“The pot revolution is over?” she said.

“All over,” Doc said. “Marijuana was never more than an active placebo anyway.”

“What nonsense.”

“An oral pacifier for colicky adolescents.”

“What utter rubbish.”

The conversation lagged. The two young women from San Diego (a suburb of Tijuana) sang a song called “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.”

The entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex—they were not—but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God’s sweet earth. The manly tradition.

The three men hunched closer to the shrinking fire. The cold night crawled up their backs. They passed Smith’s bottle round and around. Then Doc’s bottle. Smith, Hayduke, Sarvis. The captain, the bum and the leech. Three wizards on a dead limb. A crafty intimacy crept upon them.

“You know, gentlemen,” the doctor said. “You know what I think we ought to do….”

Hayduke had been complaining about the new power lines he’d seen the day before on the desert. Smith had been moaning about the dam again, that dam which had plugged up Glen Canyon, the heart of his river, the river of his heart.

“You know what we ought to do,” the doctor said. “We ought to blow that dam to shitaree.” (A bit of Hayduke’s foul tongue had loosened his own.)

“How?” said Hayduke.

“That ain’t legal,” Smith said.

“You prayed for an earthquake, you said.”

“Yeah, but there ain’t no law agin that.”

“You were praying with malicious intent.”

“That’s true. I pray that way all the time.”

“Bent on mischief and the destruction of government property.”

“That’s right, Doc.”

“That’s a felony.”

“It ain’t just a misdemeanor?”

“It’s a felony.”

“How?” said Hayduke.

“How what?”

“How do we blow up the dam?”

“Which dam?”

“Any dam.”

“Now you’re talking,” Smith said. “But Glen Canyon Dam first. I claim that one first.”

“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “You’re the demolitions expert.”

“I can take out a bridge for you,” Hayduke said, “if you get me enough dynamite. But I don’t know about Glen Canyon Dam. We’d need an atom bomb for that one.”

“I been thinking about that dam for a long time,” Smith said. “And I got a plan. We get three jumbo-size houseboats and some dolphins—”

“Hold it!” Doc said, holding up a big paw. A moment of silence. He looked around, into the darkness beyond the firelight. “Who knows what ears those shadows have.”

They looked. The flames of their little campfire cast a hesitant illumination upon the bush, the boat half grounded on the sandy beach, the rocks and pebbles, the pulse of the river. The women, all asleep, could not be seen.