Renti and Roany sat in their parked car near the bus station. When eleven passengers got off a bus from Denver, Roany rolled down the window and called out to Wade Walls, but the man only shot them a glance before entering the Ranger Bar across the street. The two sisters were waiting in the car when suddenly the back door opened and Wade slid into their backseat. He said he’d sneaked out the bar’s back door to avoid being followed. Roany introduced him to Renti and asked why he was being so careful. Wade said that he’s been doing his work for seventeen years and is now the only person left out of a dozen people who started with him. 

This wasn’t Wade’s first trip to Wyoming, and the sisters drove him out to Roany’s husband’s ranch. With his six sons, Juniper Hamp quarried sandstone for the two-story house. In recent years, Roany had worked on repairs and the upkeep of the estate. She told Wade that her husband, Shy, had left on Tuesday and she thought he might be in Montana because people were killing bison up there. 

Renti had worked odd jobs for years until she had sex with Pan, one of her managers, and they moved into a one-room adobe house together and took in an abandoned dog. After a year, Renti packed her bag and said she was going to stay with her sister in Montana for a couple weeks and the next night had a dream that a Chihuahua stood in a boiling broth and when she placed some of the broth in her bowl the dog asked her if it could be taken to the doctor. Both Renti and Roany’s romantic partnerships had turned sour, but Roany was not going to give up Shy. 

Roany told Wade that Shy was coming back today and that they were hosting him in the Cowboy Room, the place he stayed last visit. He asks them for dinner and Roany reluctantly offers him what’s in the fridge. Wade grows offended when she offers him a steak and asks why they have meat in the house if he and Shy are fighting the cattlemen. Roany clarifies that it’s buffalo and that she’s not fighting the cattlemen, just her husband. Wade argues that it still matters what she does because of the detrimental environmental impact the ranchers are having, creating methane gas and destroying national parks. He notices that one of the sisters is wearing leather boots and that the house stinks of meat and continues to argue until Roany shuts him down. 

Over drinks, Wade shares that he wants to restore the land to its natural way of life, clearing it of cows and fences and reinstating native grasses. Renti and Roany were the daughters of Tucson lawyers and Renti had majored in art at a California school and Roany in business at the University of Wyoming, where she’d met Shy. She’d brought her business skills with her and had opened a shop to sell local goods. 

Even though his brother had done far better than him in high school, Shy had been the one who’d wanted to leave the farm and go to college. During his last year of college, he got engaged to Roany and a fatal snow storm killed his parents and he had to return to save the ranch. When he asked for a tuition refund, the university refused and told him to keep going to school while running the ranch. On the drive back to the ranch, he happened upon a public lecture Wade was giving called “Bad Beef.” The crowd was booing Wade, and Shy was the only one to approach him after his talk concluded. Over drinks, Shy shared his life story with the man and Wade advised him to get out of ranching. Shy agreed to help Wade in the war he waged on ranching. 

The summer after the snow storm, Roany and Shy got married. After the wedding, Shy graduated from a two-month course in equestrian writing and started Big Horse Equine Insurance Company. He sold off his cattle and kept his horses and property. Once or twice a year, Wade visited and they did business together. While Shy’s business struggled, Roany’s gift shop did extremely well with tourists. 

Shy remembered working with Nikole Angermiller in seventh grade on a partner history project. Her grandfather had told Shy he was surprised they weren’t looking into the history inside of the Hamp house where there are all the photographs of the governors of Wyoming. They explained they had been assigned to research Portugee Phillips and Nikole’s grandparents took them to the Thoroughbred Horse monument and the Portugee Phillips plaque. On the drive back from the monument, Nikole touched his crotch and he associated his first orgasm with horses. 

On the Fiddle and Bow ranch, old lady Birch and her son Skipper disagree about ranching strategy. They welcome the rest of the family ranchers into the house for breakfast, along with several kids they’d recruited to help out. Skipper had put out a call at the local high school which drew in Rick Fissler, an emaciated kid from the trailer park, who had no ranching experience. 

Back at the Hamp ranch, Wade sat on the couch and looked at the governors’ faces on the wall, many of which were signed. A little after 9, Shy walked in and told Roany he’d been in North Dakota protesting a prairie dog shooting. This was a lie. Instead, he’d spent a few nights with a young Native American girl that he raped. Wade tries to ask him about what he was really doing, but Shy brushes him off. The conversation shifts to the governors on the wall and Wade makes fun of the picture of Governor Emerson being thrown into the air from a blanket by his supporters. Then, they get into an argument about the buffalo meat in the freezer. Wade shows him the next property he wants to cut the fence of to free cows and Shy protests, as the property is nearby. 

On his trip, Shy had first run into the girl’s brother on the side of the road and offered him a ride. When the man had said he wasn’t headed anywhere in particular and asked what he wanted. Shy told him he wanted a thirteen-year-old to have sex with and he would pay him. 

On a dry night, Wade and Shy drove to the nearby property and cut the wire fence. Halfway through their effort, a shot rang out and Shy thought he’d been shot. A voice told them to get down on the road with their hands up. Shy dropped his wire cutters and found he’d only been cut by a splinter of rock. Wade ran off into the national forest, and when Shy came to he was in the back of a sedan and saw Governor Emerson through the sunroof being thrown up again by his supporters. He got ready to smile at the voters.