Centennial (149 page)

“Well, he came up with a real fine idea. Lot of men in pickup trucks and special huntin’ dogs, and we’d go out onto the prairie, far away from everything, and we’d turn up some coyotes, and we’d chase after ’em for mebbe ten miles and then we’d let the dogs go and they’d zero in on a coyote.”

“Then what?”

“Then the dogs would tear him apart.” There was a pause in court, and Emig added, “It was necessary, of course, because coyotes eat sheep.”

“Your sheep?”

“No.”

“Mr. Calendar’s sheep?”

“No. We just went along for the fun.”

The prosecution now called a new witness, Clyde Devlin, a dynamiter. “What we done, there wasn’t no more prairie dogs, and the coyotes was used up, so Floyd, he kept lookin’ for anything sportin’, and his mind fell on the rattlers up at the buttes. We bought small sticks of dynamite and threw them into the dens. Killed a lot that way, but the fun was standin’ around with shotguns and blastin’ the others as they crawled out.

“But the reason people was willin’ to pay money for the dynamitin’ was the fun of seein’ Floyd handle rattlers. He had a way of pinnin’ ’em down with a forked stick, then pickin’ ’em up by the tail and snappin’ ’em like a whip. The rattler’s head would fly off. I seen him whip sixteen snakes in one day, and nobody else had the guts to try even one. Me? I wouldn’t get near ’em.”

The prosecutor turned to the first serious charge. Calling to the stand Hank Garvey, pilot of a small plane stationed at Fort Collins, he asked, “When, in your opinion, Mr. Garvey, did Mr. Calendar first direct his attention to eagles?”

“We were flyin’ one day, about five years ago, and in the distance we seen this eagle come off a dead tree, and we both watched it flyin’ for some time, and Floyd said, ‘Hell, Hank, with the right attention a man could stay on that eagle’s tail and blast him right out of the sky.’ So we spent a whole week makin’ dry runs, seein’ if we could spot eagles and close in on them, and we found it was right easy. Eagles don’t fly half as fast as they show ’em in the cartoons.”

“When did the idea ... I mean, whose idea was it to do this commercially?”

“That came natural. Floyd and I knew a lot about hunters, him bein’ a guide and all, and we knew how tough it was for a hunter to bag hisself a eagle. Some very good shots tried for years without ever gettin’ close to one, let alone hittin’ it. And this bugged ’em, because on their walls they would have the head of a rhinoceros from Africa and a tiger from India, but they wouldn’t have their own national bird. There was a blank spot on their wall, and they were hungry to do somethin’ about it, because nothin’ looks better, when it’s mounted right, than a bald eagle.”

“When did the commercial aspect begin? Your first customer, that is?”

“One day when we were practicin’ on dry runs we came so close to a big bird that Floyd cried, ‘Shit, a man don’t even have to aim. If he can point a gun he can get hisself a eagle this way.’ So there was this dude from Boston. Had one of everything in his game room except a eagle. Even had a Kodiak bear, and wanted a eagle so bad he could taste it.

“He told Floyd before takeoff, ‘I don’t think you can get a eagle this way, but if you bring me onto one, I’ll give you five hundred dollars.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘And there’ll be a little somethin’ in it for you.’ So we were bound to locate a eagle.”

“Did you?”

“We cruised for a while west of Fort Collins and didn’t find nothin’. So we sorta drifted down over Rocky Mountain National Park, where we turned up a big, beautiful bird. The dude wanted to fire as soon as we saw it, but we didn’t want to shoot him over the park, because we might run into trouble when we landed to pick it up.

“So I swung the plane south of him and we worked him north, out of the park, and when he was over plowed land I moved in real close.

“Now, the eagle and the plane fly at about the same speed, so it was just like the bird was standin’ still. And that’s where we made our big mistake on our first try. I got too close. Hell, you could of killed that eagle with a broom.

“So when the dude does fire he practically disintegrates the eagle. We spent the better part of a hour pickin’ up the various bits and pieces, and when we hauled them in to Gundeweisser, the taxidermist, he looks at the pile and asks, ‘How do you want this job made up? As a duck or a eagle? I can play it either way.’

“He turned out a masterpiece. Spread-eagled, talons projectin’, glass eyes flashin’. The dude was delighted and sent us the picture you have over there. When we showed it to Gundeweisser, he said, ‘That eagle’s two-thirds plastic, but he’ll never know.’ So after that I kept the crate a little farther away so’s the gun blast didn’t tear the bird apart.”

“How many did you kill from your platform in the sky?”

“Somethin’ over four hundred, but me’n Floyd never shot a single one. Always some sportsman who wanted our national bird on his wall.”

Taxidermist Gundeweisser confirmed these figures. “The boys brought me their eagles because I’d perfected the knack of making them look extra ferocious—talons extended. I was able to do this because I bought only first-class eyes from Germany—hard glass with a flash of yellow. I mounted over four hundred eagles, and nobody ever wanted the bird just looking natural. Always had to be in the act of killing something, talons extended.”

One of the state naturalists was now called, and he testified that he and his associates had been watching Floyd Calendar for some time. “National publicity on the eagle thing scared him off that line, and we never saw the plane again. What he directed his attention to was bears. There was almost as good a market for bears as there was for eagles, and he devised a sure-fire way of helping an eastern hunter bag his bear.”

“Explain it, if you will.”

“He learned to trap bears. He probably knows more about bears than any man in America. At the beginning of each season he’d trap eight or ten beauties and hide them in cages deep in the woods. When some sportsman came along Floyd would charge him one hundred dollars for the hunt, two hundred if he bagged a bear. He would take the sportsman to one of several cabins in the woods, and about a quarter of a mile away he would have one of his bears in a cage. At five in the morning he’d sneak out and let the bear loose and at five-fifteen he and the sportsman would start trailing it, and by five-thirty the bear would be dead. I investigated three dozen cases like this, and never did the hunter suspect what Floyd had done. He handed over two hundred dollars and was delighted with the deal.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, every now and then Floyd would release a bear that would take off in some unanticipated direction, and there’d be no chance of trailing him. So he adopted the practice of not feeding the caged bears for two weeks prior to releasing them. Now there were few escapes, because the bear would stop to eat, and the sportsman could creep up and gun it down.”

“We’d like to hear what Mr. Calendar tried next”

“Ranger Quarry will explain that.”

A very young man took the stand, with a collection of gadgets to which the clerk gave numbers. “Mr. Calendar was still not satisfied, for an occasional bear would still get away. We have evidence that his new plan was inspired by an article in
National Geographic
in which I detailed experiments I had made in Canada on the hibernating habits of bears. In the article, which now I’m sorry I wrote, I explained how we attached to the bear a very small radio device, like this. Wherever the bear went, it sent a signal, which betrayed his position at all times. Then I put one of these direction finders in my cap, and I could move about and always know where the bears were.

“Well, Floyd Calendar discovered who manufactured the broadcasting and listening devices, and after that whenever he captured a bear to be used later, he planted one of these transmitters around his neck. Then when a sportsman came into the mountains to get himself a bear, all Floyd had to do was let the bear loose, listen to where he was going, and zero his hunter right onto the scene without any chance of failure.”

“Didn’t the hunter realize what was happening when he got to the dead bear and saw the broadcast device?”

“No. Because Floyd never let him shoot at the bear till he—Floyd, that is—was all set for a running start. Then, while the hunter jumped in the air with joy, Floyd ran in, bent over, and with one quick swipe, tore the little transmitter from the bear’s neck, and no one was the wiser.”

Now came the turn of Paul Garrett, who was introduced as deputy to the commissioner. Spectators in the courtroom leaned forward as he took the stand, because feelings ran high in this case, and some citizens felt that it was unfair to confront Calendar with an official like Garrett.

“I’ve known Floyd Calendar all my life,” Garrett said under questioning. “Knew his father, too. And my family knew his grandfather.”

“Tell us about Mr. Calendar and turkeys.”

“About ten years ago I lured a family of wild turkeys onto the north edge of my ranch. We fed them, protected them, and after a while we had quite a colony. The wild turkey is a very sensitive bird, almost extinct in these parts, and we watched our brood very carefully, because they’re our real national bird.

“But apparently Floyd Calendar was watching them too, because after they reached a certain number they began to decline, and we could find no sign of coyotes. We worried about this until a friend of mine in Massachusetts sent me a copy of a form letter he’d received from Colorado. Here it is.”

The judge instructed the clerk to read it, and the spectators were either amused or outraged when Floyd Calendar’s mimeographed letter to his clients was divulged: “I can make you a guarantee that no other guide in America can make. Come to the Rockies and I’ll show you how to bag both of our national birds, a baldheaded eagle and a wild turkey.”

“Where did he get the turkey?” the prosecutor asked.

“From my protected sanctuary. When I saw the letter I staked one of my men out to guard the turkeys, and sure enough, here comes Floyd Calendar with a hunter from Wisconsin, shooting my turkeys.”

“Now, Mr. Garrett, there are rumors circulating as to what you did then. Will you tell the court.”

“I became very angry and waited till I saw Calendar go into Flor de Méjico, that’s the restaurant run by Manolo Marquez, and I went up to him and I said something like ...”

“We don’t want to hear ‘something like’ what you said. What did you say?”

“As well as I can remember, I said, ‘Calendar, if you ever set foot on that turkey range again, I’ll kill you. If I’m there when you come, I’ll do it there. If I miss you when you sneak in, I’ll come into this restaurant and get you while you’re eating.’ ”

“Did you say, Mr. Garrett, that you’d get him while he was eating?”

“I did. I was very angry.”

This early confession of his threat took some of the sting out of the cross-examination, but the defense attorney made a good deal of the fact that a man who would be working with sportsmen in his new job had threatened to shoot one of them in a public restaurant. By the time the interrogation ended, Garrett did not look good.

The last prosecution witness was a Centennial man who had had several run-ins with Calendar, and his testimony was devastating: “With Floyd Calendar, killing became an end in itself. He hated everything that moved—prairie dogs, rattlers, antelope and, like you heard, bears and eagles. I think if you gave Floyd a free hand, when he got through with the animal kingdom he’d start on Negroes and Mexicans and Chinese and Catholics and anyone else who wasn’t exactly like himself. He hates anything that intrudes on his part of the world, and considers it his duty to wipe it out. To call him a sportsman is obscene. He’s a one-man ecological disaster.”

The defense attorney, of course, objected to this whole tirade, and the judge ordered it stricken from the record.

When the first defense witnesses appeared the general tenor of the trial became clear, for they were ranchers and hunters who testified that bald eagles carried away young lambs and should be exterminated. They also testified that Floyd Calendar was one of the finest men in the west—everyone said he had been kind to his mother—and on that edifying note the court recessed over the weekend. One rancher, as he left the courtroom, told Garrett, “You have a nerve, testifyin’ against a real American,” and Paul was relieved to know that he would be required to testify no further.

On Saturday, November 10, he worked on the ranch, riding north to inspect the wild turkeys. They were most handsome birds, big and heavy. They always looked as if Pilgrims with long guns should be chasing them for the 1621 Thanksgiving, and Paul was delighted that they shared the ranch with him.

He also rode over to a corner of the range he had set aside for a prairie-dog town. Slowly the little creatures were making a comeback, sharing their burrows with sand owls. Their return was not an unmixed blessing, for one of Garrett’s horses broke his leg in a burrow and had to be shot. The ranch foreman wanted to bulldoze the town out of existence, but Garrett refused permission: “You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.”

The fact that he had sought the company of turkeys and prairie dogs reminded him of how deeply he was afflicted by the permanent American illness. A deep depression attacked him, which he could identify but not explain, the awful malaise of loneliness.