Yellowstone Standoff (2 page)

2

M
e,” the man shouted in response to the grizzly's roar, his voice strong and forceful. “Hey, bear. It's me you want.”

Justin raised his free hand. “Wait for it,” he said, his eyes big and round and shining.

Chuck's jaw tightened.

The hiss of releasing aerosol came over the phone. From the reports he'd read, Chuck knew the two wolf researchers were spraying a protective screen of red pepper mist between themselves and the charging bear.

Chuck envisioned the team members' desperate effort at self-preservation, comparing it to the practice session he'd held with Janelle and the girls and Clarence before they'd left Durango a few days ago. Standing side by side in the front yard, bear-spray cans at arm's length, all five of them had pressed the buttons on the top of their flashlight-sized canisters at once. The pressurized cans hissed and a red fog formed in the air in front of them. They stepped forward and took a sample whiff of the spray as it dissipated. Even in its dispersed form, the aerosolized pepper burned their noses and set their eyes watering.

On Justin's phone, the video feed remained fixed on the meadow and pines while the terror-filled voice of Rebecca, the young woman, came over the speaker. “Joe!” she screamed. “Joe!”

Justin narrated. “She did what the guy wanted. She backed off. The Incident Team figured it out when they reconstructed the event.”

Two sharp pops sounded.

“That's the griz,” Justin said, “snapping at the spray.”

Chuck pictured the brown bear's powerful jaws and jagged teeth, saliva flying. The pepper mist should have turned the animal away.

“Back!” Joe yelled.

The bear snarled. The warning nature of its initial woofs was gone now, replaced by long bursts of deep, bellowing roars.

The sounds of a struggle came over the phone—exhalations, scuffling feet.

Joe screamed in agony. “It's got me,” he screeched. “Rebecca. It's eating me! It's eating me!”

“Joe,” Rebecca moaned. “Joe.”

“Run,” Joe cried. “Rebecca. Run!”

Chuck shot a sidelong glance at Justin, who gazed at the screen, the phone steady in his grip.

Growls and indistinct noises came from the speaker. Chuck's gut twisted.

“She didn't know what to do,” Justin said. “No protocol existed for her situation. The spray had always worked.”

“Oh, my God,” Rebecca cried. “Oh, dear God. Joe!”

“She wouldn't leave him,” Justin said. “Gotta give her props for that.”

“Bear!” Rebecca yelled. “Leave him. Leave him!”

“The griz went for the guy's abdominal cavity,” Justin said. “She stayed. She should've run. I bet she'd have gotten away.”

“Bear,” Rebecca said. Her voice was little more than a whimper now. “Bear.”

There came a long pause. Chuck clenched his hands at his sides, his fingernails digging into his palms.

Rebecca screamed, loud and shrill. Her cry died in her throat, followed by snarls and sounds of ripping and snapping.

“Stop,” Rebecca managed. Then, two final words, half cry, half sigh: “Please. No.”

Silence. The video feed remained steady on the field and forest.

“Keep watching,” Justin said. “This is the creepy part.”

Half the bear's body appeared on the screen. The animal stood in profile, looking across the meadow.

When the next frame appeared, the bear had turned to look straight at the camera.

Chuck stared back at the creature—its massive, furred head and short, dark snout glistening with blood; its stubby ears, the notch plainly visible in its right flap; its blond hump, lit by the midday sun, rising between its wide shoulder blades.

The hunter in Chuck focused on the precise spot between the eyes where an adult grizzly was sure to be brought down by a bullet.

But researchers weren't allowed to carry firearms in the park.

The bear continued to stare at the camera.

“It's almost as if it's posing,” Justin said. “Is that bizarre or what?”

No further sounds came from the wolf researchers. Three seconds later, the bear was gone, the camera back to recording the sun-dappled meadow, the lodgepole pines covering the distant hillside.

“That's all,” Justin said. “Those poor wolfies.” He tapped his phone with his fingertip. Its face went dark and he shoved the phone back in his pocket. “By the time the posse showed up, the grizzly had split.”

“They tried to track it, from what I read,” Chuck said.

“Yeah. But it rained later that day and they ended up losing the trail.”

“They haven't spotted it in all this time? Even with that notch in its ear?”

“They're still trying.”

“It's been two years.”

“Grizzlies cover a lot of ground—and there's lots of ground out there for them to cover. Lamar Valley alone is forty miles long, almost all of it roadless. It's not like civilization starts right up at the park boundary, either. At this point, everyone figures the griz is so deep in the Absaroka wilderness east of the park no one will ever see it again.”

“That'd be fine with me.”

Justin gave Chuck a calculating look. “I'll bet. I hear your wife and kids are coming with us tomorrow.”

“And my research assistant, my wife's brother. My contract calls for a quick recon, a few days at the site. We were planning to backpack in on our own from the south, over Two Ocean Pass. Then Hancock told me about the research teams basing out of Turret Cabin this summer, everyone together.”

“Grizzly people and the wolfies and geologists and meteorologists and the new canine-tracker guy and the Drone Team—and now you, too.” Justin's mouth twisted. “Going to be a whole herd of us out there.”

“The site I'll be working, at the foot of Trident Peak, is only five miles from the cabin. The timing turned out to be perfect. I was glad to join in, to be honest.”

“Sounds like a peachy little family vacation for you.” Justin lifted an eyebrow. “Assuming the killer griz is as long gone as everybody says it is.”

3

A
ll of you will use Turret Patrol Cabin as your base of operations for the summer,” Chief Science Ranger Lex Hancock announced to the three dozen scientists seated on folding chairs in the Canyon meeting room.

A collective groan rose from the researchers.

Chuck sat in the back row beside Clarence, who'd slipped into the room behind Lex, just after eight. Justin sat a few rows ahead and to the left, with the other Grizzly Initiative team members.

Clarence shoved a length of black hair behind his ear, revealing the thick silver stud set in his lobe. He cast a questioning glance at Chuck, who shrugged, waiting to see how the ranger would respond to his disgruntled audience.

Lex stood at a podium at the front of the room, flanked by American and Wyoming flags, his appearance as crisp as Chuck remembered from the years they'd worked together during Lex's climb up the ranger ranks at Grand Canyon National Park. Lex's gray hair was combed back from his high forehead, his mustache neatly trimmed. Despite the jowly cheeks framing the sides of his wrinkled face, he stood erect, shoulders straight, aging body fit beneath his pressed, green and gray park service uniform, brass badge shining on his chest. As chief science ranger, Lex oversaw Yellowstone's scientific research operations while his boss, Park Superintendent Cameron Samson, served as Yellowstone's public face.

Lex waved his hands for quiet. “Now, now. I know this comes as no surprise to any of you. And I don't necessarily blame you for your complaints—which I've been reading online.” He furrowed his bushy eyebrows at his audience. “Rather than
complaining, might I suggest you instead welcome the opportunity to work in the backcountry at all this summer?” The room grew still as the ranger went on. “As all of you are well aware, last year was a dark time for our research efforts here in the park. After the attack the previous fall, Superintendent Samson and I made the difficult but prudent decision to end all backcountry science operations and, instead, limit research to only roadside activities for the duration of the summer season.”

Lex pointed at a young man and woman in the front row. The two wore black fleece jackets emblazoned with logo patches of various outdoor and high-tech gear manufacturers, including the bright red logo of a company called AeroDrone. The woman, petite with long, ebony hair, straightened in her chair. Even so, her head barely reached the shoulder of the man seated beside her. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven, his head enveloped in a fluffy cloud of red curls.

“The fact of the matter is, if it weren't for the work of our Drone Team, we'd have conducted no backcountry research at all last summer.” Lex inclined his head toward the two. “Thank you, Kaifong, Randall.”

The woman looked at the floor while the puffy-haired man lifted a hand and turned to face the others with a broad smile.

Lex addressed the room: “One of several new faces with us tonight I'd like to introduce is Keith Wilhelmsen.”

A young man in jeans and a plaid shirt twisted in his second-row seat to acknowledge those around him. His thick, black beard was untrimmed, his wavy, shoulder-length hair corralled into a ponytail by a braided leather cord.

“Keith is a Ph.D. candidate out of Cornell. He constitutes the human half of the park's latest research addition, our Canine Team. He and the second member of his team—his tracking dog, Chance—will work out of Turret camp this summer. Like
all of you in your specialties, Keith is a top dog in his field—pun intended.” Lex's joke drew a handful of chuckles. “He'll be conducting leading-edge work in a new field of inquiry: the use of service canines to track other mammals. I know it's unusual to use a domesticated animal in the course of backcountry field work in the park. It's unprecedented, in fact. But the potential to expand upon our abilities to track and survey predators in the backcountry makes this new option one we have deemed worth exploring this summer. Keith and Chance will provide us with a new and, dare I say, revolutionary tool as we continue to pursue the grizzly involved in the attack on the Wolf Initiative's Territory Team.”

A number of scientists seated ahead and to the right of Chuck—clearly the wolfies—shifted in their seats.

“Please understand,” Lex said in response to the show of unease, “we have no indication the bear we've come to call Notch is anywhere in the vicinity of Turret Cabin. Keith will spend the coming weeks testing and refining Chance's ability to track other grizzlies whose territories include the Thorofare region. The goal is for Keith and Chance to be prepared to help in the pursuit of Notch when the bear is spotted—something we are convinced will eventually happen.”

A woman two rows ahead of Chuck raised her hand. Her hair was shaved close on both sides of her skull. Half a dozen hoop earrings dangled from piercings in each of her ears. A blond mohawk rose from the top of her head and swooped down the back of her neck to the collar of a vibrant pink down vest over a skin-tight top. The nylon top hugged her wide shoulders and muscled arms. She spoke before Lex acknowledged her. “All this talk about Notch, and the humiliation you put the Grizzly Initiative through last year. I, for one, am getting pretty tired of it.”

The researchers seated around the woman nodded their approval. After a second's hesitation, Justin followed suit.

Lex crossed his arms, his face immobile, giving the woman the floor.

She shifted in her seat. “I know you're trying to do what's best. But I lost an entire year on my whitebark pine nut ingestion study because of your decision to pull everyone out of the field last summer, and the twelve-month gap in my data set has forced me to recast my entire dissertation. At this point, I'm not even sure my thesis committee will accept the changes I've had to make. It's not only me, either. Everyone who was here last year, and that's just about all of us, is faced with the same kind of problems—research screwed up, theses delayed—because of what I would argue was an overreaction on your part.”

Lex grasped the sides of the podium and leaned forward. “We pulled you and everyone else out of the field last year for good reason, Sarah. We lost two of our people the previous fall. A terrible, terrible tragedy. The entire Yellowstone research community was, and remains, devastated by what happened.”

“Understood,” Sarah said. “Much as I continue to disagree with it, my point is not to rehash last year's decision. Rather, I'm speaking up now because those of us on the Grizzly Initiative—” she looked to her right and left “—believe your forcing all the park's backcountry science teams to work together out of Turret Cabin this summer will severely limit our opportunities to conduct decent research again this year, just like your roadside-only decision hurt us so much last year.”

Lex released the podium and folded his arms across his chest as Sarah continued.

“Forty people working out of the same base camp? With that kind of crowd around, all of us involved in mammalian studies will have a tough time collecting meaningful data.
The only team that's sure to get any decent work done is the Archaeological Team. It's not like anything they're here to study will be going anywhere.”

Clarence dug his elbow into Chuck's side.

“As for the Grizzly Initiative,” Sarah went on, “we're studying real, live grizzly bears. We have to go deep into the backcountry on our own in small teams to assure our presence doesn't alter the bears' behavior patterns. We're trying to study their natural movements and traits, free of human interference, not their response to the crowd you've got heading across the lake to the Thorofare region tomorrow.”

Lex's steel-gray eyes glinted behind his glasses. He touched his upper lip with the tip of his tongue before he spoke. “I've acknowledged the difficulties inherent in last year's decision, Sarah. Moreover, while your concerns are duly noted, I stand by this year's determination that all backcountry teams will do the best they can while performing their summer research out of, and spending every night at, Turret Cabin base camp—which, I might add, park staffers have spent the last two weeks working long and hard to set up on your behalf.”

“It was a grizzly bear,” Sarah said. “A grizzly bear doing what grizzly bears do.” She turned in her seat to face the Wolf Initiative team members on the opposite side of the room. “I feel for you guys. I really do. I can only imagine how hard it's been for you after what happened to your Territory Team. But you've got to understand. Our two teams are studying different creatures with different study protocols, different needs.”

“Sarah,” Lex warned.

She continued to face the wolf researchers. “I don't think you people can really comprehend the risks those of us with the Grizzly Initiative take every single day we're in the field. Remember, it was a grizzly that attacked your team, not a wolf.
Do you know the last time a wolf attacked a human? I'll tell you when: never. But grizzlies? They attack. It's what they do. They defend their young, their food, their turf. Learning what we can about their natural behavior by studying them in the backcountry is the best way we have of determining how best to keep people safe around them—and keep what happened to your team from ever happening again.” She turned to Lex. “You already cost us a year of critical research, along with the knowledge advancement that would have come with it. Now, with this group-camp requirement of yours, you're about to cost us another year of legitimate, backcountry-based research.”

“That's enough, Sarah,” a male voice said from among the wolf researchers.

Sarah spun in her seat, her mohawk swinging with her. “What was that?”

Silence.

“Too chicken to show yourself?” she challenged.

“No,” the voice came again.

A head turned, revealing the profile of a man with a long, sloping ski jump of a nose. A brown beard hid his chin, and a thick mustache, big as a cigar, ran around his face, almost connecting with his long sideburns.

“No, I'm not chicken,” the researcher said. “In case you didn't hear me, what I said was, ‘That's enough.'”

“I'll decide what's enough, Toby,” Sarah replied, climbing atop her folding chair. Before Chuck realized what was happening, Sarah launched herself at the mustachioed man with her arms outstretched, her hands aimed at his throat.