The Shooter

Forest Service dumps are for refuse disposal, not target shooting.

 Some of the challenges of my Toiyabe National Forest fire prevention guard job had nothing at all to do with wildfire prevention. Some had to do with the fact I was often the only public servant around to handle an emergency—with that sometimes gray area between assigned duty and moral obligation on what might be termed a “now or never” basis.

Once, on my way to the busy Twin Lakes recreation area, I detoured to check the Forest Service dump I’d burned a few days before. Suddenly, I heard gunshots, just as the Lone Ranger and Tonto once did at the beginning of almost every episode. What I saw as I arrived at the dump scared me.

A big, beefy, fortyish man, standing next to a late model Cadillac sedan, was firing a high-powered rifle—not at me, but at a row of cans and bottles on an earthen berm at the opposite end of the dump. He didn’t, I quickly decided, know what lay beyond the low ridge toward which he was firing and over which his bullets could fly. And he apparently didn’t know that Mono County didn’t allow shooting in the area. Somebody had to tell him before it might be too late.

“Good Morning, sir,” I managed as I climbed out of the cab of my patrol rig.

He nodded and smiled.

“What are you shooting?” followed, though his targets were obvious.

“Just plinkin’ at cans and bottles.”

“Sir, do you know what’s over that hill about a mile?” I asked, pointing toward the southeast—the same direction he’d been shooting.

“Just sagebrush, I guess. That’s all I can see from here.”

“No, sir. The Hunewill Guest Ranch is over there. I’d guess bullets from that rifle could reach there from here.”

“Too many dudes around anyway, right?” he smirked, making light of my concern.

Deciding another appeal to common sense wouldn’t hack it, I invoked the law. There was, I told him, a Mono County ordinance that prohibited shooting within the Twin Lakes basin.

“Oh, yeah? Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything illegal, would we? Guess we’ll just go shoot somewhere else.”

And with that he got into his Cadillac and drove away. I was relieved to see him gone. A few minutes later, after my heart stopped pounding, I radioed a report of the incident to the ranger station. I never saw him again, never heard anything about him.

But, most important, nobody had been hurt.

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.