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56 Dr. William Willard Evans 9 Josh Wittmore turned his pickup onto Highway 22 and headed for Madison and the University of Wisconsin campus there. He’d made the trip many times when he attended the UW in the late 1990s, and he remembered it as a pleasant drive. It was but eighty-five miles from his home farm, and only seventy-five miles from Willow River. He was surprised how little traffic had increased since he’d left the county ten years ago— only a car now and then. As he drove south from Montello, he passed the occasional Amish buggy, with a single horse trotting alongside the road, the buggy’s occupants deep in the vehicle’s dark interior shadows. As he drove, he scarcely noticed the fall colors that were appearing everywhere. The long hills lining the big marshes between Montello and Pardeeville were especially striking, as they were studded with bright red and yellow maples. October was a beautiful time in Wisconsin, but Josh drove on, noticing not much of anything out his window. Josh planned to think through the questions he wanted to ask his former professor about these relatively new massive hog operations that had sprung up in several parts of the country. He’d done enough exploring on the Internet to learn what was going on in North Carolina, where some of the largest operators did business. He’d learned that one company alone had more than fifteen hundred operations, with seven hundred thousand sows total, in that state alone. That same company operated a slaughterhouse there that butchered thirty thousand hogs a day. All these facts and figures swirled around in his head as he drove, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept coming back to his meeting with Natalie. He was furious with this woman, conservation warden or not. Nobody 57 Dr. William Willard Evans had ever accused him of doing something dishonest, but she had. Why would she even think that he would tip off Dan Burman about a possible conservation warden visit? All he said was that he’d interviewed him and saw him slicing up some goat meat. No crime in cutting up your own goat meat. He felt sorry for the man, dirt poor with scarcely enough food to take his big family through the winter. Josh had met people like the warden before: those who jumped to conclusions before they had all the facts. When people had done this to him previously, he’d crossed them off his list of contacts and tried to avoid them. He couldn’t easily do this with Natalie. But he would try to stay out of her way. He would do his job, and she would do hers, and when they overlapped he’d be cautious, very cautious. But something else had happened at their meeting. Something about Natalie had gotten to him. True, she’d unnerved him with her accusation. She didn’t know how close she’d come to having Josh Wittmore jump up and tell her off. He had a bit of a temper, which had gotten him in trouble before. Now, he was asking himself why he hadn’t said more. Why hadn’t he confronted this badgewearing , gun-toting woman? He didn’t know why. And that’s what was troubling him as he drove on toward Pardeeville and then south to Arlington , Deforest, and on into Madison. Evans had sent Josh a permit for the university parking ramp next to Steenbock Library on the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences campus. Josh parked his pickup, walked around the library, and headed up the hill toward Agriculture Hall, to the offices of the Department of Agribusiness Studies. It had been ten years since he’d been in Agriculture Hall, and memories of his college days came flooding back. The agribusiness offices were on the third floor of the old building; the stairs creaked as they did when he had climbed them to the auditorium where several of his classes met. It was in the Agriculture Hall auditorium that he suffered through Professor Evans’s Introduction to Agricultural Economics in 1997. Thinking back to the course, in which he’d received a C, he wished he’d paid better attention. So much of what he wrote about these days required a solid grounding in the economics of agriculture. He stuck his nose through the Ag Hall auditorium doors—students [3.137.178.133] Project MUSE (2024...

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