by Jess Walter
At about 9 a.m., Roderick, Cooper, and Degan backed away from the ridge, where Hunt and the others were hiding, sneaked back down the road to a stand of birch trees, and slid back into the woods to get even closer to the house. Degan moved behind a rock 200 yards from the cabin, and Roderick and Cooper edged in behind a tree fifty yards closer. They were separated from the cabin by a crease in the two hills, a low spit between their vantage point and the cabin’s.
“I want to see what the dogs will respond to,” Cooper said.
Roderick grabbed a baseball-size rock and threw it into the wash between them and the cabin, but it plunked down harmlessly and the dogs didn’t alert. He tried again. Still, nothing. They spent about twenty minutes there, watching the cabin, and then they backed away from the closest observation post and began walking down the hill. They moved along the tree line, and Roderick pointed out places to hide snipers during the undercover phase of Northern Exposure. By 10:45 a.m., they were done for the day and were walking down the hill to meet the other deputies at the Y in the road when the radio crackled.
VICKI WEAVER STOOD in her white nightgown, framed by the doorway, looking out over the trees that surrounded their cabin. At night, they tied one of the smaller dogs down at the garden, to keep the deer away, and that morning, Sammy—lightly freckled, with a slight overbite, his hair shaved to a quarter of an inch—walked down there and brought it back up. It was about 8:00 a.m., and the family was getting on with the business of a normal day. They took turns walking to the outhouse and then grabbed breakfast when they were ready. That morning, it was potatoes and fried eggs.
Vicki’s long black hair fell to the middle of her back as she crouched down with Elisheba, who was learning to walk. She would make it five or ten feet before tumbling cheerfully over. She was teething, too, and she fussed a little as Vicki rocked and nursed her. The older children began their daily unscheduled routine of chores and playing. The weather had been in the nineties for more than a week now, but the nights were cooling off, and Vicki hoped the long, sweltering summer was about to break. The herbs and vegetables couldn’t take much more sun.
The Weaver kids dressed and took their turns in the outhouse. Kevin had stayed with the Weavers for a couple of weeks, but he was about ready to leave for a farming job in Washington State. He’d been to Spokane earlier in the month, and his mom had been worried that Kevin would be in danger with the militant Weavers.
“Mom, don’t worry,” Kevin had said. “Nobody’s going to shoot anybody.”
He woke up that morning on the porch, rolled up his sleeping bag, and talked with Sammy about working on the cabin they were building. He shared a smoke outside with Randy, their rifles resting on their shoulders or under their arms as they talked. Randy came out first in a flannel shirt but went inside and changed to camouflage, a holstered pistol on his waist, a shotgun in his arms. The dogs had been yapping all morning, and Vicki yelled at them to shut up.
A little before eleven, Sammy and Kevin walked out of the cabin with their rifles and began strolling down the driveway, Striker running in front of them. Sara walked a few steps behind them, and Randy ran out of the house to catch up to the kids, his feet slapping on the packed-dirt driveway. Rachel came last, skipping, a rifle over each shoulder. Near the base of the driveway, Striker alerted on something, a cold bark that meant he’d caught a whiff, just enough to send him nosing off into the woods, half-interested in whatever he’d found. Randy, Sam, and Kevin walked quickly after the dog, as they always did. This time, Randy said later, he hoped the dog was chasing a deer or an elk. It would be valuable meat for the long winter ahead.
With the shotgun under his short, sinewy arms, Randy ran along the dirt road that traced the top of the steep, forested meadow. “You cut down,” he called to Kevin and Sammy. “I’ll take the logging road.” Kevin cradled his bulky 30.06 hunting rifle as he jogged through the field grass, down the hill. Sammy, not even five feet tall and eighty pounds, ran with his lightweight .223 assault-style rifle, a.357-caliber handgun on his waist, jumping rocks and fallen branches as if he was playing war.
From the rock outcropping near the cabin, Vicki watched Sara and Rachel walk back up the driveway and saw Randy and the boys chase the dog until they were out of sight. She listened for a second—always concerned when one of the dogs started in—but then she turned and walked back to the cabin, bent over and picked up a rock, and casually kicked at the summer dust.
DAVE HUNT HAD FINISHED putting his camera equipment away and had gone for a little walk to see where Mark Jurgensen should build his undercover cabin. He came back and was watching the Weaver cabin over the shoulders of Frank Norris and Joe Thomas—the three marshals standing in a line—when he saw Kevin, Sam, and Sara walk off the knob and down the hill, probably to work on Kevin’s cabin. Hunt saw Randy run after them, followed by little Rachel. Vicki walked back toward the cabin.
“There’s a vehicle!” Thomas said into the radio.
Hunt listened. He didn’t hear anything. Then he heard the dog bark, and the family began running down the hill. God, no. “They are responding,” he said into the radio. “They are responding.”
“Give me a body count!” Roderick called back on the radio. Thomas answered him. Only Vicki was walking back to the cabin; all the others could be coming toward the marshals.
Dave Hunt had done enough ‘coon and rabbit hunting to know when a dog got a hot trail. When the barks picked up in intensity, he began to get nervous. This couldn’t happen on his case. “Get the hell out of there,” he muttered to himself. It was probably no more than five minutes, but to Dave Hunt, it seemed to take hours, Roderick calling his position in to them, the dog’s bark getting farther from Hunt and—it figured—closer to Roderick, Degan, and Cooper.
“DOG’S COMING! Pull back!” At first, Roderick thought they could take cover, and he slid behind a tree and looked back up the hill, where he saw Striker, with Kevin Harris running behind the big yellow Lab, break over the top of the hill, one hundred yards away, aiming straight for them. He realized it could all be coming down right then, but he also thought they could still get away without a gunfight. Torn with adrenaline and fear, the deputies ran alongside the logging road, from one stand of trees to another, twigs and branches crackling under their footsteps and the woods full of confusion. They stopped and turned several times, covered each other, and hoped the dog would turn back.
Instead, the dog was gaining on them. The Weavers usually stayed at the rock outcropping; why were they coming so far down the hill?
“We’ve got to take this dog out,” Roderick said. “He’s leading everybody to us.”
Over his shoulder, Cooper saw flashes of yellow between the trees, shadows and movement behind the dog that he took for people. Ahead, he realized they’d have to run through a clearing before they reached the next stand of trees. They’d be wide open for fire from above. He realized that he and his buddies might not get away.
“This is bullshit,” Cooper said into his radio headset. “We’re going to run down the trail and get shot in the back. We need to get into the woods.” The dog barked and bayed and still chased them. The marshals fanned out and stopped in the woods, breathing heavily and listening for the rustling of brush and timber. They hopscotched down the hill, shuffling sideways and taking turns as the last in line, covering the retreat of the others.
Cooper told the others to go ahead a little bit and he would take care of the dog if it got too close. He had the 9-mm machine gun with the silencer, and he hoped the Weavers wouldn’t hear the metallic clank when he took the dog out. Roderick and Degan made it to the canopied tree line while Cooper continued running sidestep, keeping an eye on the trees where he could hear the dog barking and the crackle of men running behind it. Then it all seemed to happen at once, Cooper seeing someone on the higher trail, the one above them, and the realization that they had fallen into an ambush. He yelled at the man on the upper trail, “Back off! U.S. marshal!” Roderick saw
him, too, and yelled at him. Cooper heard the dog bark, turned, and saw it growling at him. He pointed his rifle at the dog, but it ran right past him toward Roderick. Cooper didn’t shoot the dog, and when he looked back at the trail, Randy Weaver was running away.
In his peripheral vision, Cooper saw Degan duck into the woods and so he ran behind him. Thirty or forty feet inside the tree line, Degan jumped behind a big stump. Near him, Cooper spied a hole protected by a rock, and he dove into it. The dog was still barking, and Kevin—dressed all in black—and Sammy—in jeans and a flannel shirt—were walking along the trail, coming closer, almost to them. From his stump, Degan saw Kevin and Sam—who was the same age as his youngest boy—walk right past them. When the boys were past, Cooper relaxed a little, thinking they might be safe.
And then several things happened in rapid, foggy succession—the dog moved toward Roderick, Degan rose on his knee to identify himself, and in a thicket of who-shot-first stories, both sides agreed that everything just went to hell.
IT HIT RANDY as he ran back toward the cabin: They had run smack into a Zionist Occupied Government ambush. He had been at the fork in the logging road when a man covered head to toe in camouflage clothing had stepped out from behind a tree and yelled something at him.
“Fuck you!” Randy Weaver had yelled back. He had run about eighty yards back up the road, toward the cabin when he heard the first shots—sharp cracks echoing through the timber. Sammy and Kevin were down there!
“Sam! Kevin! Get home!” He fired a round in the air from his 12-gauge, double-barrel shotgun. He loaded another shell, but he was too eager and he pushed it in too far and jammed the shotgun. He drew his 9-mm handgun and squeezed off three more rounds. “Sam! Kevin!”
He heard his boy’s voice. “I’m comin, Dad!” There were more shots down the hill, someone yelling, a burst from all directions, like the air was being torn in half.
KEVIN HARRIS WHEELED AND FIRED his 30.06, hitting Billy Degan square in the chest.
Larry Cooper saw his friend knocked backward and saw his arm fly up like a kid asking a question in school. He laid a line of fire right back at Kevin Harris, who fell like a sack of potatoes.
“Coop, Coop, I need you.”
“I’ll be there, Billy, as soon as I get ‘em off our ass. Hang with me.” He squeezed the switch on his hand and called for Roderick in his radio. “Get up here, Artie! Billy’s been hit!”
But Roderick had his own problems just down the trail. The dog had run up to him, and Roderick had shot it in the back so it wouldn’t lead the family to them. Sammy had appeared in front of him, saw that Striker had been shot, and yelled, “You son of a bitch!” Sammy had fired at Roderick. Another round of fire seemed to come from the woods and Roderick dove and bounced, feeling something graze his stomach, just as a bullet tore through his shirt and came within a breath of hitting his chest. The shots seemed to come at him from all directions.
Up the hill, Cooper fired another barrage, darted over the brush, and found Degan a few feet behind the stump he’d chosen for cover, lying on his side, his left arm still in the sling of his machine gun, his right hand up in the air. Cooper cradled his friend, who looked up at him with misting eyes and made a couple of chewing motions and gurgling sounds.
“Come on, Billy, help me and we can get behind the rocks and we can take care of this.” Cooper kicked his pack off and threw it into the brush. He had to stop the bleeding somehow. He felt with his left hand for the entry wound but couldn’t find it, so he started dragging his friend back to safety. Degan wouldn’t budge. It was quiet and still for a moment, just the last traces of smoke, the awful echo of gunfire.
Billy pointed to his mouth, which was full of blood, and Cooper remembered that his father had done the same thing right before he died, only a few months before. Coop pulled Billy close. He put two fingers on the side of his neck, found the carotid artery, and felt the last three beats of his best friend’s heart.
VICKI WEAVER HEARD THE GUNFIRE just as she made it back to the plywood house, the place that Yahweh had shown her might be safe from all this.
There was gunfire in the woods all the time. Those who lived up there didn’t even flinch at a few rifle shots on a late summer morning. But these reports sounded different, volleys cracking and popping and echoing along the walls of the ridge, and there were so many, it was clear more than one gun was being fired.
Sara heard the shots and the yelling, grabbed her .223, and ran to the rock outcropping. Vicki and Rachel joined her, watching the woods frantically. A few minutes later, Randy broke through the tree line, panting and afraid.
“What happened?” Vicki yelled.
“We run into an ambush!”
And then Kevin came through the trees and up the driveway, wailing and shaking so much, Randy didn’t recognize him.
“That’s not Kevin!” Randy yelled.
“Yes it is!” he cried.
“Where’s Sam?”
Kevin didn’t want to tell them.
“Did you see Sam?”
“Sam’s dead.”
And then, Randy would remember, the family just went “plumb nutty.”
AT THE OBSERVATION POST, the other three deputies heard screaming, heard someone yell “U.S. marshal,” and then a loud pop. A few seconds later, there were a couple more shots, and Norris and Joe Thomas turned to Hunt. “Let’s go,” Hunt said.
They began running through the woods to the base of the hill. They heard more gunfire down below—six, maybe seven shots—and then Roderick came over Hunt’s radio. “Dave, get Frank down here! Billy’s been hit! He’s hurt bad!” Hunt worked with his radio as he ran, trying to get a forest service channel. “Mayday!” he called. But he couldn’t raise anyone, and the other two deputies passed him while he fiddled with the radio.
Norris, the medic, didn’t know the hill very well, and he turned back to Hunt. “Dave, you gotta get me down there.”
“I know.” They made it to the fern field below the Weaver cabin, puffing and gasping. Hunt crashed through the deep brush, protecting his face with his arm. And then a barrage of rifle fire cracked around them, Hunt saw the other two deputies go down and figured they’d been hit. The only one without a machine gun, Hunt dropped to his knee with his 9-mm pistol and looked for a puff of smoke to show him where the shots had come from. But he didn’t see anything. He rose, saw the other two were okay, motioned them ahead, and followed along the trail into the heavier brush and trees.
They strode toward the Y in the road, tense, their weapons pointed in front of them. Hunt was in the lead again, moving too quickly, his pistol braced at eye level, like a TV cop. Near a stand of trees, the camouflaged Larry Cooper rose up on one knee and motioned the others off the trail and into the woods.
Inside the trees, Frank Norris immediately saw Degan on his back, facing the trail, his head rolled back, eyes slightly open and glazed over. Norris dropped down next to Degan, pulled a twig from his open mouth, inserted an airway in his throat to keep the passage open, and gave him two quick breaths of CPR. Degan’s blood-filled lungs gurgled with the bursts of air, and Norris tried to find a pulse. Nothing. The medic ripped open Degan’s shirt and saw a nickel-size hole between his chest and his collarbone. There was no blood on the outside of the wound. He rolled Degan over and saw that his back was covered in blood. The shot had gone right through him.
“Dave, get Billy and drag him over here,” Cooper said.
“Give Frank a few more seconds,” Hunt said.
Norris shook his head and keyed his radio. “Billy’s gone.” He picked Degan’s wire-frame glasses off the ground and found a marshal’s badge hanging on a low tree limb.
Norris and Hunt dragged Degan over behind a rock and then kept their guns trained on the tree line in front of them. They circled around Degan’s body, protecting it. Later, in court, Cooper and Roderick would testify about what had happened: Degan stepped out and said, “Freeze, U.S. marshal” and identified himself with hi
s badge. Then Kevin Harris just turned and shot him in the chest, without provocation. Cooper fired back, dropping Harris. Farther down the hill, Roderick said that after the shooting started, he turned and shot the dog to keep anyone else from finding their position. And then both sides had fired back and forth.
Now, lying with Degan’s body in the woods just off the trail, they agreed someone needed to go for help. “I’m staying with Billy,” Cooper said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Roderick said.
“Dave, you’ve got to get some help.”
Hunt didn’t want to go, but Cooper insisted. “Nobody knows how to get out of here except you. Take Frank with you.”
Hunt said Norris should stay, in case they needed a medic. “I’ll take Joe with me.”
Just then, a woman screamed on the hill above them like a siren: “Yahweh! Yahweh!” A man yelled: “You son of a bitch!” and what sounded like a child’s voice: “You tried to kill my daddy!” Cooper figured they’d found Kevin’s body, right where he’d dropped him. “I guess Kevin bit the bullet,” he said to Roderick. There was another round of gunfire. And then more eerie screams, most of them indecipherable, except: “Stay the fuck off our land!”
THE FAMILY WAILED AND FIRED their guns in the air. Randy just kept reloading and firing, until Vicki stopped him and then they just cried and yelled. The bastards had killed their only son.
Kevin’s recollection of events was completely different from the marshals’. Kevin, back at the cabin, explained that he and Sammy had been chasing the dog, when a man camouflaged from head to toe stepped out of the woods and shot the dog in the back. And then Sammy lost it. “You killed my dog, you son of a bitch!” he yelled. Sammy fired at the marshals, one of whom opened up on him, hitting his right arm and practically tearing it off at the elbow. “Oh shit!” Sammy had screamed and turned to run away, but the marshals kept firing at him, so Kevin had wheeled and shot one of the marshals to protect Sammy. Another marshal had shot at Kevin, just missing him. But as Sammy ran away, one of the marshals shot at him and a bullet tore through his back and dropped him face first on the trail. Kevin scrambled to his feet, turned, and ran back to Sammy’s body. He couldn’t find a pulse so he ran back to the house.
