Death Canyon (6 page)

Finally, Gosling Lake came into view. “This is it. Right below where the snow starts, above the overlook.”

A day later, the scene was incredibly peaceful and benign. Nature had already forgotten about the horrific occurrence.

Nat caught his breath and looked toward her. “Noelle, we appreciate your help. We're gonna spend a few minutes here looking for tracks or any other indication of where the bear might be. Then, unless we have clear tracks to follow, we'll simply walk the area in a predetermined pattern and hope to intercept the animal.”

“You're of course welcome to come along. With their firepower”—Nat motioned toward his team, taking a deep breath—“and my experience”—he winked—“capturing this bear shouldn't be an exceedingly dangerous task.”

“Thanks, but I'd better get back to work.”

“Okay,” Nat said. “Then farewell. Don't stay in the area. We don't want to flush an irritated bear out toward you, or tranquilize you accidentally.” Nat smiled at her one last time.

“No problem,” she lied. She did plan to stay in the area.

The team soon headed into the woods. Noelle lingered, walking a zigzag route through the area where the hikers had shown her the victims. She looked closely at the ground, hoping to find fur or some other evidence.

It didn't take long.

Noelle found something that would answer her doubts about the attack. Glinting in the sun, there was a clean ivory object. She almost yelled out. Almost alerted the bear team as to what she'd found. Instead, she put the inch-long bear tooth in the cargo pocket of her park-issued pants and started back down the trail and away from the scene. After all, there was a killer bear in the area.

Jake awoke, dressed in a high-loft fleece and an old pair of insulated jeans, and then took some water from a nearby creek. He put the water on a small camp stove and boiled it for coffee. His breath formed dense, nearly opaque clouds in the cold morning air.

While he waited for the water, he walked the perimeter of his camp looking for the tracks of the moose that visited him the night before and found them easily. They were six inches long and four inches wide. In the damp sand on the river's edge, the animal's tracks were deep and well defined.

Back in camp, Jake spooned four tablespoons of powdered coffee mix into his blue camp mug and, using two thick willow branches to lift the coffeepot from the burner, carefully poured water over the powder. The coffee was too hot to gulp, so Jake sipped what he could tolerate, and it warmed him up. The taste
of the coffee reminded him of past camping trips with his father. In all of Jake's years in the wilderness with his dad, the man had always used the same Maxwell House French Vanilla Café instant coffee. It came in a red-and-white rectangular tin with a plastic top. Jake smiled. Sometimes the simplest things brought comfort.

The water level in the Snake River had dropped considerably overnight. Rocks in the riverbed that were submerged when Jake went to sleep were now dry. Since the flow was controlled by a hydroelectric dam many miles upriver, this wasn't unusual. Most western rivers were dammed.

Any sudden change in the water level usually put the fish down. Off the bite. Fishing the Snake shortly after a change in water volume rarely proved to be a worthy endeavor, if the angler was of the type that allowed his catch rate to determine his success.

The idea behind water management was to prevent the reservoirs from totally overflowing during spring runoff while stockpiling the maximum amount of water to be used for irrigation and energy later in the summer. Little consideration was given to how these decisions affected trout or trout fishermen.

Jake had planned on fishing for an hour before continuing downriver, but he changed his plans when he saw that the water level had dropped so much. The fishing wouldn't be any good now.

Instead, he tied on a large rubber-legged nymph that was intended to imitate the large salmonflies that thrived in this section of the river. He fished the first two pools of the small tributary where he had taken the water for his morning coffee. Here, the water volume was unaffected by the dam's release—this stream ran unimpeded from the mountaintops until it reached the Snake.

He landed one cutthroat in each of the pools. Both fish violently
attacked the fly. Jake always loved the eagerness with which trout ate these larger fly patterns. Again, he knew that their ferocity resulted from that cardinal equation of trout fishing—that a trout will expend calories only if the expected return is sensible. In this case, the fish had determined that the caloric value of a meaty stone fly nymph warranted an aggressive effort to ensure that the morsel wasn't consumed by a competing trout or left to drift downriver, untouched. The fish shot from their resting positions like cannonballs.

Back East, trout fishing was a far more refined affair. The trout there were consistently difficult—they saw many times more imitations in their lives because of the higher ratio of angler per fish. In order to survive, these trout became very adept at distinguishing artificial flies from their natural counterparts.

On top of that, pollution and low water quality meant that eastern insects were less healthy and thus grew on average to a much smaller size. The fish in turn reacted less enthusiastically to their presence and were less healthy themselves.

Another good reason to be in Wyoming.

After he was through fishing, Jake packed up his camp and freed the boat from its moorings. Before he could get into the boat, he pushed it farther into the water. The receding water level had left the skiff partially beached in the sand.

Jake sat down at the rowing station and pulled the oars hard to get to the main channel. The sun was warm on his face. Downstream, the broken water sparkled brightly. Summer was coming. He pushed the boat forward.

In most cases, guides back rowed with the bow facing downstream so they could provide their anglers with the opportunity to cover the water thoroughly. By slowing the boat down with backstrokes,
the guide gave the fishermen the most possible time to cast to the places where trout lived.

If the guide didn't slow the boat, the current would push the boat too quickly and the fishermen wouldn't cover the water well. Still, most anglers simply picked what they thought would have been a likely spot “back home” and beat that spot to a froth with repeated casts rather than covering the water as the guide suggested. The worst clients never hit
any
likely spots. They seemed capable of casting toward only two locations: about ten feet out from the bank, where the current was too strong to hold fish, or straight into the bank side bushes. These anglers never placed a fly in that magic two-foot corridor just off the bank that held 90 percent of the river's feeding fish.

The occasional pleasure of fishing with a good fisherman is what kept the full-time guide sane. Competent casters would toss the fly in the gentle water adjacent to the bank, allow the fly to act naturally and look appetizing, and if there was no result, cast again, slightly downstream, as the boat moved in that direction. They always anticipated the fish-holding lies as the boat approached them and they were never caught flinging the fly desperately back upstream to hit a spot that held a fish as the boat moved inevitably farther away. Jake enjoyed rowing for such fishermen more than he did fishing himself.

An old fly-fishing adage applied to Jake nicely: When a person first starts casting flies he wants to catch a lot of fish. Then, when he has proven to himself that he can catch lots of fish, the man desires trophy fish. After he has caught enough large fish to satisfy himself, he decides to pursue fish under certain difficult conditions. The fourth phase begins when the man wants to go fishing because he truly and thoroughly enjoys the experience. At
this point, fly-fishing ceases to be an addiction and becomes a part of the man's life.

Jake had reached this point sometime shortly after his move to Wyoming. He still dabbled in the earlier stages of the sport from time to time, but he was just as likely to be found watching fish rise to consume natural insects as actively pursuing a fish. It was no longer the take, the surging and acrobatic fight, or the pictures of trophy fish that enthralled him.

Jake still believed it was a noble and spiritual pursuit. Fishing rewarded the most humble, observant, and dedicated participants, and for this reason it was inherently fair. There were no rewards in the sport of fly-fishing for those with flashy egos or aggressive personalities. If a man rushed into a stream ignorantly and cast his fly at a feeding fish while prematurely feeling sure of his success, he was certain to fail. In fly-fishing, the patient and quietly confident man always won. Those who did the work, remained humble to nature's complexities, and observed their surroundings caught plenty of fish.

This theory for success, however, was not applicable to life in general. Lawyering, for example, often rewarded the aggressive and the pushy. Business, too. An inflated sense of self could fool others into believing you were the best around. Politics. It was all the same.

It was ironic to Jake that while it was possible to convince other humans using puffery and haughtiness, you could not convince a simpleminded fish this way. There was no bullshitting a trout.

Too many people worked and lived in worlds where they never moved beyond the first or second phase of the hierarchy. That is to say, they wanted only lots of things or big things. They never got to the point where they enjoyed their life's work as an experience,
because to them the experience itself was only a means to an end—a way to get many, big things.

As he approached a tricky section of river, Jake broke from this train of thought. He shielded his eyes with his right hand and looked for the safest route through the small rapids. On river left, there was a tree matted with debris jutting into the current. Water siphoned through its branches at a furious pace.

When the Snake's currents were high with runoff, they deposited debris—logs, branches, occasional litter—that was exposed only when the water dropped. The river changed constantly.

Jake slid the skiff past the deadfall just a few yards from the debris. The sun's glare subsided as the boat came parallel with the debris, and he finally got a good view of the tree.

For a split second, Jake thought it was just a tangle of colorful fabric washed downstream from a flooded neighborhood or blown off a clothesline. Then it became disturbingly clear; there was a form filling the clothes. A man's body was stuck in the deadfall, half-submerged and bouncing about in the undulating current.

Shit!
River rocks scratched against the hull as Jake pulled the boat against the near bank below the deadfall. He dropped anchor and splashed into the water, hurrying upstream. There was really no chance the man could be alive. He had probably been there for hours, or even days. It would be a miracle to survive a swim in the cold, turbulent water.

Jake fought the current until he got to the tree and the man suspended in its snare. The large, thick trunk spanned the thirty or forty feet between the bank where Jake stood and the man's body. The victim's head was underwater. He was dead.

Jake stood and caught his breath, thinking. Rather than leaving the body, he decided to retrieve it himself. This kind of thing
wasn't totally foreign to him. He had seen worse as an investigator.

The log was wide and flat on top, but Jake knew it would be slick. If he slipped off, the cold, churning water would cause hypothermia. In this isolated setting, hypothermia meant death. Jake waded back to his boat to see what he might be able to use to his advantage. He opened the compartment under the front seat and found his bowline. He looped it over his shoulder, then grabbed a life jacket.

His plan was to make his way to the body inch by inch, straddling the log. Then he would attach the rope to the body and return to the riverbank, where he would try to pull the body from the tangle. This way he could avoid struggling with the body on the slick log, where the consequences of a mistake were graver.

Jake reached the body with relative ease, despite the frigid water splashing over him. He regretted not packing additional clothes for the trip. It was going to be a cold couple of hours to the takeout.

He tied the rope around the man and headed toward shore, but he didn't have enough slack to make it back. He would have to pull the body out while sitting on top of the log. He looked at the cold, deep water below him.

Not good.

Jake intertwined his feet in the water underneath the dead tree on which he sat, securing himself. He tugged on the rope. No luck. The heavy current had pinned the body with incredible force. It wouldn't budge. Finally, after a herculean pull, the body came free.

In a split second, the rope was tearing away from Jake with tremendous power. It was swept underneath the log, and the man's body acted like an underwater sail—its crescent-bent broadside harnessing the full force of the river's current.

Jake groaned.

The force was going to pull him in unless he let go, so he risked the loss of the body and dropped the rope underwater and below the tree. A second later the rope resurfaced downstream. Jake lunged for it. The weight of the body was still there.

As the rope became taut, Jake understood his new quandary. The force of the river's current was pushing against the dead man's chest. His body was facing Jake and bent into an unnatural U shape, like in an exorcism movie. It nearly tore Jake from his perch above the water. The direct connection—now unimpeded by the log—was more powerful than ever. The strength of the river threatened to pluck his arms from their sockets.

Then he had an idea. The tree had no bark. Indeed, it was glass smooth. With all his remaining strength, Jake pulled the rope to gain enough slack to plunge it back underwater and around the tree. It took three attempts, but he succeeded in replacing the rope back into its original position. He sat on the rope and rested. His arms had gone numb.