UPPER PETTY CREEK - Up here, neighbors get together to play dominoes. They exchange vegetables from their gardens, and watch each other's places when they're away.

"It's really mellow, as you can see," Melissa Wilkinson said, glancing out her back window as a couple of spike mule deer cavorted in the meadow. "We love it, and everybody else does, too.

"And then Dopey comes flying into the mix with his guns blazing and whatever the hell he's doing."

"Dopey," allegedly, is David Burgert, the ex-felon who continued Tuesday to elude authorities after a two-day manhunt in the mountains of western Montana.

Though the search was disbanded and the roadblock a mile down the road at Printer Creek removed earlier in the day, the neighborhood remains locked and loaded.

"I think all the people out here, when we go out right now, carry a weapon," said Karl Joost, on the porch of the occupied home closest to the top of Petty Creek.

Burgert is suspected of exchanging gunfire with two Missoula County sheriff's deputies Sunday on a ridge less than three miles from here.

Not 15 minutes later, the phone rang at the Wilkinson home, a quarter of a mile down the creek.