When the chief lobbyist for the Magog Lumber Company dropped dead at the annual shareholders’ dinner, everyone chalked it up to a long year spent aggressively attempting to dismantle anti-clear-cutting legislation.  It took two days for the medical examiner to find the tiny dart lodged at the base of his hairline, its pin-tip dark with dried blood and curare. 

By then, Luna Sea was already underground; or, rather, above-ground, safely lodged in her lair high in the canopy of the Madagascar rainforest.  This hideout, the fifth in as many years, had yet to be discovered--A few more successful curare campaigns, thought the Western Hemisphere’s most notorious environmental vigilante, and I may never need to move again.

Languidly stroking her pet lemur, Luna nursed the memory of her first and most famous treetop home, Manitou: how she had loved that stately redwood, living in its branches for one beautiful year, protecting it from the paper company’s cruel chainsaws while preaching the hippie gospel of nonviolence to any sympathetic tape recorder; how the roar of the dreaded machines had torn her from her perch and toppled the mighty Manitou, leaving it in a disgraced heap on the cliffside; and how surprised the foreman had looked when she’d seized his still-humming saw and pulled its ripcord, abruptly bisecting him before running into the black cover of her beloved forest.

The chainsaw made a succinct point and certainly got her noticed; but in her campaign to liberate Mother Earth from the tyranny of corporate grab-hands, stealth was the order of the day,  After two years in residence with a family of Brazilian Nukaks, her arsenal was smaller but more effective:  Her curare darts, her natural beauty, and her speedy getaway skates moved her in and out of any high-ticket Capitol Hill event, leaving the bulging-pocketed bodies of CEOs and politicians alike in her wake.

Now as she dipped darts in a pot of bubbling liquid and adjusted the dial on her shortwave, she hummed an old Donovan tune and smiled.  It was almost time for the legislative report…