on her older sister.
The man her dad called Sheriff Barnum stood in the yard near the woodpile, and another man wearing the same kind of policeman's uniform--he was younger than Sheriff Barnum but still old, like her dad--stood near him. The sheriff stood with his back to the woodpile, pointing toward the mountains and talking. His arm swept along the top of the mountains and up the road, and the younger man's eyes followed the gesture. Sheridan couldn't hear what the sheriff was saying.
At one point, the sheriff walked from the woodpile to the house. He stopped squarely in front of Sheridan at the window, and Sheridan was too scared to move. Over his shoulder, to the other man, the sheriff called out the number of paces he had measured. Before turning back, he had looked down and grinned at her. It had been a kind of "get out of my way, kid" smile. Sheridan wasn't sure she liked Sheriff Barnum. She didn't like his pale eyes. She didn't like cigarettes, either, and even through the screen in the window she could smell them on his uniform.
As Sheriff Barnum returned to the woodpile, Sheridan thought about how surprised she was that this thing had happened. How could it be that what she had thought the night before was a monster from her "overactive imagination" (as her mom called it) had turned out to be real. It was as if her dream world and the real world had merged for this event. Suddenly, adults were involved. She had had a strange notion: what if her imagination was so powerful that she could dream things into existence? But she decided this wasn't the case. If it was, she would have brought forth something much nicer than this. Like a pet-- a real pet of her own.
Sheriff Barnum took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook them, and flipped one up into his mouth. It was a neat trick, she thought. She had never seen it before. The man with Sheriff Barnum reached over and lighted the sheriff's cigarette for him. A great roll of white smoke grew around the sheriff's head.
Sheridan wore her glasses. She wished now she would have had her glasses on the night before, so she could have seen the man's face in detail when he looked at her. If she would have seen him clearly, she would have trusted her own mind over her imagination and run to her parents' room instead of convincing herself that she had a nightmare about monsters coming down from the mountains.
She loved that she could see clearly now but hated the fact that she was the only student in her class who had to wear glasses. Her first day of school at Twelve Sleep Elementary was also her first day wearing glasses. She would never forget how tall she seemed to be when she looked down or how awkward she felt when she walked. The chalkboard and the words on it were in such sharp focus that they hurt her eyes. It was bad enough that she was one of the new girls in school, and the rude girls had already grouped her into a category called "Weird Country" that was made up of students who lived out of town. Or that she could already read books and say poetry she had memorized while they struggled with sentences. But on top of all of that, she also had to show up wearing glasses.
And she was the new game warden's daughter in a place where the local game warden was a big deal because nearly everyone's dad hunted. It was understood that Sheridan's dad could put others in jail. So far, in the two weeks since school had begun, she had absolutely no friends in the second-grade class.
Sheridan's only friends were her animals, had been her animals, and they had all disappeared. The loss of her cat, Jasmine, had devastated her. She had cried and prayed for Jasmine to come back, but she didn't. She begged her parents for another pet to love, but they said she would have to wait until she got a little older. They told her she would have to get a fish or a bird in a cage, something that didn't go outside or into the hills behind the house. She had overheard her dad telling her mom about coyotes (although she wasn't supposed to know), and she had figured out that her cat Jasmine had been eaten. Just like her puppy before that. But while those pets were nice, they weren't what she needed. She wanted a pet to cuddle with. She wished she had a secret pet, one that neither her parents, the rude girls at school, or the coyotes knew about. A secret pet that was just hers. A pet she could love and who would love her for who she was: a lonely girl who had moved from place to place before she could make friends and who had a little sister who was too adorable for words and a baby on the way who would command most of her parents' love and attention for ... maybe forever.
Then she saw something outside that quickly brought her back to earth. Something had moved in the woodpile; something tan and lightning fast had streaked across the bottom row of logs and darted into a dark opening near the base between two lengths of wood.
The sheriff and the younger man were still talking, and they had their backs to the fence and the woodpile. What she had seen was just behind them, only a few feet away, but it didn't look like they had noticed anything. They hadn't even turned around. She could see nothing now. A ground squirrel? Too big. A marmot? Too sleek and fast. She had never seen this kind of animal before, and she knew every inch of that yard and every creature in it. She even knew where the nest of tiny field mice was and had studied the wriggling pink naked mouse babies before their eyes opened. But this animal was long and thin, and it moved like a bolt of lightning.
Sheridan gasped and jumped when her Mom spoke her name sharply behind her. Sheridan turned around quickly but her mom was looking sternly at her and not at the woodpile through the window. Sheridan didn't say a word when her mom guided her away from the window, through the house, and to the car.
As her mom backed out of the driveway and Lucy sang a nonsense song, Sheridan watched over her shoulder through the back car window as the house got smaller. As they crested the first hill toward town, the little house was the size of a matchbox.
Behind the matchbox house, Sheridan thought, was a woodpile. And in that woodpile was the gift her imagination had brought her.
PART TWO
DETERMINATION OF ENDANGERED SPECIES AND THREATENED SPECIES
Sec. 4. (a) General.- (1) The Secretary shall by regulation promulgated in accordance with subsection (b) determine whether any species is an endangered species or a threatened species because of any of the following factors:
[(1)] (A) the present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat or range;
[(2)] (B) over utilization for commercial, [sporting,] recreational, scientific, or educational purposes;
[(3) (C) disease or predation;
[(4)] (D) the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms;
or [(5)] (E) other natural or manmade factors affecting its continued existence.
--The Endangered Species Act Amendments of 1982
There were 55 game wardens in the State of Wyoming, an elite group, and Joe Pickett and Wacey were two of them. Wacey had received his B.A. in wildlife management while bull-riding at summer rodeos before Joe had graduated with a degree in natural resource management. Three years apart, both had been certified at the state law enforcement academy in Douglas and both had passed the written and oral interviews, as well as the personality profile, to become permanent trainees in Jeffrey City and Gillette districts respectively, before becoming wardens. Each now made barely $26,000 a year.
As Joe drove down the two-lane highway toward the Eagle Mountain Club, he thought of how the morning had violently changed course. Ote Keeley had ridden down from the mountains in the middle of the Pickett family Sunday routine. It was a routine that had moved with them as they relocated throughout the state. It continued to Baggs in Southern Wyoming, then to Saddle string as he worked under the high-profile Game Warden Vern Dunnegan, then to Buffalo when Joe took on his first full-fledged post as game warden.