing her face into his neck. He kissed her hair and then backed away, took a few steps into the scrub past his front bumper, knelt laboriously, and scratched at the sand under a clump of saltbush. One of the Possemen came near and gave Cutt a pistol, which he held loose at his side, watching intently.

I might not think much of my editor’s politics, but I had to admit this bordered on heroic. He hadn’t taken my information to the Feds. Instead he’d somehow gotten a car—probably bought it since they’re next to impossible to rent—come up here, and waited all night to face down a gang of criminals. He’d put himself directly in their path and there was a better than decent chance that as soon as he dug up his keys, they would shoot him dead.

Meg got in the car, in the front passenger seat. I opened the rear door but remained outside, hand on my own gun in my jacket pocket.

My editor straightened up, a three-step process where first he raised his torso perpendicular to the ground while remaining on both knees, then shot the right knee forward to get the foot flat on the ground, and finally, using both hands on his thigh for leverage, struggled his body erect. He came back to the car, keys in hand. Cut did not shoot. But he didn’t plan to just let us go, either.

“How did you know we’d be here?” he demanded. “Did you hear from the Feds? Do they know we’re coming?”

Most of the Possemen were a few paces behind Cutt, but the one in the Broncos shirt was edging up. He was almost even with Cutt already and his gaze was locked on me, specifically on my right side where my hand disappeared into my jacket. He carried an AR-15 or something like it in his right hand, pointed down so the barrel nearly grazed the road.

“That UFO guy,” my editor said. “The one who set up your interview with Meg.” It was a good lie and he was a good liar: his breath, which was fast and heavy from fear and slight exertion, did not catch; the puffy flesh around his eyes didn’t so much as twitch. He kept moving as he said it, got his door open, dropped behind the wheel, tried to get the key in the ignition.

“Stop!” Cutt thundered.

He might have let us get away if “that UFO guy” hadn’t been with us. I saw him coming our way fast and thought it’d make it much worse if we were caught in a lie. There was no way we could drive off faster than several dozen men could shoot.

“I told him,” I said. “I’ve known for days, since I met another Sheriff in a bar.”

“Don’t you get it yet?” Bronco-shirt said to Cutt in a dead voice. “They turned us in.” He swung his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at me.

I fumbled with my gun, trying to free it. I was not afraid. I did not think of my wife, though I love her very much. What was happening was not real enough to be frightful. Instead I had the absurd feeling of being in a Western movie quick-draw scene. Many people think of such showdowns as the climaxes of those kinds of movies, but in the Westerns I’ve seen that’s almost never the case. They are tense, suspenseful moments, to be sure, but nearly always too foregone and tightly constrained to be climactic. In a movie’s final battle, the one that really counts, neither the hero nor the villain fights fair.

The horizon let go its last hold on the sun. It shone on me and my villain equally, from the side. From the car, Meg was yelling at me to get in.

Someone kicked me in the chest, harder than I’d ever been hit before, a blow that felt like it went clear through me. I heard gunfire. Someone punched me in the face, caving it in. I fell.

O Bury Me Not

"O bury me not on the lone prairie"
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of the youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day.

"O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where the wild coyote will howl o'er me
Where the buffalo roams the prairie sea
O bury me not on the lone prairie"

"It makes no difference, so I've been told
Where the body lies when life grows cold
But grant, I pray, one wish to me
O bury me not on the lone prairie"

"O bury me not," but his voice failed there
But we paid no head to his dying prayer
In a narrow grave, just six by three
We buried him there on the lone prairie

We buried him there on the lone prairie
Where the buzzards fly and the wind blows free
Where rattlesnakes rattle, and the tumbleweeds
Blow across his grave on the lone prairie

Flying West to Abandon the West

We took off from an abandoned airstrip at night. If you don’t immediately see why that might be harrowing, I’ll spell it out: abandoned runways don’t have working lights. I had to point my truck’s headbeams down the tarmac to show our plane where to land in the first place, but that wouldn’t work for our takeoff. I would have had to leave the truck sitting in the open while I flew away, headlights shining.

There was a gibbous moon, so we were hardly blind. Still, we were in a four-seater prop plane, meaning that from the back seat I knew exactly what the pilot could and couldn’t see, and it was terrifying to speed down that gray runway with its edges blurring into the dirt. I kept imagining we were off line, that any second one wheel or the other would fall from the pavement, dig into the sand, and crash the plane’s nose straight into the ground.

Thirty seconds later, though, as we rose into the air, I looked down and saw that the runway was much wider than our dinky plane. There had been almost no risk we’d slip off.

Everything went smoothly for about the next ten minutes, until I noticed the smell. That reporter and I have been toting around a cat for days, for reasons I won’t go into now. Getting in the plane the engine noise had sent it into a thrashing, hissing freakout, and just to control it I’d had to roll it inside my coat with just its head poking out. The drop in pressure from our climb must have cut its last flimsy thread of cat-sanity, because it peed all over itself and my jacket.

We had to spend almost the full two-hour flight in that reek.

I’d been to Las Vegas once before, as a kid. My family and I had also landed at night, under a full moon—though the moon didn’t make much difference then. The whole valley was like a net of lights. Nowadays big patches of the net are missing. The Strip with all its lights off looked like a pile of gray plastic blocks.

We got decent rooms downtown at the Union Plaza, a ratty hotel at the head of Fremont Street. Hotels generally frown on cats, so we snuck ours and its litter box upstairs zipped in a gym bag. I felt a little bad for the animal after its plane trauma but not terrible—after all, it had peed on my clothes. I locked it in my bathroom with litter, water, and food, hung the Do Not Disturb sign outside the room, and took my jacket down to the street to find a dry cleaner.

Right away I started seeing incognito Possemen. If you’ve lived in the West awhile you learn to spot one who’s just shaved, washed, and changed his clothes for the first time in years, and come down from the hills to do a spot of business in the civilian world. He looks uncomfortable in his skin and walks carefully enough to make you wonder where the gun is hidden. Usually, though, you don’t see more than one or maybe two at a time.

But I have to admit that my first reaction wasn’t curiosity about why they were all there, let alone to try and find out. I’ll have to develop that instinct for my new job—soon I’ll be leaving this blog, and the West, for an introductory gig at an East Coast newspaper. No, my first reaction was shame. I was ashamed that I’m betraying the West by leaving, and I was sure they could tell. I felt like they even had the right to judge me.

Ridiculous, I know, since you—my readers—and I have done more good than Posses ever have by organizing, writing letters, attending public hearings, marching. The unglamorous everyday work of civil activism. My rational mind knows perfectly well that I’m every bit the Westerner they are and more, but reason doesn’t always rule.

I found a cleaner for my coat and headed back to the hotel. The casinos all had the air conditioners turned off and their doors open to the street. In one of these places I saw an old Posseman having a drink alone at a semicircular bar just inside. The irrational guilt I’ve just been describing pushed me toward him. I went in and sat down, offered him a cigarette, and we chatted. I think he was suspicious of me at first, but it was after midnight and he was pretty drunk; he couldn’t hold onto his suspicion for long because he couldn’t hold any thought for long. Finally I confessed to him that I planned to go East.

“I can’t blame you,” he said. “Any sane man would.”

Stupid as it sounds, that actually made me feel a little bit absolved.

***************

I feel like I should say something profound about all this. Some kind of formal goodbye nicely tied up with a Nevadan symbol, since that’s where I am now. That’d be the blog-post form. Unfortunately, Nevada’s a bad place to go looking for symbols. It’s a big empty space that the rest of the country appropriated in the 20^th century for its vices and nuclear waste.

I’ll probably get angry comments now from Nevadans. Bring ‘em on. Look at the facts: barely anything happened here worth mentioning until at least the 1940s. There was a silver boom in the 1860s and another in the 1910s, but even those “booms” were relative, leaving behind ghost towns and little else. At the height of the Teens rush, fewer people lived in Nevada than any other Western state including lonely Wyoming, and most of those states were founded considerably later.

One of the few historical claims Nevada does make is that the last shot of the Indian “Wars” was fired here in 1911. Except it’s not true. The actual last firefight was in 1918, just inside the Mexico-Arizona border, between the 10^th U.S. Cavalry and a group of Yaqui Indians who mistook the Americans for the Mexicans they meant to shoot at. Only one Yaqui and no U.S. soldiers died.

The Indians involved in the Nevada story were about fifteen members of a Shoshone family who had had lost their reservation homestead in southeastern Idaho to settlers: a patriarch named Mike Daggett, his two adult sons, their wives, and various grandchildren ranging down from teens to babies. They’d wandered across northern Nevada for twenty years trying to live off the desert and sometimes doing labor on ranches.

During the very cold winter of 1911 the Daggetts roped and slaughtered some cows that didn’t belong to them. A short while later, four Basque shepherds stumbled onto their campsite in Little High Rock Canyon (about 120 miles north of Reno and not far from where the Burning Man Festival used to be held). The family thought the men were after them because of the cattle theft, so Mike and his two sons killed the Basques and the whole family ran away.

Two weeks later a posse caught up to them and shot all but four: one of the women and three young children. The bodies went into a common grave. (Though they don’t still lie there. Somehow the bones entered the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and in 1994 they were shipped to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, Idaho for proper burial. The spot where the Daggetts died is now part of a major gold mine’s mineral dump.)

I suppose this story is emblematic of the West in at least one way. Looked at sympathetically, the Daggetts were victims along with the rest of their tribe, forced onto a reservation and then defrauded of even that corner of land. They robbed because they were starving, killed because they were desperate, and when the posse caught them tried to defend themselves with a black-powder rifle, a couple of forty-year-old pistols, and spears. On the other hand Mike Daggett and his two sons were unquestionably murderers, no matter how poorly armed they were. Members of the posse even later claimed to have killed most of the family in self-defense. They said the women and children picked up the men’s weapons when they fell and tried to keep fighting. I’ll leave it to you to decipher how credible that is, but bias it by recalling two things. First, the fact that women seem quite often to fight alongside their menfolk in the accounts of Army officers who participated in indiscriminate butchery. For example this description of an 1865 massacre of Arapahos:

I was in the village in the midst of a hand-to-hand fight with warriors and their squaws, for many of the female portion of this band did as brave fighting as their savage lords. Unfortunately for the women and children, our men had no time to direct their aim … squaws and children, as well as warriors, fell among the dead and wounded.

Second, the words of Colonel John Chivington in 1864, right before the massacre at Sand Creek I described recently: “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

Our position as Westerners now is a little like the Daggetts’, if less desperate. Collectively we’re in the right. We’re being oppressed on our home soil. But individually there’s no way to justify Posse murders or rapes. (Apart from physical cowardice, that’s the main reason I never joined a Posse.) We wanted the Indians’ land and some of them recognized that fact well enough to fight back, often in ways the Feds would probably call terrorist now and that we Western immigrants called the equivalent then. Today the Feds want our water, and some of us see what that means well enough to fight, using methods fairly called savage.

Is it morally pure for Westerners to hoard what we stole from Indians not so long ago? Of course not. Even our water we often took at their expense.

But Montana is my home and Montanans are my people—and by extension the West is my home and Westerners are my people. What other side could I choose? The Feds? They’re no better than us. In fact they’re just as guilty of all the old evils.

Imprisoned in a Settlement

I didn't want to spend a day in a settlement. I didn't even want to go into one. But we were three hours southwest of Denver, had hours and hours to go across some of the emptier parts of Colorado, and my gas tank was almost dry. I carry a few extra gallon jugs in the bed of my pickup and those were dry too. In that town the settlers got the only gas shipments, so we were stuck waiting for their tanker truck to show.

Those who have kept up with these articles I've been writing from the road may have noticed that all of them discuss food. It's a natural interest of any Westerner, I'd bet. When you're often hungry, it makes a big impression to be well fed.

Forget about that when it comes to a settlement. Every settler lives on the same prepackaged garbage: onion powder instead of onions, chili flakes instead of chilis, tomato paste for tomatoes, oleo for butter, powdered eggs, powdered milk, powdered potatoes, instant coffee, canned meat and vegetables. What average Westerners would eat if there were no black or gray markets, no hunters, and no gardens—if we had to rely on our federal distributions. Only the company manager does better. He's a regular at Jack's, the train-car restaurant I described in my last post.

Eating their stuff just a few meals was bad enough; it was spooky what it's done to the people who've been stuck with it for years. I’d already known how hunger can make you listless and stupid. You can't think anything complicated because all you want is to eat. Well, settlers have the opposite problem. Day after day they get energy and nutrients but no pleasure. They shovel in these canned, fat-laden things and get fat, and then they’ve got nothing to talk about but their health problems and their wills. They’ve got no plans and no drive. It’s depressing.

It can't help that they live in an old prison. The Feds must have decided it was cheaper than building the usual defensive walls.

The Feds haven't made the settlers live in the old cells, though. They knocked down a couple of the buildings (irreplaceable Western history, by the way—before Occupation part of the place was a museum) and jammed as many double-wide trailers as they could into the space. About 250 people live close-quarters in them.

One thing they didn't knock down, oddly, was the gas chamber. The museum had it on a lawn in front of the old warden's house (which at that time was a ticket office but has since been turned back into a house for the company manager). The straps and locks and so on are all still in it. Because the temporary-classroom trailers they use for a school are parked beside it, and because it has only small, porthole windows, the few high-school students sneak into it constantly to smoke. There’s a plaque on the outside of that gas chamber explaining that this is the prison where Alferd Packer served his time. (There’s a tasteless joke to be made about that and the settlers’ eating habits—several, in fact, starting with the word “tasteless”—but I’m going to resist.) I don’t know why they put the plaque there. The gas chamber couldn’t have been in use when Packer was here.

Alferd Packer, if you don’t know the story, came east from Utah with four friends, bound for the gold country of Cripple Creek. The Utes told them not to go, it was too late in the year and they were bound to get stuck. And I bet you can all guess the rest of the story just from that much of it: they did get stuck in the Rockies, near what is now Lake City, and Alferd killed his friends and ate them. He ran away for a while; the Supreme Court invalidated his first conviction on the grounds that murder hadn’t actually been a crime when he’d done it, some quirk of pre-State Colorado law; and at last he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

Supposedly the judge who sentenced Alferd the first time gave him the death sentence as a warning to other “emergency cannibals.” I doubt it was necessary. By the early 1880s, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had already built two narrow-gauge lines over the Continental Divide, one passing right by this prison on its way from Pueblo to Leadville, to Gunnison, to Grand Junction. (The other ran more strictly west from Walsenburg through Alamosa to Durango.) The Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad had wanted to build that same line, and there were years of court battles over it. Some shooting battles too.

In those kinds of railroad races, it was the Chinese laborers who took it on the chin. Lots of Chinese workers died working for the Denver and Rio Grande on the western side of the Rockies in particular, laying rail from Durango to Silverton. Lord knows how many. To give some idea how bad it was, ten years earlier, around 1870, railroads dug up 1,200 Chinese bodies alongside their lines and shipped them home. 20,000 pounds of bones.

We thanked them by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It stayed illegal for Chinese to come to America until 1965.

Some of you will probably call me a hypocrite for caring about that, because of what I’ve said in the past about immigration and Ticket Home. I think it’s pretty clear how the situation is different. White folks were just as new to the West as Chinese back then. They had no right to say they belonged and the Chinese didn’t. Only the Indians had that right, and if you read my last post, you might remember what it got them. But today we’re the natives and we have the right to defend our soil, especially against immigrant settlers trucked in to stuff the ballot box.

**********

If you’re wondering, I did find out the story behind why settlers all wear those same coveralls. I'd always assumed they were required to wear them, but that's not true. They own other clothes. It's just that their companies only sell that one style from some other connected company that got the Fed contract. If they wear out their regular clothes they can't replace them, but if they wear out coveralls—which happens all the time, since they're made as cheap as they look—they can get new ones easily. The regular clothes stay in boxes for some day in the future, but since they all get fat on their packaged foods pretty soon none of the stuff fits.

My reporter friend asked me to put on a pair before we went to dinner at the company canteen, at the end of our first full day there, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I marched in there in my belt buckle, hat, and jeans, feeling proud. I wasn’t going to let them intimidate me. I kind of wished I’d lain lower, though, when my reporter friend stood on her chair and demanded to know which one of them stole her passport and visa.

The Halted Train: Aristocratic Dining by the Royal Gorge

At first the owner and head chef of Jack's Coach Gourmet (On Sidings) didn't want me to write about him. He had enough customers, he said. He only agreed when I told him this blog doesn’t really get that many hits, and even then he asked me not to say exactly where he is.

He has his reasons. Jack serves the powerful from all over, mainly regional Army commanders and cartel jefes but also water magnates, gun and explosive dealers, private security men, and a manager of call centers in three settlements. On Tuesday they’ll be trying to kill each other; on Wednesday at Jack's they’ll sit at neighboring tables.

Jack wouldn’t tolerate anything else. He operates on a membership basis, like a college alumni club, and although he has nothing to threaten his members with but the loss of his restaurant, to them it feels like a real threat. They love coming to Jack’s.

It's not just his food, which is very good but not magical. It's the after-dinner smoking parlor, home of the best chess in four territories. A few of the men who come here are gourmets; a few are cigar lovers; they are all chesshounds.

Once, Jack told me, an especially tense, high-level game was interrupted by gunfire. A Posse had come all the way from the western edge of the state because they’d heard that the Territorial Governor would be there. Not only did two of the other guests—an Army major and a cartel boss—order their personal guards to fight back together, they cooperated for four weeks, totally unauthorized, to hunt down and punish the Posse survivors.

The major was demoted and transferred for exceeding his authority, and the cartel boss was executed, basically for the same reason. The shooting itself also badly damaged Jack's generator. He was closed for a month and lost two near-master chess players. He can’t afford a repeat.

In my last post I mentioned that I’m traveling with an Eastern reporter. Normally we wouldn't have been allowed in without an invitation from a member, but my reporter friend happened to drop the name of the Sheriff I also wrote about in my last post. It turns out he’s one of Jack’s suppliers, trading delicacies like mushrooms, dandelion greens, watercress, wild honey, and venison for diesel. They don't really need each other, Jack says, and it's not efficient business for either of them, but they're old friends and like the excuse to meet.

Not that Jack doesn't love the mushrooms: morels and black morels in spring, milky caps, shaggy manes, and chantrelles in summer. The day we visited the Sheriff had brought him the last of the year's boletes and the first of the year's pine nuts.

We happened to show up on a Sunday evening, not a popular time. Most of his customers go to church, and as most Westerners know, getting to church and getting home again is enough struggle for a Sunday even if, like a few of Jack’s regulars, you have your own Praetorian Guard. So Jack “wasn't cooking much,” he said, “just enough for the four or five die-hards” he expected later.

Well, not much turned out to be fresh linguine with a porcini-alfredo sauce, half a grilled trout each with a fresh lemon wedge and minced dill, and for dessert chopped apples, pine nuts, and honey-sweetened whipped cream on a butter shortbread cookie. (That Sheriff isn’t Jack’s only supplier. He’s ludicrously stocked with foods most Westerners see once a month if ever: fresh heavy cream and eggs, aged Romano and pecorino, smoked ham, saffron.)

Given what Jack had told us about his clientele, I was naturally curious about the other four people who showed up. But they didn’t talk much. One had brought a newspaper—the paper my reporter friend works for, in fact—and leafed through it while he ate, spending twenty or thirty seconds per page until he reached the crossword, at which point he took a pen from his rear pants-pocket and went to work.

My friend said she hadn't thought you could get her paper in the West, and asked the man where he'd bought it. All he would say was that he had it flown to him.

After dessert we all went down to the smoking car. I'd begun nursing my last pouch of tobacco the day before, not sure when I'd get the chance to buy more. I was smoking only when I couldn't stand it anymore, and then only enough to bring on that front edge of a nicotine buzz before I pinched it out to finish later. More than half the time I was smoking the last half or third of a butt, so more than half the time my first drag was bitter and ashy. It was foul and made me wish I’d quit years ago.

Truly the mantra of the Western tobacco addict.

But my friend had a company credit card, and Jack had a working card reader and cigars. I smoked mine like a barbarian, sucking it all the way into my lungs, mixing a little smoke from the cigar with a lot of air through my nose. It made the tiny muscles in my face relax. Two of the other customers lit their own and we opened the car windows to let out the smoke—we were only at 5,500 feet so it wasn’t too cold outside.

Jack’s one waitress brought us all brandies and put away the humidor, and then she sat at the far end of the smoking car with her guitar and sang for us:

This old smoke filled bar is something I'm not used to
But I gave up my home to see you satisfied
And I just called to let you know where I'll be living
It's not much but I feel welcome here inside.

And I've got swinging doors, a jukebox and a bar stool
And my new home has a flashing neon sign
Stop by and see me any time you want to
Cause I'm always here at home till closing time.

I've got everything I need to drive me crazy
I've got everything it takes to lose my mind
And in here the atmosphere's just right for heartaches
Thanks to you I'm always here till closing time.

And I've got swinging doors, a jukebox and a bar stool
And my new home has a flashing neon sign
Stop by and see me any time you want to
Cause I'm always here at home till closing time

Yeah, I'm always here at home till closing time.

She sang it folk-style. Her voice wasn't professional, or even very strong, but it wasn’t bad. She was on key, anyway, and the room was small.

It was all very civilized. My ashtray was thick, clear glass with a deep bowl, my leather-upholstered chair was firm yet comfortable, my brandy was served in a snifter just big enough to warm with one hand. The chessmen were hand-carved in soft stone, polished, with fresh felt on their bottoms, and the board was made of black and white marble. It was so nice there, in fact, that when the waitress took stopped singing my reporter friend compared it to "a hotel bar on a weekday afternoon, back in DC before the war."

One of the chess players looked up from his game and talked to us for the first time. "Don't get comfortable," he said, "it's the Wild West out there."

"Does that make you cowboy or Indian?" said the man with the newspaper. He had a Spanish accent.

The chess player smiled. "I'm the traveling snake-oil salesman. You're the cattle rustler. My friend here," meaning the other player, "he's the U.S. Cavalry."

I suppose I should have guessed, even if the man was in civilian clothes. He was black, and these days a black man in the West is probably a settler or in the Army. Jack had said a number of his members were officers, and that they usually came out of uniform.

The man with the newspaper raised his glass. "To the U.S. Cavalry!" he said.

He left soon after. Jack leaned in and told us he managed airlift security and airstrips for a drug syndicate in Arizona and New Mexico. My friend rushed after him for an interview and the two of them talked for half an hour inside the empty, pigeon-shitted train station next door.

Now, when she ran outside I went after her. I was responsible for her—officially, I was her guide—and she was rushing after a drug-cartel employee. She waved me off before I got close, though—later she told me she’d been afraid I’d spook the guy. So when they went into the station I just stayed close enough to see their shapes through the window, pacing around the small parking lot while I waited.

On one trip around the lot I passed by the NS-man’s pickup, a brand-new model. A boy of around eighteen was trussed in the bed, squatting on his heels with his back against the cab. One piece of rope tied his left ankle, went through an eyebolt on the cab wall behind him, and finished around his right ankle. The bolt was two inches above the bed floor and right between his legs, and with his feet just wider than his hips he had maybe six inches of slack. Another piece of rope went around both of his wrists, pulled them between his knees, and tied them to that same ring. He couldn't unbend his back, sit, or stand. He couldn't roll backward because the cab was there to stop him, or forward without pulling his shoulders out of joint.

He must have been like that all through our dinner, and I couldn't tell if he was still conscious or if the pain he must have felt in his thighs, knees, ankles, and back had knocked him out. If he’d screamed during dinner we wouldn’t have heard him: inside the train car, built to shut out noise, we could barely even hear the diesel generator right under the windows. His head hung forward and I couldn't see his eyes. He wore a settlement work blazer.

I wish I could say I was brave enough to untie him, but I wasn't. If he’d raised his head and looked at me I might not have been able to turn away—I know I’d have seen him since the full moon was shining. I don't know whether or not to be grateful that he didn't. It felt inhuman, but what could I do? We’ve seen too much suffering in the West; we know how little we can help each other most of the time. We have to ignore each other, otherwise we would drown in our guilt and shame. I would be surprised if you reading this hadn’t turned away from at least one person who needed your help.

All I did was go over near the station and call for my friend. I thought that if she wrapped up her interview, the NS-man might untie the boy himself. But he didn’t. He came out, got behind the wheel, and drove away without even looking in the back.

Since then I’ve been thinking about how we Westerners love the idea of the Old West, and thinking we should remember that those days could be very brutal. We all carry guns again, the way we did in the Old days. We’ve always believed in our right to carry them—and I believe in it too. But we should try to remember that in the Old days we kept guns for protection from some pretty nasty characters. Also because we had dispossessed, slaughtered, and tortured the natives, driven them to the wall, and they were fighting back.

Let me give an example. In my last post I referred to the Pike Gold Rush of 1858. Well, by 1864 the brand-new Colorado Territory was full of miners, traders, and homesteaders. Sioux from the north, angry for their own reasons, attacked wagon trains along the South Platte River, and the Third Colorado Regiment began attacking Cheyenne in retaliation, though the Cheyenne had signed a peace treaty with the U.S. in 1851. So a large group of Cheyenne gathered and put themselves under the protection of Fort Lyon (about 125 miles east of present-day Colorado Springs). They stayed on the bank of Sand Creek, forty miles north of the Fort, for about four months. Then, in late November, Colonel John Chivington rode on the camp with 700 men from the First and Third Colorado Regiments and four howitzers. Here’s an eyewitness account (taken from Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee):

I saw the American flag waving and heard [chief] Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. When the troops fired, the Indians ran, some of the men into their lodges, probably to get their arms … I think there were six hundred Indians in all. I think there were thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all … the rest of the men were away from camp, hunting. After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then left her without killing her. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out … I saw a little girl about five years of age who had been hid in the sand; two soldiers discovered her, drew their pistols and shot her, and then pulled her out of the sand by the arm.

About 130 Indians died. In the year that followed, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux together killed and looted up and down the South Platte. They shot eighteen people in the small town of Julesburg and burned it to the ground. Ultimately, though, the Cheyenne retreated north to Sioux country and south to Kiowa country. In 1865 they signed another treaty giving up claim to everything between the South Platte and Arkansas rivers—basically all of eastern Colorado.

I have also been thinking that in our love of the Old West we should consider that we’re the desperate natives, up against technology and numbers we can’t match in the long run. I don’t know whether in the end we’ll be luckier than the Indians. I, myself, am hired as a guide by a traveling Easterner, like those Indians the U.S. Cavalry used to employ as scouts, and I turned away from that boy in the truck bed because I was powerless and scared.

Rabbit on the Trail: Dinner With the Dirtiest Men Alive

For those who’ve never tried being kidnapped at gunpoint, I say don’t, no matter how exciting meeting Possemen might seem. For one thing, they probably haven’t planned on kidnapping you, which means that you’ve showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time and they’ve had to recalculate. Possemen hate that. You’re a nuisance, and they’re not likely to look after you gently.

For another, Posse life is hard, and riding their trail is no easier with your hands tied. Posting on a dog-trotting mule exhausts your groin muscles if you’re not used to it, and without hands to keep you steady your muscles eventually give out and let you fall, again and again, until you just try to fall slow so you land on your battered shoulders instead of your face.

By the time we stopped I was tired and sore, but my friends—an Eastern reporter and a Denver Sad Betty—looked far worse than I felt. The Betty in particular. My reporter friend was just a little bruised and had a couple of cuts on one arm. My Betty friend had cracked on the side of her head on a tree root and what worried me wasn’t so much the lump she’d grown but that her eyes weren’t focusing right, and that instead of feeling pain she said she was nauseous.

We’d been captured on a kind of holiday, so instead of taking us to some nearby temporary camp the Posse rode us all the way to one of their permanent bases, an abandoned mine near a stream. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away, mainly because “abandoned mine near a stream” could describe hundreds of spots in that part of the Rockies. Colorado was literally created as a mining enterprise, assembled in 1861 from the western parts of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and the eastern part of Utah Territory, in response to the Pike Gold Rush of 1858. Denver itself was founded as part of that rush. A whole lot more mines followed with the Cripple Creek rush of 1891.)

The Feast of Future Peace, I learned, is a Posse tradition nearly as old as Occupation. None of the Possemen in camp seemed to know why it had started, or whether all Posses celebrate it on the same day, or celebrate it at all. But in any case the Posse Sheriff said that it’s very important for his men.

“It reminds us we’re fighting for something,” he said. “That someday we hope to go home and live free.”

It did surprise me that they only had a hazy picture of what their ideal future would look like, beyond bromides like these. I always thought Posses had a pretty good idea of what they wanted the West to be—and for all I know that may be true of every other Posse out there. With the men I met though, things aren’t any clearer than they are with the rest of us. They don’t like Occupation; they don’t like the Army; they especially hate settlers. Honestly, about half seemed to long for the end of Occupation simply because they were tired of being outlaws. They wanted to declare victory and have it all be over.

I might even say the Sheriff himself was one of those. He tried harder than any of them to explain what the “end of Occupation” meant in practical terms—amnesty for his men and some kind of radically free-market, deregulated version of the Western Territories (he calls it “original intent federalism”)—but I got the sense that in the end, he’d accept a lot less if he could find a way to get it by his pride.

I think he needed his goals partly because the other half of his men would have been content to stay in the forest forever, living their Robin Hood fantasy. A bunch of them were smoking pot, which bothered the Sheriff more than I would have expected. Later, after the feast, some of them started to joke about the fight they’d been in that day, and that also seemed to bother him. He got up from where he was sitting, leaving a conversation in the middle, and stood over them a minute, frowning. Then he led them and the rest of his men in a sing-along, of all things. And they actually enjoyed it. I guess life can get boring in the woods.

The first dish of the feast was made in front of us. The cooks had several live trout in pots of cold water and killed one the way Asian chefs do, with a pair of skewers rammed through the mouth into the brain-stem. They filleted it before it was done writhing—especially impressive since the two of them seemed to be those Possemen with war injuries too bad to ride or shoot. One had lost most of a leg, the other most of his left arm.

Each of us got a small bowl of venison broth—thin, parsley-flavored, and boiling—with three things in it: a red-hot pebble, a little bunch of watercress, and about two ounces of raw trout meat. The pebble kept the broth hot enough to cook the trout a little, and the smoky flavor of the fish went perfectly with the venison.

Next came a rabbit stew, sludgy with pounded acorn flour. It also had venison broth as a base, with chunks of lightly grilled rabbit meat, wild onions, ginger, garlic, trout roe, and new potatoes. It was served in hollowed bread put into in wooden bowls, each with its own cured rabbit-skin cozy. This was a more complicated dish than the last one. I could make out the salty trout roe, sharp ginger, tangy rabbit, and slightly bitter acorn.

The stew was heavy and we were already getting full, so it was a little scary when the cooks asked for men to help carry the next course and four of them went. I noticed the Sheriff watching my companions and me, and I started to think that maybe he was actually a little pleased to have an audience.

The volunteers came back with a whole deer carcass on a spit. The cooks had them balance the spit on a pair of sawhorses, and put a plastic basin under its stomach. The Posse sat down in a semicircle on the floor, facing the deer, and the one-armed cook came forward with a scimitar. The Possemen cheered and started to chant: “Spill its guts! Spill its guts!”

The Sheriff leaned to my reporter friend and said, “The intestines only have rotting grass and leaves in them, so we leave them. You’re not a little squeamish city mouse are you? As long as you don’t think about the fact that you’re eating turd, it’s pretty good.”

He was playing “shock the Easterner,” but it was a heartless thing to say in front of my young Betty friend with the concussion. She was already so wobbly that she’d only been able to swallow the first course’s broth, plain. She turned paler and whispered, “Oh god. Gross.”

“Not at all,” the Sheriff said. “We cook it long and hot enough to kill all the nasty germy parts. It’s perfectly safe.”

Meanwhile the men were chanting louder and clapping in rhythm. The cook with the scimitar went up to the carcass, swung the blade over his head, and slashed open the belly. Out came the guts, the dark large intestine and the longer, lighter small intestine. Both were covered in black, tarry dung full of shredded leaves.

“Make sure you taste some meat from each end, by the way,” the Sheriff added. “The guts and the lights. They cook different.”

The cook with the scimitar scooped out the rest of the lower body cavity with his hand. Then he buried his arm up to the shoulders in it, working at something inside. In a moment he took out a lump of cooked flesh, and then two more, the heart, liver, and pancreas, or maybe the lungs. He reached inside one last time and tossed me something round, dark, and leathery, like no piece of an animal I’d ever seen. It took me almost half a minute to suss out what it was: a whole orange, stained and wet from its time inside the deer.

The “guts,” it turned out, were two kinds of sausages: the “small intestines” were ground deer offal and other scraps, garlic, salt, aniseed, pepper, coriander, and lemon; the “large intestines” were blood and bread crumbs, onion, pepper, thyme, and bay leaf. The “dung” in the surrounding body cavity was ground unsweetened chocolate wetted with strong, dark, yeasty beer, and the shredded vegetable fiber in it was fennel.

As for the “lights,” they were actually three cleaned pigeon carcasses, tied to the inner rib cage and packed in whole, pierced oranges. (I have no idea where they got real oranges.) They’d separated the upper chest cavity from the lower during cooking with a quadruple paper wall, two heavy paper shopping bags, each flattened to make a double ply and sewn where the diaphragm should have been.

The Sheriff was right, actually. The meat from around the “guts” did taste different from the meat around the “lights.” The first kind was sharp and nutty from the chocolate and the second, marinated in orange juice and bird fat, was sweeter.

The sausages were nothing special.

I did not eat the next course, two roasted bear paws cradling a whole raccoon with the tail and stuffed head sewn back on. I might have been able if I was starving, but by then I really wasn’t. Also, at the same time my Betty friend was nodding off, and I’d heard too much about how important it is to keep concussion victims awake. I wanted to give her my full attention.

The last course, dessert, was a sculpture. The cooks brought it out to look at while the Possemen were still eating their bits of raccoon. It was made of candy stuck together with an egg-white-and-sugar glaze, and represented a Bichon Frisé humping a bulldog. The bulldog’s body was built of Fun-Sized Snickers bars, except for the place where the bowed front legs sank into the powerful chest. There the body was darker plain Hershey’s chocolate. There were also pied white chocolate spots on the left flank and underbelly, drooping jowls and lower lips of prunes, and maraschino cherry eyes. The Bichon was a wad of Smarties with sugar-floss flying in all directions, its front paws clamped to the bulldog’s rear, Mike-and-Ike penis straining vainly in midair.

The camp dogs, incidentally, included both a bulldog and a Bichon. The Possemen thought it was very funny to show the sculpture to them. The bulldog was a sweet old girl who didn’t mind being moved about, although she kept trying to return to her table scraps with that patient, sad look bulldogs have. The Bichon spent its time trying to get at the plate of the Posseman holding him. The fur around his tea-saucer face was all matted with raccoon gravy.

Goose in Denver

Look, there isn’t much good to say about Occupation. One of its small, accidental benefits, though, has been the rebirth of regional food. Since we’re all poor we have to eat what we can get nearby or grow with the water we can afford, and what runs wild or grows well in Arizona isn’t the same as in Idaho.

Back home in Missoula we have lots of wilderness around us still, plenty of rangeland and game, so we’ve stuck mostly to venison when we can’t have beef. I imagine there’s beef and venison both somewhere in Denver. But when I went to the hunter’s market, on the floor of the old Colorado Convention Center, all anyone was selling was snow goose. (And pigeon, of course, which you can get anywhere but which is always nasty. The mind and tongue revolt.) One of the hunters told me that this time of year, when the geese are on their way down from Canada, all the grain crops in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas are ripe.

“Geese everywhere,” he said. “Don’t even have to aim to hit them.”

Although in truth, he said, there are fewer geese than there used to be, and more hunters, because it’s relatively easy money. Hunters pack up the beds of their pickups with those cheap styrofoam coolers and drive to the nearest corporate farm, which has spent the whole year illegally buying up hunting licenses so the hunters can shoot as much as they want.

Goose is a lot more edible than pigeon, but if you’ve never had it, there are some things you should know. The biggest is that these are large, strong birds shot as adults at the end of migration. There’s not much fat on them, so the softness and flavor has to from the sinew, and melting sinew means long cooking with slow heat. It’s a delicate balance: cook a goose too little and it’ll stay tough, too much and it’ll be gamy. The only chance you have of getting it right is if all the meat cooks evenly—roast a goose like a turkey and the outside will be gamy, the inside stringy.

I collected some tips from those Denver convention center hunters on how to do it right.

First, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have to clean the thing. When you get it home, make a fire outside and boil a big pot of water. You want to do the cleaning outside because it’s messy, but have a garbage bag ready so the guts don’t rot up the yard. Dip the whole carcass into the water for about ten or fifteen seconds, which should loosen the feathers enough to be pluckable. If not, dip it again. Pluck the bird. Don't worry if a discharge comes out of the pores of the larger feathers; that's normal.

Use a freshly sharpened, strong knife to cut the neck between the bottom vertebrae, and remove the lower legs by twisting the joints and wedging the knife into them to cut the tendons. Put the goose on its back and cut a slit about an inch above the vent. This may take a couple of strokes. Then reach inside as far as you can and pull out the innards. The pressure may force whatever's inside out the anus, which is gross but okay; the goal is to get the intestines out without breaking them open and spilling that stuff inside the bird. You'll have to reach in a second time to get up around the gullet (a red and purple flattened ball) and a third time for the lungs, liver, and heart.

Since they have no teeth, geese swallow pebbles to grind up the grass they eat. Slice open the gullet and turn it inside out to get rid of these, wash it out, and peel off the tough, yellow inner membrane. The gullet, heart, and liver go into ice water.

On the tail of the goose is a nub of flesh supported by a bone. This is a gland that must be removed or the rest of the meat will taste terrible. Do this by cutting a 'V' shape, beginning a half-inch above it and coming down to the tip.

Wash out the bird's insides with lots of water and you're ready to cook.

Put the drumsticks and hindquarters aside for jerky or sausage, or in my case chili. My specific chili recipe is a secret, but I will say that it includes both sauteed chili peppers and roasted ones—kind of a chipotle base—and that to adjust for the low fat content of a goose at the end of its migration you’ll have to add extra tomatoes to your own recipe, and maybe a can of beer.

Take the breasts, butterfly them, pound them with a mallet, and soak them overnight in the refrigerator in a pickling salt solution. (To fully saturate the water heat it before dissolving the salt, but make sure to let it cool to room temperature before adding the meat.) Or you could tenderize the breasts by marinating them overnight in an acidic sauce, like this basic barbecue:

1 c. ketchup

12 oz. Coke (not diet)

½ tsp. black pepper

1 tsp. minced garlic

After that, you can go a couple of different ways. You can sear the breasts in an iron skillet, cover them with mushroom soup, and simmer them very low for about six hours. Or you can cut them into pieces, put them in a slow cooker with some onions, celery, carrot peels, and herbs, cover the lot with water, and leave that on low heat for about as long.

Or you could try clay-baking. Fold the pounded, marinated breasts around a paste made of herbs, chopped onions, bread crumbs, and a lot of fresh mushrooms, all stuck together with olio (butter if you can get it). They should look like meat empanadas. Paint the outside with more olio and wrap them in foil.

Make the dough for the baker’s clay from

4 c. flour

1 c. salt

1½ c. water.

Roll it a quarter inch thick, and then wrap that sheet of dough around the foil. Use a little water on your hands to smooth out the cracks and seams.

These can now either be baked in the oven (two hours at 400) or buried in dying coals and left for however long it takes. When it’s all done you’ll need to break off the baking clay with a hammer. Try not to be too aggro or you’ll ruin the food inside.