The rain had let up and the crescent moon shown brightly in the clear night sky.  I held my head out of Wyatt’s window and looked at the stars as they twinkled in delight.  My long auburn hair flapped in the wind, feeling free from the confines of lies and half-truths.   Mad cow disease.  Gunshots.  Greg.  My past few conversations with Greg rose in my mind like the tide, and a wave of betrayal washed over me.  It wasn’t the first time that he’d lied to me during the course of our three-year relationship, but the other untruths seemed innocuous.  Everyone told fibs.  Right?  And Greg’s fibs were usually because he was on a top-secret assignment and was forbidden from disclosing his whereabouts.  I understood.  Maybe that was happening again.  I was willing to give Greg the benefit of the doubt.

“Awfully quiet over there.  Cat got your tongue?”  I hadn’t noticed the dead air space.  The white noise of the tires on the wet pavement, coupled with my thoughts about Greg, tuned everything else out.  Wyatt had his left arm dangling over the steering wheel and his right arm was palm down on the seat next to me.  I studied the lines and veins of his hand – thinking that they looked like tree roots and knowing that they told his story of ranch work.  Greg’s hands were soft and smooth.

“No.  Just thinking.”

Wyatt fiddled with the radio, trying to tune in a station.  “Don’t get much out here in the hills.  The stations come in pretty good at the ranch.  Umm.  Well, how about telling me a little about you?  Can’t say that I know much more than the fact that you’re a lawyer and Greg’s girlfriend.  Where you from?”

“I was raised in Boulder, Colorado.  Harry hired me after law school, and I’ve been working for him in Jackson for the past ten years.  He’s like the father I never had, but he’s tough as nails to work for sometimes.  He’s trained me well, but he expects a lot out of me.”

“That’s good.  To expect a lot.  Then you deliver a lot.  Umm.  What happened to your father, if you don’t mind the intrusion?”

“He died in a car accident when I was four.  It was snowing and he lost control.  My mom remarried a man with two kids of his own pretty soon after my dad died, so I have one brother and two half-sisters.  I don’t see them much though.  I work a lot.”

“What do you do for fun?” Wyatt asked, as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his can of chew.  With his knee on the steering wheel, he took a pinch with his left hand.  Before shoving it deep in his gum, he looked my way.  He put the chew back in the can and tossed it up on the dashboard.  “I know.  I need to quit.”  I nodded.

“For fun?  I love to travel.  I’ve been on a few great trips with Greg over the last few years.   I also love to run – I jog four miles every morning, rain or shine.  I have this adorable tabby cat named Ted.  He keeps me company.  I like to read and play basketball and ski and hike.  Anything outdoors, really.  And you?”

“I like being outdoors.  I like to hunt and fish and ride horses or motorcycles or snowmobiles.  I like going fast.  Want me to show you?” he asked, glancing at me sideways while downshifting his truck as we rounded the corner quickly.  I shook my head.  My father’s death had curbed any desire for dicey driving.   I told Wyatt about the times in high school when kids would speed or drive crazy and how I would scream my head off until they let me out of their car.   He understood.

As we rumbled over the cattle guard toward the Anderson ranch, I remembered that I drove out with Butch and that my SUV was parked at the library in town.  As if he read my thoughts, Wyatt said, “After a few beers, it’s best you stay at the ranch tonight.  Too many antelope and deer shootin’ across the road at night.  Mom or Dad can drive you into town in the morning.  Anyway, I’m sure that Dad will want to make amends.”  I didn’t argue.  The beer had made me drowsy and I wasn’t familiar with the road.  Wyatt showed me to a spare bedroom and set me up with a clean washcloth before saying good night.

“I live in the guest house out back in case you need anything.”  He smiled and gave me a cowboy nod, lowering his head a bit and tipping his hat, and then quietly he slipped out the back door.

* * *

The next morning, Beth greeted me at the breakfast table with coffee, biscuits and gravy, and scrambled eggs.  She was dressed in jeans and a light blue sweater and looked like she’d already spent part of the morning outdoors.  “You can borrow some jeans and boots if you want to take a look around the ranch,” Beth said.  I agreed, trying to figure out how I was going to choke down this huge breakfast of fat-laden food.  Normally, I got up and went for a run, then had coffee and fruit for breakfast afterwards.  The calories and cholesterol in this single meal would put me over my daily intake.  Nevertheless, I smiled and nibbled the best I could.  After breakfast, she set me up in horseback riding attire and then shooed me out to the barn. 

Butch was in the barn tying fancy knots with his rope.  Two horses were saddled.  I asked him what he was doing.  “Hobby,” he answered.  “My foster father must a taught me to tie a hundred kind of knots.  Used to practice under my desk at school.  See, a rope is a cowboy’s friend and in order to get acquainted properly with this kind of friend, a cowboy has to try out lots of different ways to tie knots – to find out which one works best for him.”

“Which one works for you?” I asked, slightly puzzled by the topic.  I wasn’t sure whether Butch was serious.

“Depends on what I’m up to.  The hackamore is probably what I use most out here on the ranch, but it’s not my favorite to tie.  I like the double round turn hitched knot a lot.  It’s tied by first making a running loop in the middle of the line.  Next, take one end and pass it through the loop twice, like this.”  He showed me his loop.  “See, the loop makes a round turn.  Now give the other end an additional turn, or in other words, double the loop.  Now the knot is complete.”  He threw me a coiled rope and suggested that I try it, but I could never have repeated the steps and have it come out looking like his knot.  It was sort of like a yo-yo trick.  Some people were good at it – others couldn’t even “walk the dog.”  He showed me his old-fashioned double bow knot and the sliding monkey fist in loop, and finished his demonstration with his sliding blood knot noose. 

“Ride much?” he asked, nodding at a beautiful horse decorated in white and brown spots. 

“Not much, but I love horses.  Is she gentle?”

“If she wants to be.”

“What’s her name?”

“Well, you’re not gonna believe this, but my wife named her Mocha Cappuccino.  It’s her favorite drink.  My wife’s favorite drink, that is.  Beth goes to town nearly every day for one.  I just call her Mocha for short.  She’s a real charmer if she’s in the mood.  Have to tell you though, she is a bit moody.”  I walked under Mocha’s neck and scratched her near the ears.  She quickly flicked her ears back at me once and then set them straight again.  She stomped her front foot and whinnied.”

“She’s straight with you.  That’s Mocha’s sign that she’ll take you for a ride.”
            “Her sign?  I didn’t know that horses give signs.”

“Of course they do.  All living creatures give signs.  You just have to know what to look for.  Go ahead.  Mount her.”  Carefully, I slid back under Mocha’s neck and put my left leg in the stirrup.  I hopped twice and then swung my right leg up and over into the saddle.  I took a deep breath and grabbed the reins.  “You look nervous.  Don’t let her on to that.  She needs to think that you’re in control.”

“I love horses but I’ve been afraid of them for a long time.  When I was a teenager I had several bad experiences with horses, including being thrown off when I went to a dude ranch for summer camp.”

“That was then.  This is now.  Take her out of the barn and gently nudge her into that pasture over there.  She’ll take you for a nice ride.  I won’t take us too close to the wells or compressors.  She doesn’t like them much.”

Mocha started into a canter the minute we left the barn.  “Whoa.  Whoa.”  I wanted to slow her down, but she had a mind of her own.  She followed Butch’s horse closely as we charged into the green pasture.   The grass smelled sweet and fresh and it graciously bowed with each step Mocha took.  She stopped on occasion to nibble a few blades but quickly picked up her pace with a gentle nudge.  The mountains were glittering a sapphire blue and were crowned by a clear turquoise sky.  A few peaks were still crested with white caps of snow, but for the most part, the snow had melted by this spectacular July day.  The wind was picking up a bit, and I noticed a low, brownish haze moving in near the foothills of the mountains.  I pointed toward it.

“Seems too early for forest fires.  What’s that brown haze over there?”

“Pollution.  From methane gas development, of course.  Half the people around here are coming down with asthma from it.  Pneumonia even.  Contaminating the land wasn’t enough.  They had to go for the air too.”

I could see that Butch was fixated on the methane gas.  Since I was hired to talk about it with him, I took the bait.  “Tell me about your relationship with MethZap.  How did it develop?”  I nudged Mocha to catch up to Butch’s horse so that I could ride alongside him.

“At first, it was okay, I guess.  I wasn’t happy about the fact that they were fixin’ to pump the gas out of my property, but I understood that there was really nothing I could do about it.  So, Chance Baker helped me negotiate the terms of the surface damage agreement so that when the drilling was done they’d put my ranch back the way it was before they started the drilling.  I was concerned about my fences and the roads they wanted to put in.  We had a number of issues about that.  And I was very concerned about the water.

“We’d had some things go wrong in terms of trash and cigarette butts and the methane workers going to the restroom on our ranch.  There was no Port-a-Jons up there at first.  And the mud.  The mud was horrible. Damn near drove Beth to her grave.  There were quite a few places where my fence had been destroyed.  I was upset, and I talked with Rowdy Rodiger about it first, before we ever talked to an attorney.  I just said, ‘Listen, I don’t know how things are where your employers are from, but you know that in this country if you tear out a man’s fence, you ought to be man enough to call him up and at least apologize and tell him you’re going to make it right.’  So, Rowdy called up his boss and got permission to mend some fences.  Of course, Rowdy didn’t know a thing about tamping a fence or Budd-Eaton barbed wire, but I schooled him on it real fast.  Hell’s rope.”

I gave Butch a quizzical glance.  “What’s hell’s rope?”

“Barbed wire.  I call it hell’s rope.   If you’ve ever had it tangled around your ankles while building a fence, you’d know what I’m talkin’ about.”   I nodded at Butch, understanding his point.  Without prompting, he continued talking.  “So once we got straight on the fact that the fences were there to keep the livestock in certain pastures, he seemed to catch on.”

We rode up a steep hill and Mocha again started to canter.  I held on tight and let her do what she wanted.  What she wanted was to beat Butch’s horse to the top of the hill.  When she crested the top of the plateau, she put on her brakes and nearly threw me over her neck as she stopped a few yards short of some kind of a hut.

“What is that?” I asked.  I felt like I had landed on the moon.  The jade-green hillside had turned into a russet and barren plateau.  Copper and plastic pipes were strewn in every direction.  L-shaped pipes jutted into the ground, flanked by meters and gauges hissing mysterious tunes.  A few feet away were tan cylindrical huts bordered by indicators and conduits of unknown function.  Further down the horizon, I saw a house-like structure with two antennae that stretched from its roof, making it look like a giant ant crawling toward us.  The giant bug-creature hissed and groaned like a jet engine preparing for take-off.  The land smelled like rotten eggs and appeared infertile – the only living things I could see were weeds. Dust clouds billowed with each step Mocha took.  She reared back.

“This, Miss MacIntosh, is why you are here.” 

Butch deftly swung his leg over his horse and dismounted.  He reached down and pulled a handful of weeds out at their roots.  “I’m a cowboy, Miss Macintosh.  I’m not a farmer.  But I do know all about noxious weeds.  I come from Montana, and they’re a huge problem in Montana.  In fact, the western part of Montana is gone.  We do have weed problems here in Sheridan County.  There are leafy spurge, beggar’s lice, cockleburs.   It affects your livestock, especially horses, because of the fact that in the summertime horses will stand head to tail, and they’ll sort of swat flies for each other.  And when they have burrs in their tails, that ends up getting in their eyes and then you have ulcers and you have blind horses, the whole nine yards.  Because of that we have to have a weed-spraying program on the ranch.  And all of those things are, you know, the scourge of the west.  You got to stay caught up with it.  So, anytime you disturb the surface, you are going to have weeds.  There’s no question.  If you’re wheat farming and you disturb the surface, you have to take care of weeds.” 

As far as I understood the case, the weeds were not a huge issue.  But Butch was a cowboy at heart and it seemed like he wanted to make sure I understood that the weeds affected his business a good deal.  “I take it that you didn’t have any weeds before MethZap arrived on your property?

“No.  I’m not saying that.  Weeds are everywhere.  Like I was just telling you, where I came from, we had a knapweed problem in Montana.  Well, here it’s leafy spurge.  And unless you want to run goats on your place – that’s about the only thing that’ll eat leafy spurge – you gotta spray.  So, every year I called Abby Rodson up at the weed board and she issued me my weed spray for the year for the ranch.  Now, typically that would be around twelve to fifteen hundred bucks a year to do the whole ranch.  At first it was quite a bit more, because the prior owner of the ranch hadn’t done it for a long time.  They controlled the weeds before I bought the ranch by overgrazing to where there was nothing left to eat but cottonwoods, and the animals would eat the weeds.  But since I wanted grass to grow, I had to spray weeds to give the grass a chance.  So, that’s kind of what my program was.  It’s sort of like having a race, you know, in terms of controlling weeds.  It’s competition between weeds and grass.”

He walked with his horse for a few hundred feet and Mocha followed along without much coaxing.  He bent down and pulled more weeds from the earth and held them up for me to see.  “Now, obviously, when MethZap first started drilling, we understood that the surface was going to be disturbed in terms of the weed race and that meant that as long as the reclamation of the land hadn’t done happened, the weeds got out of the blocks first and were on their greedy way towards winning the race.  So even if a fellow wasn’t going to immediately do proper reclamation of the ground, the weeds needed to be controlled in the meantime so that at least when the reseeding started we all got a fair start on the deal.  I don’t know if that makes sense.”

“Makes sense.  So you had some weeds before MethZap, but they were under control.  Now that MethZap has destroyed your land, the weeds are winning the race, right?”

“Right.  The weeds have won.  But as you can see,” he said, pointing to the wellhead which was ticking like a time bomb, “I suppose those weeds are not my biggest problem.”  Butch grabbed his horse by the reins and led him over toward the compressor station.  Mocha and I followed, but as we got closer, she was clearly uneasy by the loud sounds spewing from the ground.  Butch pointed to a reservoir of water over the hillside that was overflowing its banks with a muddy, sudsy liquid that smelled like sulfur.  “That, Miss MacIntosh, is my biggest concern.  See, as it overflows, which happens too often to account for, that spill-off traverses its way down my ditch to the Powder River.  The sludge is poison, I tell you.  And it’s filling up the Powder River with poison.  The Powder catches up to a number of tributaries along the way.  I can only imagine what it looks like at the mouth of Cottonwood Creek.  These rivers and cricks and streams feed our livestock and all of the animals that live in nature:  deer, antelope, sage grouse, prairie dogs, fox, peregrine falcons, trumpeter swans, owls, frogs, sturgeon chub.  Some species are endangered.   Think of what them environmentalists will say someday when they figure out that half of the indigenous creatures are extinct.  The methane gas companies will be long gone by then.  The government will turn to us ranchers and tell us to clean up the water and fix the hillsides.  How we gonna do that?   The damage will be done.  Can’t bring something back from extinction, right?  Remember the dinosaurs?” 

Butch tied his horse to a tree and walked toward the first dam. 

“Have you been cited for contamination yet?” I asked. 

“Cited?  No.  But, the Oil and Gas Commission said, ‘You have to get those fixed, because that’s a heck of a liability holding up that much water,’ because once those – let’s say those dams were full and they started to wash, boy, that would turn loose a lot of water down for Martha Stevenson, who lives down the Powder River from us – close near where Cottonwood Creek intersects the Powder.  See, I have two stock reservoirs below them in other pastures, and one is big.  Once all of that water would let loose, that’s millions of gallons.  It would wipe her out.  So, the Oil and Gas Commission said, ‘You got to fix this.’  Problem is – problem is that I don’t know how to fix it.  MethZap says that they have the right to discharge the crap.  They say they have government permission from the Bureau of Land Management and the Army Corps of Engineers.  They say that all the mining laws say that they can discharge whatever they need to.  How can that be?” 

Butch leaned down and scooped up some dam water into his hands.  “Do you really think that my livestock should drink this?”  I knew it was a rhetorical question, but I shook my head nevertheless.   He continued.  “Do you think they should graze on the grass that grows from this?  If any grass grows, that is.  Do you think that Wyatt’s cows should eat and drink this sludge and then be sold at the County Fair and put on the butcher block for the good people of Sheridan to eat next winter?” 

“So, do you think that lady might have a case against Wyatt for her son dying of mad cow disease?”

“Crazy Mrs. Becker?  Hell no.  That woman is just lookin’ for someone to blame for her kid being crazier than her.  But, I’m not ruling out the possibility down the road.  I’m downright scared that the cows’ll get contaminated and someone’ll blame us for it.  Mad cow disease is a misnomer in these parts, if you ask me.  I don’t think it exists around here, but I’m sure someone as loony as she is might be able to convince some folks otherwise.”

Butch kept going on and on with his monologue as we walked back to the horses.  As we approached, Mocha was rearing up and whinnying wildly.  Butch’s horse was prancing around like he was standing on hot coals.  Butch held up his left hand at me.  “DON’T TAKE ANOTHER STEP!” 

I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around.   Butch unsnapped the holster on his belt and pulled out a Ruger .22 pistol.  He jerked back the chamber and took aim.  I heard a noise that sounded like “hdddddddddddt, hdddddddddt” but I had no idea what was going on.  I thought that he was going to shoot his horse by the looks of his aim. 

“Stop!” I yelled.  Butch pulled the trigger and a crack as loud as thunder discharged from the gun.  Both horses reared up in fright. 

“Rattlesnake.”   A one-word explanation was all it took.  He walked over to the dead snake and scooped its bleeding carcass up with the barrel of his gun and flung it away from the horses.  “Practically the only living creature I hate,” he said as he turned and calmed the horses.  Butch whispered in his horse’s ear for a few seconds and then into Mocha’s ear.  Both horses looked as if they understood him perfectly.  They stood calmly as he removed the hatchet from his belt and found the snake corpse in the grass.  Butch raised the hatchet high in the air and then hammered it to the ground, slamming it into the snake’s neck, decapitating the quivering creature.  He dug a hole in the earth with the blunt side of the hatchet and buried the head of the snake so that no one could step on the venomous fangs.  “Nuisance.  And there are hundreds around here.  Watch your step, if you please.”  I trailed him closely on horseback all over the ranch, now mindful of every little hole in the ground. 

“Do you always pack a gun?” I asked, thinking about being shot at the night before.

“Pretty damn much.  Hell, people look at you sideways if you don’t.  I remember one time when I was on the professional rodeo circuit; I was boarding a plane in Casper.  It was close to hunting season in the fall and the security lady asked if my weapon had been checked and I told her that I didn’t have a weapon with me.  She looked at me and then looked at her supervisor and then asked for me to step aside.  They practically did a full-cavity search before they let me board.  I swear she didn’t believe me.  Everyone has a weapon in Wyoming.  Well . . . almost everyone.”

* * *

Butch showed me the damage MethZap had done and was continuing to do.  He told me how his business had suffered from having MethZap on his property.  Then he told me about the “Well from Hell.”

“That’s what all the drillers called it.  It was a mess up there and very dangerous for my horses.  The compressor station, it was a jumble, I tell you.  Pipes and rubbish everywhere.  Those are the kind of things that looked pretty dangerous for people to be around.  That ties right into why I was upset about not being able to use my property.  My horses are broke and they were scared when I rode up there near that compressor.  And for whatever reason, that compressor wasn’t working right.  In town, at Hardee’s restaurant, Wyatt overheard Rowdy Rodiger talkin’ that MethZap was fixin’ to explore other opportunities elsewhere in the area because the ‘Well from Hell’ was causing them too much trouble.  Game over.  He said that if they found another viable coal seam somewhere down river, that they might move on.  Well, considering this, I realized that they might not be paying me any royalties for the drilling they’d done on my property, and they might leave it looking like hell.  If that was the case, then I’d be in a heap of trouble because I wouldn’t be able to run my rodeo clinics with all that mess on my property, and I wouldn’t be getting no income from the royalties they promised.” 

“So what did you do?”

“I did what any man would do.  I confronted them.”

“And what happened?”

“MethZap promised me that they were going hold up their end of the deal and get the gas out from under my property, pay me the royalties, clean up their mess and then move on.”

“Did you believe them?”

Butch looked around his land and then gave his mustache a slight tug.  “Would you?”  I wouldn’t either.  After listening to Butch describe all of the ways he tried to work things out with MethZap, I realized that this case was not going to settle easily.  And if it wasn’t going to settle easily, I might as well consider putting together a class action.  If enough ranchers joined us in our pursuit, we might just get MethZap’s attention.  But class action lawsuits were very expensive.  That would get Harry’s attention.  I would have to call him when I got back to my office.

As we rounded the corner back toward the barn, Mocha picked up her pace.  Her cantor had earnest, and this time, I didn’t try to slow her down because my thighs were aching so much from the ride that I couldn’t wait to dismount.  After settling the horses back in the stalls, I turned to Butch and thanked him for hiring me.  “I’m honored that Greg recommended me to you,” I said.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Greg didn’t recommend you.  In fact, he’ll be downright mad when he hears that I switched lawyers,” Butch said as he reached down and patted his black and white Border collie.  “This is Cody.  She’s the best herding dog I’ve ever owned.  Hell, she’s the best friend a cowboy could ask for.”  Cody looked up at Butch with adoring eyes, as if she understood his every word.  I reached out to pet Cody, but he backed away a few inches.

“Why would Greg be mad if you changed lawyers?” I asked.

“It’s a long, complicated story.   I couldn’t begin to tell it all to you in a day.  What I can tell you is that Greg was so doggone set on having Chance Baker as our lawyer that it made me apprehensive, to be perfectly open with you.  But it was Chance who wanted out.  He hates death threats, being a tree-hugger and all.  And even the tree-huggers in Wyoming carry guns.”

“But that doesn’t explain why Greg would be mad if you hired me.   He knows what a good reputation Harry has.  He saw us in action during the O’Connor trial.  I don’t understand what –”

“When this all started heating up,” Butch said, “I asked Greg if he’d call you and talk about it.  I wanted him to ask you a few questions about the mining laws and whether we had to let the MethZap folks have ingress privileges to our land.  It irked me to no end that they could just buy the mineral rights under our property, but also have the legal right to use the surface of our property to get to them.  It didn’t make any sense to me.  Greg knows a lot about the environment and that sort of thing, so I asked him to ask you about it.  Now, I don’t mean to be putting you down or anything, but Greg said that environmental law wasn’t your expertise.  I think that’s the word he used.  So, I didn’t call you.  But when Chance Baker told me that Harry was one of the best lawyers he’d ever known, then I gave Harry a call.”

I fiddled with the thoughts going through my mind, trying not to take offense to the fact that Greg hadn’t recommended me to Butch.  In all honesty, environmental law was not our forte, but it seemed unfair of Greg to discourage his father from consulting with us.  Harry had handled a fair number of cases that had environmental issues involved, and I’d told Greg about a number of them during a recent trip that he and I took to Central America.    I knew that it wasn’t worth obsessing over, but my feelings were pinched, nevertheless. 

Still, the more I learned about Butch and Beth’s case, the more enthusiastic I was about it.  I couldn’t wait to go through the rest of Chance Baker’s files and figure out who to sue for what claims.  It was at that moment I realized that I had become a partner in Harry’s firm.  I no longer just accepted the cases that were shuffled in my direction.  I now was in the unique position of evaluating the case and deciding whether it made sense to proceed.  I very much liked that feeling.  I embraced the litigation, accepting its burdens and benefits.  I was ready to take on the challenge of a new area of legal expertise and I hoped to learn a great deal from the process.

* * *

When Butch dropped me off at my car later that evening, I found a note on the windshield.  It read:

Wastewater is not the only poison around here.  Watch what you drink lawyer woman.

The Sheriff, an overweight nonchalant fellow, listened patiently when I told him about the shooting on the Anderson ranch, but the sheriff didn’t seem to think much of it.  He said that he’d look into the incident and make a report.  Worse, when I showed him the note, he shrugged his shoulders and even went so far as to suggest that it was some silly prank.  I insisted that he send the note to the crime lab in Cheyenne for analysis.   In a tone laden with sarcasm, he assured me that he’d “get right on it.”  I drove from my office parking lot to my apartment in complete silence.  I couldn’t bear to listen to music.  I needed to be alone with my thoughts.

As I climbed the steps to my second-story apartment, I constantly looked over my shoulders, making sure that no one was following me.  I quickly jammed my key into the lock and thrust myself into the darkness of my apartment.  I reached with my left hand and flicked on the lights.  When I saw that everything was how I left it that morning, I slammed the door behind me and clicked the deadbolt.  Ted, my orange tiger cat, came running in my direction, mewing loudly for food.  I hadn’t fed him his customary can of wet food in twenty-four hours and he was not shy about protesting.   I followed him to the laundry area and pulled open a can of Feline Feast, shaking the contents of the meshed meal into his round, blue bowl.  Ted lapped at the juices first, and then took his time biting into the brown lump of cat food.   All the while, he purred loudly, letting me know that there was little else that he needed to complete his day. 

I slipped into my pajamas and washed my face before getting into my un-made bed.  I patted Ted on the head and scratched his cheeks and reminded him that he was the one boy in my life that I could count on to love me no matter what.  He seemed to understand me as he cuddled in closer.  I fell asleep within seconds and dreamed vividly of being trapped in a den of rattlesnakes with no way out.