Pleasure of Believing

Hobbet's unsentimental, evocative portrait of contemporary Wyoming focuses on the changes that diversification and environmental concerns have brought to what was once almost exclusively the domain of ranchers. Carl Drummond and his wife, Flo (a painter who has discovered her considerable talent in old age), still run a traditional sheep ranch. Their neighbors, Glen and Roberta Shea, no longer depend on livestock for their living: he's a state senator; she's turned the barn into a hospital for injured owls, eagles and hawks. Roberta's niece, Muirie, who has left an advertising career in California to return to her family's land, helps Roberta with the birds. When some of Carl's sheep are attacked by what he supposes to be coyotes, Carl quietly resorts to an old rancher's survival tactic and baits the carcasses with a powerful poison, now banned. The poison kills wildlife, including a number of birds. Roberta knows who did it, and a silent war erupts between Roberta and Carl, who's angry that he's no longer allowed to protect his stock from the wildlife. Though the story moves slowly at first, there are rich rewards for readers: Hobbet has a keen sense of the landscape and the rhythms of life in rural Wyoming, and she expertly conveys the delicate balances of the two marriages. Descriptions of the raptors, including a symbolic blind hawk, are breathtaking, and sections on Flo's painting are compelling and unpretentious. Basing her story on a widely publicized 1971 incident that helped push the Endangered Species Act into law, Hobbet injects a rich dose of private character into an issue of abiding public concern. Author tour. (Apr.)