Open Season

Nick Davidson | The Atavist Magazine | April 2026 | 1,752 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 174, “Big Game.”

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John Morgan woke to the sound of a fist hammering on his door. The clock beside him read 10:15 p.m. Morgan answered and found Costilla County deputy sheriff Robert Espinoza staring at him. Espinoza was muscular, with dark eyes, a kempt beard, and black, wavy hair that fell down his neck in a short mullet. It was a cool night in early September 1987, and most people in the quiet village of Fort Garland, Colorado, were asleep. Morgan had recently established himself as Fort Garland’s new taxidermist and wild-game sausage maker; he and his business partner, J.J., had opened a shop three weeks earlier. Morgan mostly mounted deer heads and sold elk chorizo, but Espinoza knew that he also trafficked in poached game.

“You want to go out and kill one?” Espinoza said. “I just saw four deer in a field.”

Hunting season was still a month away, but Espinoza didn’t care.

Morgan got dressed and followed the deputy sheriff. Espinoza grabbed a scoped, bolt-action .22 rifle and a box of shells from his cruiser, changed into camouflage coveralls, then hopped into Morgan’s pickup. He directed Morgan to a dead-end gravel road north of town, heading toward Blanca Peak, the tallest mountain in the Sangre de Cristo range. The two men drove to the road’s terminus looking for signs of game wardens—the state employees tasked with enforcing hunting regulations—then backtracked to an open field adjacent to a scrum of homes.

“There they are,” Espinoza said, pointing into the alfalfa. “Turn your lights on them.”

Five deer grazed in the truck’s beams. Espinoza raised his rifle, fired a single shot, and watched one of the animals fall.

Morgan sped them back to Espinoza’s cruiser, where the men listened for a game warden to come over the radio. When it was clear that no one had heard the gunshot, they returned to the field. The buck Espinoza had hit stood up at their approach; the first round had merely wounded the animal. The deputy shouldered his rifle and dropped it with a second shot.

Near the dump south of Fort Garland, Morgan gutted the deer at the bottom of a pit. Espinoza offered to split the meat and asked Morgan to turn his half into sausage.

“Do the game wardens use planes here?” Morgan asked, gesturing at the pile of offal in the moonlight. “Sometimes,” Espinoza said. He had once shot at one.

“I’m in a position where I can help you,” Espinoza told Morgan. “If they’re about to raid you or something, I can let you know.” Morgan said he appreciated that.

“But I have to be real careful,” Espinoza added. “If I find out you’re a federal agent, I’ll shoot you and leave you out here in a gut pile.”

Morgan said plenty of locals could vouch for him.

After finishing up with Espinoza, Morgan took the deer back to his shop. But he needed J.J.’s help to process the meat, because he didn’t know the first thing about making sausage. He wasn’t a taxidermist, and his name wasn’t John Morgan. He was George Morrison, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And he intended to take down Espinoza and dozens of other men he believed were among the American West’s worst poachers.

“If your true identity is discovered, there’s a good chance they will take you on in numbers or from afar with a rifle in the dark of the night,” Grosz said.

Morrison had worked in wildlife law enforcement for a decade, beginning as a state game warden in Ohio, where he grew up. From March to December, he checked anglers’ licenses and chased night hunters jacklighting deer—an illegal tactic that blinds animals for easier killing. When the Ohio Division of Wildlife required a covert operator to infiltrate a poaching ring in the Appalachian Mountains, Morrison jumped at the opportunity. He found that he had a knack for going undercover, and in 1984, the Fish and Wildlife Service hired him as a federal investigator. He spent the next nine months on Long Island, New York, casing duck hunters, scallop boats, and taxidermists who illegally stuffed migratory birds.

Then he got a call from Terry Grosz, who offered him a position in the Rocky Mountains. Grosz was a burly, no-nonsense special agent who oversaw a network of two dozen operatives covering eight states. Morrison had long dreamed of living in rugged country. He packed his pickup and drove west.

Not long into the job, Grosz called Morrison into his office at Fish and Wildlife’s Denver headquarters. Morrison was in his early thirties at the time, with tousled blond hair, dark blue eyes, and a Sam Elliott voice. (Grosz later described him in a book as a “tall, muscular drink of water with not more than four percent body fat on his lean six-foot, five-inch frame,” who moved “with the deliberate energy and practiced smoothness of an anaconda.”) Morrison had already initiated three covert investigations in the Rockies. In one he posed as a woodcutter working for an outfitter who poached bighorn sheep at a remote hunting camp in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. In another he made backroom deals with a Korean sex trafficker peddling black market bear parts in Colorado. These were worthy projects, and Grosz was pleased with their progress. But he had called Morrison with a special assignment in mind.

A swaggering lawman with a cowboy sensibility and a soft spot for what he called “the poor critters,” Grosz took personal offense at the illegal slaughter of animals in his domain. He was especially peeved about the situation in the San Luis Valley, some two hundred miles south of Denver. Grosz wanted Morrison to launch a clandestine investigation into the rampant killing of the valley’s wildlife. “It would require you to sever all but the most necessary ties with your fellow officers,” Grosz told him.

A mile and a half above sea level, the San Luis Valley stretches across parts of eight counties in two states. Most of its terrain is high-desert scrubland, peppered with sagebrush and piñon-juniper forest. Spruce- and fir-clad mountains soar into the sky—the San Juans form the valley’s western edge, and to the east are the Sangre de Cristos, where the Great Sand Dunes dust the knees of the highest peaks. The towns scattered across the region are little more than blips in otherwise desolate country.

In 1987, the San Luis Valley was a tequila-swilling, gun-toting pocket of the Old West transposed onto modern America. Morrison would focus his efforts primarily on Costilla and Alamosa Counties in Colorado, and Taos County in New Mexico. These were economically depressed locations; Costilla was Colorado’s poorest county. As a white man, Morrison would stand out. Most of the area’s denizens descended from the settlers of Spanish New Mexico, who in the 1850s answered Don Carlos Beaubien’s call to colonize a million-acre land grant he had acquired after the Mexican–American War. Some locals traced their roots in the valley even further back, to the Catholic Penitentes of the 1600s or to earlier Indigenous nations.

By reputation, residents were hostile to outsiders, and for good reason. In 1960, a timber baron from North Carolina named John Taylor strode into the valley and bought a 77,000-acre tract known as La Sierra. The land had been privately held by a far-off entity for years, but locals believed they had the right to use it to hunt, graze cattle, and cut wood, as they had for more than a century. Taylor disagreed. A protracted land-rights war ensued. Taylor erected fences; people tore them down. Taylor eventually won the claim to his land in federal court, but many of the valley’s residents thought the ruling was racist—a federal judge had given a white man thousands of acres that had belonged to them before the area was even part of the United States. People continued to vandalize and poach on Taylor’s property. In October 1975, the timberman awoke to a spray of bullets cutting through his roof, one of which shattered his ankle. He left the valley and never returned, though La Sierra remained in his possession and tensions simmered between locals and the land’s caretakers.

Many valley residents claimed to be subsistence hunters, and certainly there were people who shot only what they needed to fill their freezers, even if they neglected to get a hunting license to do so. But others killed indiscriminately. State and federal authorities thought that this faction—made up of hardcore loners and ragtag rings of friends, farmers, and businessmen—had decimated populations of deer, elk, eagles, and other animals protected by hunting seasons or outright bans on killing. Crooked cops, judges, and county employees accepted poached meat as gifts and arranged cover-ups. People in the valley who opposed poaching mostly stayed silent. Snitches found their homes shot up or set afire, their children threatened, or their cattle butchered.

As the Colorado Division of Wildlife saw it, by the mid-1980s the San Luis Valley had become a lawless backcountry where hunters traded poached wildlife for goods and services, to pay off gambling debts, or to obtain cocaine and marijuana. (The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had its sights on the valley, too.) State authorities shared information about poachers with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the agency in turn produced a list of people it believed to be the worst perpetrators—fifty-eight names in all. Grosz felt that it was up to his agency to break the valley’s poaching habit and prosecute as many people as possible. That was where Morrison came in. But it was a dangerous proposition. Some of the men on the Fish and Wildlife list carried felony convictions for arson, robbery, battery, and homicide.

Grosz warned Morrison that he couldn’t provide him with protection. Local law enforcement would remain ignorant of his purpose by design—some officers were the very poachers Morrison would be charged with investigating. “If your true identity is discovered, there’s a good chance they will take you on in numbers or from afar with a rifle in the dark of the night,” Grosz said. “You will have to survive using your own wits, common sense, and the god of your choice.”

Morrison hadn’t said much while Grosz spoke, but his enthusiasm was palpable. “You have a deal,” he replied. “This is going to be a good one.”

Operation SLV was a go. Morrison took a six-week CIA Spanish course, then called his parents. He told them they wouldn’t hear from him for a while.