He couldn’t get her to warm up.
“You have so much to learn,” she said. “But I don’t hate you because you’re ignorant. Have you ever heard the saying ‘An insect is a cat is a dog is a boy’?”
“Nope,” Joe said, a little disappointed that she hadn’t even cracked a smile at his joke.
“It means we’re all interconnected. We’re all life. There aren’t degrees of life, there is only life. Eating beef or elk is the same as eating a child. There’s no difference. It’s all just meat.”
Joe winced.
“Americans, on average, eat fiftyone pounds of chicken every year, fifteen pounds of turkey, sixtythree pounds of beef, fortyfive pounds of pork,” she said. She was getting into it, stepping toward Joe, gesturing with her hands in chopping motions. “Then there’s lamb—lamb!—and veal.
Out here these people eat even more red meat than that, like deer and the elk that will be fed and fattened at the place we’re standing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see all of those creatures every day, instead of murdering them for their flesh?” She talked as if she were quoting, Joe thought.
He didn’t want to get into the debate, but he had a question. “Isn’t it different for a man to hunt his own food than to buy it wrapped in cellophane in a grocery store? And what about these elk? Would it be better if they starved to death in the winter? There isn’t enough natural habitat for them anymore. They’d die by the thousands if we didn’t feed them.”
Pi had obviously heard this argument many times before and didn’t hesitate. “As for your first question, meat is meat. As I said, an insect is a cat is a dog is a boy. As for your second, we never should have gotten to this stage in the first place. If we weren’t raising the elk for slaughter, and feeding them, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
Joe nodded. “But we do have this problem. We can’t solve it now by just saying we shouldn’t have it, can we?”
“Touché,” she said, smiling. “You have a point, if a weak one. But I’ve accomplished what I set out to do here.”
“Which is?”
“To get you thinking.”
Joe smiled back.
“So, are you going to arrest us?” she asked.
“Did Will arrest you?”
“Many times. Once he arrested me up on Rosie’s Ridge, in the middle of an elk camp. I dressed up like an elk with these cute little fake antlers”—she raised her hands and wiggled her fingers over her head to simulate cute little antlers—“and walked around the hunters going, ‘Who killed my beautiful wife? Who shot my son? Who shot my baby daughter in the guts?’ ”
“It was so cool,” Birdy added. “She had those bastards up there howling.”
Joe stifled a grin. The way she told the story was kind of funny. “Yup, I bet they were.”
“I went a little too far with that one,” Pi said. “It was too much too soon. The Wyoming legislature passed an anti–hunter harassment law after that, and Will was really angry with me. He said I wouldn’t be accomplishing anything if I got myself shot, although I disagreed at the time. The movement needs a martyr. But I was too strident, I admit it. I even threatened Will, just so you know. I wrote letters to the editor about him, and put a picture of him on our website with a slash through it. I went a little overboard. He was just doing his job. So now we’ve scaled things back a bit. We need to work in incremental steps, to raise awareness.”
“Which is what you’re doing here,” Joe said.
“Correct.”
Joe shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and started to walk to his pickup.
“Hey,” Pi called out. “Aren’t you going to arrest us?”
Joe stopped, looked over his shoulder, said, “No.”
“But we’re breaking the law,” she said. Joe saw Birdy exchange glances with Ray. As Joe had figured from seeing the light camping tents and the threeseason sleeping bags, the campers weren’t really prepared or equipped to stay long. They wanted to be arrested in order to get more media attention. The shadow of the Tetons had already crept over the refuge, and it would freeze during the night.
Pi looked desperate. “You’re not just going to leave us out here, are you?”
“Yes.”
“There are some real extreme huntertypes in town,”
Birdy offered. “You ever heard of Smoke Van Horn? He’s crazy. He’s probably heard of our sign out here. What if Smoke and his pals come after us tonight?”
“I’m sure Pi here can reason with them,” Joe said with a grin.
Birdy looked at Pi. Ray looked at Birdy. Pi glared at Joe.
“You’re a bastard,” she said.
“That was harsh,” Joe said, still smiling.
“Pi . . .” Birdy started to say.
“Why don’t you throw the sign in the back of my truck,”
Joe said, “and kick some dirt in those holes. I’ll help you pack up and I’ll give you a ride to your car so you don’t have to hike.”
Pi set her mouth, furious.
“Pi . . .” It was Birdy again.
“You are a bastard,” she said again.
Pi sat in the cab of the pickup, fuming, while Joe drove across the refuge toward the highway. Birdy and Ray were in the back, in the open, huddled near the rear window in light jackets. The sign and the camping gear were piled into the bed of the pickup. It was dusk, and Joe could smell the sweet, sharp smell of sagebrush that was crushed beneath his tires. He reached forward and turned on his headlights.
“It’s an interesting subject, animal rights,” Joe said. “It’s more than a subject for some of us,” Pi answered. Joe ignored her tone. “I’m around animals all day long.
Sometimes I wonder what those animals are thinking, if they’re capable of thinking.”
“You do?” This surprised her. “How could you not?” he asked.
She seemed to be trying to decide if she wanted to engage him, or be angry and refuse to talk to him.
“In the end, it’s all about meat,” she said. “What?”
“It’s about meat. What we eat is what defines us. People are starting to wake up to that, even here.”
Joe said nothing.
“Have you heard of Beargrass Village?” she asked, the words dripping with venom.
“Nope.”
She looked over at him. “It’s a whole planned community, and I hate it. For a few million, people can live in what they call a planned environment where meat is raised and slaughtered for their pleasure. They call it the Good Meat Movement.”
Joe remembered what Trey had said about it. “I heard something about it recently. Is it a serious thing?”
“No, it’s just a veneer,” she said. “It’s a way for rich people to feel good about themselves. That’s what this valley is about, you know—rich people feeling good about themselves, and dominating the land and creatures that they feel are beneath them.”
“Bitter,” Joe said.
Pi snorted. “Yeah. You fucking bet I’m bitter. I’m bitter about a lot of things.”
Like factory farms, she said. She quoted verbatim from a book she was reading, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully:
“ ‘When a quarter million birds are stuffed into a single shed, unable even to flap their wings, when more than a million pigs inhabit a single farm, never once stepping into the light of day, when every year tens of millions of creatures go to their death without knowing the least measure of human kindness, it is time to question old assumptions, to ask what we are doing and what spirit drives us.’ ”
Then she asked, as they approached her car, “What spirit drives you, Joe?”
He was glad the ride was just about over and he didn’t have to answer that question.
“We’re here,” he said.
He helped them load their car. It was completely dark now, with a cold white moon. Their breaths billowed in the cold. Birdy started the motor in order to get the heater running. Ray sat in back, amid their packs and tents. Pi opened the passenger door to climb in.