I’m driving through Fort Hunter Liggett in a blue pick-up with Regina Quiñones, her partner Somar (who declines to give his last name) and their 7-year-old son Okhuse. We are hunting for a herd of nine bison rumored to be in “the Jackhammer Dropzone,” a training area the military uses to practice dropping big things out of the sky.

Ever since Maiwo Agdeppa washed his hands of the situation, and David Saunders signed ownership of the bison to Quiñones, her tight-knit and decidedly odd little family has made most of the efforts to round up 74 stray bison in South Monterey County. For more than two months now they have devoted their lives to the bison—living in their car on the side of the road, responding to calls from locals and the authorities, printing fliers, tracking the animals by foot through the thick foliage on brutal day and night maneuvers, acquiring aerial shots of the landscape, mollifying angry locals and, above all, remaining “lawful”—a term Quiñones uses to mean remaining on the moral high ground.

“We have stayed lawful through it all,” Quiñones tells me. “These animals are great medicine. It has been a miracle, there have been many miracles, that we’ve recovered so many. There are many things looking out.”

Somar nods sagely from the passenger seat.

“These bison have changed many lives, the medicine of these animals. We’ve seen people cry, break up, wake up in their presence,” he says with his strained New Jersey accent. “And they can be invisible.”

Okhuse, their elfin son, looks up at me from the backseat and smiles. He’s home-schooled, Quiñones tells me. For the last two months school has been very weird indeed.