It was just past midnight when I noticed the five magazines of ammunition. Near a window, there was a rifle and a scope. Beside me were two members of Ammon Bundy’s armed militia—the one that had recently made national news for taking over a federal wildlife sanctuary and a smattering of buildings contained therein. All around us was complete and utter blackness. We were standing atop a watchtower, in 18-degree weather, eight rickety stories above the snow, in the middle of a remote bird sanctuary in Eastern Oregon, 30 miles from the nearest town, which was 130 miles from the next nearest town.

Thus far, it had been a pretty strange night. After dusk, I had arrived at the front gate of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, outside Burns, Oregon. I am admittedly new to militia life, but I was surprised by what I encountered. A number of men were huddled around a campfire, gossiping and passing the time. Two hailed from Idaho and a third, an old-timer in a cowboy hat roughly the width of my shoulders, had driven in from Hermiston, Oregon, with his second-favorite horse trailer. (“Only take shit we can lose,” his wife insisted.) They were talking about the Three Percenters, a rival militia in Idaho. (“They never returned my phone calls,” said one man. “Sounds like my wife,” responded the other.) I stood by Ryan Payne, 32, the “response coordinator” of the militia.

The militia, which had adopted the moniker Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had taken over the park four days earlier and declared that they hoped to return the land to its homesteading roots. They were at the fore of a larger movement, they claimed, aimed at forcing the U.S. government to relinquish control of large swaths of western territory—a John Wayne fever dream of sorts intended to re-create a modern Wild West idyll.

The Citizens had come poised, they told reporters, for a fight with law enforcement. Instead, somewhat to their surprise, law enforcement had decided to wait it out. What ensued was something of a compromise: a slow-bleeding media circus. Under Bundy’s stewardship, amid the news-free days of early January, the Citizens had successfully captured the imagination of content-deprived editors and producers the nation over. The Pine Room, in downtown Burns, was filled with journalists, laptops open, drinking pints of beer, many of them complaining that USA Today scooped their shot. The highway was littered with satellite trucks.

Meanwhile, the militia members weren’t going anywhere. They were known to shuttle in envoys for food and supplies. They had sent out entreaties for provisions via Facebook. By the time I arrived, the militia and the media had already established their own dynamic, with one side offering daily press conferences and a sprinkle of scoops, and the other side returning the favor with plentiful coverage. The militia even had their own media-relations person, an online conservative radio host named Pete Santilli, who wore a flak jacket with the word “press” emblazoned on the back. He was the guy who could get me to Ammon Bundy. “What interests you most about the story?” he asked me, a bit too wide-eyed, when I approached him.

Soon enough I was in a car and headed to the main compound with Payne, who, with his trim beard, black Mountain Hardwear jacket, and single earpiece, looked like your average Portland cyclist. Payne worried aloud about the F.B.I. and what it might do next. Law enforcements’ inactivity, he suggested, was something of an insidious maneuver. According to Payne, the F.B.I. had already planted a crazy man to camp out at the front gate and get on-camera and make the militia look bad. What’s more, he said, they had set up high-pressure sodium lights and begun clearing rooftops in preparation for battle, and, worst of all, they even started disseminating misinformation. The night before, word arrived “through five different channels” that the F.B.I. was preparing to raid the compound with warrants out for five militiamen’s arrest. It made for a restless, fearful night. No one slept, Payne told me. Several people left, including a preacher and two women. But in the end, nothing happened.