Or perhaps the wait was much longer. As the criminal complaint against him notes, he had illegally grazed his cattle on federal land for more than 20 years, and he’d been under a federal court order to remove his cattle since 1998—an order he’d brazenly flouted.

The FBI hasn’t said much about why they arrested Bundy when they did. During a press conference Thursday, Greg Bretzing, the head of the FBI’s Portland office, referred questions to the district of Nevada. A call to the U.S. Attorney’s Office was not returned. Perhaps the government felt it would be easier to arrest Bundy away from home and away from less likely to be around armed men. The complaint describes the situation for agents in the 2014 standoff—outnumbered, surrounded, outgunned, and afraid for their lives:

Cliven Bundy has been charged with a long slate of offenses, including conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States; assault on a federal law-enforcement officer; use and carry of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence; obstruction of justice; interference with commerce by extortion; and aiding and abetting. The full document is here. Those charges together bring a hefty set of penalties, and Bundy, 74, could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted of several of them.

Those charged in the Malheur standoff have all been charged with conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats. That’s a federal felony that carries as many as six years in prison. The virtue of the charge from prosecutors’ perspective is that they have recordings of the occupiers discussing their deeds, which were broadcast live. That makes it comparatively easy to prove they conspired without having to prove they actually followed through.

During a press conference Thursday, however, Bretzing suggested there would be more charges to come for some of the occupiers. Once again, patience is the watchword: He described a painstaking process to go over the refuge in the coming days and weeks, and while he said the FBI would try to turn it over to the Fish and Wildlife Service to reopen as quickly as possible, there were several steps required to get there. First, law enforcement was sweeping the entire refuge to make sure no one else was left. Then a multi-agency bomb squad will go over the property. (Asked whether that was in response to any specific threat, Bretzing said only, “Several things that have happened over the last 41 days that have led us to believe this a prudent thing to do.”) After that, an FBI evidence team will go over the center, followed by a forensic team examining computers, and finally an FBI art-crime team that will assess Paiute Indian burial sites and artifacts that may have been disturbed.