ON SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE the sun rose, and cool air was flexing through the trees and over the mountainside, about the time Joe should have been home mixing pancake batter and frying bacon for his girls, Britney Earthshare came scrambling down from the ridge through the shale saying she had just seen Charlie Tibbs.
Stewie had been stretching and commenting how good bacon and eggs would be for breakfast.
'Show me where,' Joe said, and followed her back to the ridge.
She pointed to a series of openings on the mountainside on the other side of the valley Joe looked with his binoculars but could see nothing.
'He came out of the trees into the clearing and then he went back into the trees,' she said , her teeth chattering from fright and the early morning cold.
'Where was it again?'
She pointed generally
'Can you be more specific''
She hissed angrily 'Damn you, I saw what I saw!'
'Was he on horseback or on foot?'
She glared at him. 'Horseback, I think.'
'You think,' he repeated, still glassing the mountain. The binoculars gathered more light than his naked eye, but it was still too shadowy even in the meadows to see Charlie Tibbs. 'Was he coming our way?'
'Straight at us,' she declared.
Joe lowered the binoculars and looked at her, trying to decide if she had actually seen Tibbs or had only thought she had seen him. He had already been making plans about returning to the cabin and his pickup, plotting how they could travel up the ridge and work their way back through the heavy timber covering a massive saddle slope to the south. If the terrain was agreeable, they could be back by noon.
But if Tibbs was coming straight at them, had found their track, they would have to either make a stand or run.
'There he is!' Britney screamed, gesturing frantically across the valley 'Oh, my God!I'
Joe wheeled and jerked his binoculars to his eyes. He saw a tiny movement on the edge of a far-off meadow. It was dark and passed into the trees before he could see it clearly But it could have been the shoulders and head of a man on horseback.
STAY IN THE ELK TRAIL,' Joe cautioned as they scrambled down the mountain, away from the camp and the ridge. 'If nothing else, the trail may foul him up a little.'
The path of the elk herd from the night before wasn't hard to follow They had churned up a two- to three-foot swath of earth, mashing pine needles into the dark loam and littering the trail with upturned black divots. Joe was pleased by the way their own tracks blended into the elk tracks.
'I'm sure getting hungry' Stewie sang out. 'If we catch those elk I might need to take a bite out of one of'em.'
'Yuck,' Britney said. She had already mentioned that she didn't eat meat. She made a point about how the elk had become their metaphysical guides through the wilderness and how Emily's wolves played a part in providing the trail.
'Seeing those wolves running wild and free last night was, like, awesome,' Britney rhapsodized. 'It was, like, orgasmic. These beautiful creatures were all around us and for a minute there, I felt like I was one of them. Once you've seen those magical creatures with your own eyes, it makes it really hard to understand why they were trapped and killed almost to extinction. It really makes you hate the people who did that. What were they possibly thinking, to want to kill a magnificent animal like a wolf?'
They walked.
'There's an irony to all of this whole situation that I bet neither one of you know about,' Stewie said.
'What's that?' Britney asked.
'Whatever it is, I hope it's short,' Joe grumbled.
Stewie giggled at that. 'The irony is that just before I headed out here and got married to Annabel and got blown up by a cow, the executive board of One Globe had a meeting and kicked me out!'
'You're kidding!' Britney was outraged.
'It's true.' He was starting to breathe hard with the exertion of the fast trek. 'They met at the new headquarters on K Street in Washington, D.C, and voted me off of the board, eight to one. My old buddy Rupert was the only one who stuck with me. They said they didn't like my methods anymore, that I was an embarrassment to the organization.
They said that direct action wasn't as effective as lawsuits and that my egomania was holding back membership funds.'
'But you started One Globe!' Britney argued. 'They can't kick you out of your own organization.'
'Yes, they can,' Stewie said. 'And they did. The suits took over. The fund-raisers beat the hell raisers.'
'Shameful!'
'So,' Stewie said, directing it at Joe, 'the irony is that Charlie Tibbs is coming after a big, fat has-been.'
'You're not a has-been,' Britney cooed.
Joe, however, was too preoccupied with the scene in front of him to answer Stewie.
A COW ELK STOOD off of the trail, in a small clearing, in a yellow shaft of early morning sunlight. She was
