60 pages • 2-hour read
Open Season
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Parts 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6, Chapter 34 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and death, bullying, graphic violence, illness, and death.
After the woodpile fire dies down, the night’s darkness envelops Sheridan. She is cold, hungry, and scared. She hears animals moving in the foothills and mistakes them for Wacey, which frightens her more. Sheridan falls asleep, but a single gunshot wakes her. She can’t see Wacey and wishes she had a weapon to defend herself. She sees headlights pull into the driveway, and soon after, Wacey exits the house with a rifle. He calls out to her and tries to entice her home with hot chocolate. Sheridan cries uncontrollably, and Wacey hears her, but he looks through his scope in the wrong direction. Sheridan wonders how long she can hide before daylight reveals her.
Part 6, Chapter 35 Summary
Joe returns to Saddlestring at 3:00 the next morning and stops at Barret’s Pharmacy. He tries to calm himself, but he is exhausted and angry. Joe knocks on the pharmacy window, but Hans—working as a part-time janitor—doesn’t hear him. Joe finally gets Hans’s attention, and the man lets Joe in through the back. Joe asks what Hans knows about the endangered animal he mentioned before, and Hans explains he heard a rumor that Clyde Lidgard saw the weasels. Joe looks through the photo counter and finds Clyde’s pictures in the “Unclaimed” file.
Joe then drives to the Holiday Inn where Vern is staying. He lies to the night clerk about waiting for a package for Vern, and when the night clerk leaves to check, Joe jumps behind the counter and takes the extra key to Vern’s room. He drives around the motel and enters through the back. He makes his way to Vern’s room and surveys the suite in the dark. Joe finds the bedroom and turns the light on, pointing his gun at the startled Vern. A woman, Evelyn Wolters, lies next to him.
Joe instructs Evelyn to get dressed, drive to Sheriff Barnum’s, and bring as many officers as possible to the game warden's house. Evelyn fearfully agrees and runs out of the room. Vern tries to calm Joe down and explains that he has been with Evelyn all night. Joe doesn’t believe Vern and throws Clyde’s photos at him. The pictures show not only the Miller’s weasels but Vern and Wacey near the burrows with the illegal M-44 cartridges. Joe orders Vern to get dressed so they can go look for Sheridan.
Part 6, Chapter 36 Summary
Joe drives toward his house with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand holding his gun against Vern. Vern tries to convince Joe that he can get him a job at InterWest or could call in favors to get Joe reinstated as a game warden—just like how he got Joe suspended. Vern says Joe owes him for getting him the game warden position in the first place, and Joe angrily shoots the truck door. Vern wets himself and goes quiet.
Joe asks how the conspiracy with the weasels started, and Vern reveals everything. Clyde Lidgard told Wacey about the weasels, and since Wacey knew about the pipeline, he told Vern. The three men killed the colony, but Ote and the outfitters found a few living weasels. Ote wanted to use the weasels to get his license back from Joe, so Wacey shot the three men to keep them quiet. He instructed Clyde to stay at the camp, where he killed him the next day. Wacey wanted to be sheriff, so Vern extorted Barnum with information about his illegitimate children to make him drop out of the race. Vern only wanted to get rich off the pipeline, and he is annoyed at what Wacey has done to complicate things.
Wacey is now going after Sheridan because she kept some of the weasels as pets, which shocks Joe. He pushes his gun into Vern’s face and makes him elaborate. Wacey got Joe’s family to stay at Eagle Mountain so he could look for the weasels at Joe’s house. Joe connects the dots and realizes it was Wacey who shot Marybeth and then tried to cover it up to Joe’s face.
Part 6, Chapter 37 Summary
Joe parks down the road so Wacey won’t hear the vehicle approach. He grabs his shotgun and forces Vern to walk in front of him toward the house. Meanwhile, Sheridan wakes up in the foothills. From the side of the boulder, she can’t see Wacey, but she sees Joe and Vern creeping toward the house. She runs down the mountain, and Wacey stops her in the yard.
Wacey sees Vern approach and asks what he’s doing. Vern reveals that Barnum knows everything and is on his way. He conceals Joe, who hides around the corner. Wacey wants to “finish up” at the house first, and he raises his gun toward Sheridan. Joe can’t believe what he’s seeing, and he shoots Wacey’s arm off. He then shoots both of Wacey’s knees so he can’t get away. Sheridan runs to Joe and hugs him, and he apologizes for what she just saw.
Vern grabs Wacey’s keys and starts to walk away, but Joe tells him to wait for Sheriff Barnum. Vern continues to walk, so Joe shoots him in the hip. Joe tells Wacey he wants him to think about what he did to Joe’s family, and he refuses to call an ambulance. Joe and Sheridan walk out to the road, where Sheriff Barnum’s vehicle speeds toward the house.
Part 7, Epilogue Summary
Joe drives home on a spring Sunday after investigating a report at Crazy Woman Campground. Out-of-town environmentalists reported a bear circling their tent, which turned out to be a curious moose. As Vern predicted, the Miller’s weasels garnered national attention and brought all sorts of environmental groups to Saddlestring, while hundreds of locals lost their jobs in logging, agriculture, and hunting. The media shares videos of the weasels nationwide, but stories of the murders are kept quiet. One of the two discovered colonies died out from a viral infection contracted through a researcher’s dog, and the other colony’s numbers also dwindled. Debates ensued about whether to place the weasels in a facility or leave them in the wild.
While the frenzy about the weasels continues, Vern and Wacey turn on each other as their trials approach. Les Etbauer resigns and transfers to another federal department, and Joe is reinstated as game warden. Sheriff Barnum wins re-election, and the InterWest pipeline is abandoned. Jeannie Keeley has her baby and flees the country, leaving her two children behind. The young boy dies from pneumonia, but Marybeth and Joe bring April into their family as a foster child. Joe tries to comfort both Sheridan and Marybeth through their separate but connected traumas, and despite their pain, the family grows closer.
When Joe comes home, he makes pancakes for his family. Marybeth returns from a walk, having progressed from a wheelchair to a cane. After breakfast, Joe and Sheridan bring leftovers out to the weasels still living in their garage. One of the weasels had babies, and Sheridan likes to watch them imitate the adults. She sees her own family in the weasels. Joe knows he is breaking regulations by keeping the weasels, but he wants to make his daughter happy. Joe plans to release the weasels when they’re grown enough, into a safe space near the protected zone. He promises to secretly bring Sheridan to visit the weasels in the summer.
Parts 6-7 Analysis
Vern finally confesses to the full extent of the conspiracy in Part 6, which expands the theme of The Corrupting Influence of Power and Money. Vern admits that the whole conspiracy began from his attempts to keep the pipeline project alive since he had a stake in it. He didn’t want to jeopardize the vast amounts of money he was going to make for the sake of a colony of weasels. Vern tells Joe, “The clearances were issued and that pipeline was just humming toward Saddlestring. But things got out of hand because of Wacey. All I ever wanted was a ton of money” (256). While Vern never intended to commit violence, his willingness to prioritize profit over ethics leads not only to the deaths of many weasels but also to the murders of Ote and his companions. In turn, Wacey’s ambition of becoming sheriff and his desire “to be the one in control” leads him from killing the weasels to killing anyone who knew anything about it (255), culminating in his shooting of Marybeth and his attempted murder of Sheridan. Ultimately, Joe brings these corrupt men to justice while also taking his revenge. Joe shoots both men in non-fatal areas so they feel the pain they inflicted on his family while also staying alive to be prosecuted.
The Part 7 Epilogue illustrates the impacts on Saddlestring after Joe officially reports the existence of Miller’s weasels, highlighting the theme of Conflicts Between Economic Interests and Environmental Protection. As Joe and Vern predicted, a large area of the Twelve Sleep Valley is designated as a Miller’s weasel protected zone, and several hundred people in agricultural and hunting-related jobs lose work: “Every day there were stories of families who were simply dropping off their house keys at the bank as they left town” (272). The novel highlights that while conservation efforts are necessary, they often have harsh consequences on communities. Although Joe knows he made the morally correct choice, he is critical of environmentalists who travel to rural conservation areas and have a sense of superiority, thinking they understand the land better than the “backward […] miners, loggers, ranchers, developers, and hunters” who have lived there for generations (270). The presence of these outsiders in the novel is not just disruptive but actively harmful—one whole colony of the Miller’s weasels dies because of an infection brought by a researcher’s dog. Meanwhile, Joe and Sheridan’s family of weasels survive and thrive, and the two laugh at the comparative success of their secret preservation efforts. This demonstrates the novel’s belief that true conservation succeeds because of those who understand and respect the land on a personal level, rather than bureaucratizing the process.
The Epilogue also depicts the emotional aftermath of the text’s events for the Pickett family. Sheridan and Marybeth are both traumatized by what they went through, and Joe must act as an emotional support for both of them. To make Sheridan feel better, Joe lets her secretly keep the weasel family until the babies are strong enough to be released in the wild. He knows he’s breaking regulations, but at this moment, he chooses his love for his family over his love for his job: “He was making a judgement simply because he thought it was the right one, and one that might somehow benefit his daughter” (278). This marks his character development, since Joe previously strictly adhered to rules and regulations. However, the novel’s events have made him prioritize what he believes to be right rather than focusing solely on the rules.
Marybeth and Joe also decide to become foster parents to April Keeley to help the girl who was left behind by her mother—and help themselves grieve for their lost child. Marybeth hopes April will be “the focus of all of the love and mothering that had been stored in her for the new baby” (274), and she and the Pickett girls work hard to integrate April into their family. Joe is glad that the events haven’t made his family bitter, and despite their grief and trauma, the family’s love for one another helps them overcome their hardships.
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