Yellowstone Standoff (4 page)

6

S
he actually attacked him?” Janelle asked Chuck.

“They had to pull her off the guy. He's the lead researcher on the Wolf Initiative's field team—Toby. Sarah's the Grizzly Initiative's backcountry team lead. She looks like she could be the lead singer in a punk rock band, though—mohawk, nose ring, the whole bit. Not exactly what I'd expect of a Yellowstone scientist, but quite a character, that much is obvious.”

“Clarence is interested in her, anyway.”

“That's Clarence. As for her and Toby, they obviously hate each other. Chairs were flying all over the place, people scrambling for cover.”

“Science nerds—who'd've ever thought?”

“Hey. Watch who you're calling nerds.”

“Not you, my science prince. Never you.” She leaned from the passenger seat of the pickup and kissed him on the cheek. A smile played at the corners of her mouth as she stroked his leg and whispered in his ear, her breath warm on the side of his face, “
Nunca, nunca, nunca
.”

Chuck grinned as he piloted the crew cab south from Canyon Village, headed for Yellowstone Lake. “That's better.”

The girls occupied the back of the six-passenger half-ton he'd purchased for family-hauling purposes after his and Janelle's quick courtship and city hall marriage two years ago. Skinny, reserved Carmelita, ten years old, sat at one end of the rear bench seat, while chunky, brash Rosie, eight, sat at the other end. They stared out their respective side windows at the passing trees, their eyes glassy and half-closed after their morning buffet in the staff cafeteria an hour after Chuck's breakfast with
Lex. The girls wore matching nylon hiking pants and bulky fleece jackets. Janelle sported a stylish, form-fitting fleece pullover and trim khaki slacks made of wind- and water-shedding nylon engineered to look like cotton. Waterproof gear duffles in a rainbow of colors filled the truck's bed. The day was sweater cool, the morning sun climbing in the pale blue sky.

“We're finally here,” Janelle said, looking out the window. “I'm
so
looking forward to this—our big summer adventure.”

Chuck took her hand. No surprise there. Janelle—just shy of thirty, thin as Carmelita, dark haired, heart faced, and olive skinned—had been rebelliously adventurous all her life. The rebellious part explained how she'd wound up a young, unwed mother of two daughters born to a drug dealer, now deceased, in Albuquerque's rough South Valley neighborhood in spite of a loving upbringing along with Clarence, three years her junior, by their Mexican immigrant parents.

“Your new life as an outdoorswoman,” Chuck said, pushing thoughts of the Territory Team video and Lex's speculation about the grizzly attack to the back of his mind.

“
Reality TV: Alone in the Wilderness
,” Janelle intoned.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but there'll be a crowd of us out there. We'll have our own tent platform, a mess tent for meals, the cabin to hang out in if we want. Best of all, we'll be a week or two ahead of mosquito season.”

“No mosquitoes? You really are a prince.”

“Timing is everything when it comes to Yellowstone. The window of opportunity is so small—six weeks of full-on summer is about it.”

“Even with global warming?”

“Even with. The last of the winter snow will just be finished melting about now.”

“Which means whatever they saw...”

“...should be in plain sight. I can't wait to see it.”

“It's really that big a deal?”

“It's pretty much the only thing the North American archaeological world has talked about all winter. We'll hike up from camp, see what's what, take some pictures, plot everything out. Should be the easiest contract I've ever worked—no excavation, hardly any cataloguing—especially with Clarence's help.”

When things had calmed after the melee last night, Lex had introduced Chuck and Clarence to the other science teams. Lex told the scientists how much he'd enjoyed working with Chuck in Arizona, where Chuck's firm, Bender Archaeological, Inc., had been awarded temporary contracts over a number of years to perform archaeological surveys and digs in advance of new construction projects in Grand Canyon National Park.

After the meeting, Clarence made his way through the chairs to Sarah's side, his compact pot belly leading the way. He struck up a conversation with her, laughing and resting his fingers on her forearm as they spoke. He flashed Chuck a devilish grin a few minutes later as he escorted Sarah across the room, his hand at the back of her hot pink vest. Sarah aimed a look of her own at Toby, her eyes narrowed. Toby turned away from her in response.

Sarah's dangling earrings twinkled in the gleam of an overhead light as she left the building with Clarence. Toby turned back after they were gone, his eyes on the door through which Sarah had exited.

Clarence didn't respond to Chuck's texts in the morning, nor did he answer Chuck's knock at his cabin door. When Chuck peered through the front window, he noted the bed inside was crisply made.

With the Grizzly Initiative team scheduled to head across the lake to Turret Cabin two hours ahead of the Archaeological Team, Chuck wasn't too worried about Clarence's arriving at
Bridge Bay in time for their scheduled mid-afternoon launch. He did wonder, though, how hungover Clarence would be when he showed up at the marina.

“The effects of global warming in the park are showing themselves more?” Janelle asked.

Chuck guided the truck along the winding road with one hand. “It's the only reason we're here.”

Janelle clicked the heater fan up a notch. “But it's so cold, even in June.”

“Not as cold as it used to be. In the last twenty years, Yellowstone's glaciers have melted away to a few lumps of remnant ice. The park's alpine regions have lost half their year-round snow coverage, and the speed of the loss is increasing. If present trends continue, year-round snow coverage will be a thing of the past in the park's high country in another few years.”

“That won't take much away from its beauty.”

She leaned forward to peer out the windshield. Pines swept past along the side of the road and sunlit meadows showed through breaks in the trees.

“You're really okay with this, aren't you?” Chuck asked.

“With what?”

He waved out the window. “All of this. I was raised with it. I never can get enough. But you're a city girl.”

“I
was
a city girl.” She glanced at Carmelita and Rosie in the rearview mirror. “
We
were. You brought us something different. Something better.” She slid her hand from his and rested it on his shoulder. “Way better. It's like I've been handed this gift—you, the mountains. It's a chance to really live, not just survive, like the girls and I were doing before you came along.”

“Survive? I guess that explains the courses you've been taking—EMT Basic, Backcountry Medicine, Wilderness First Responder.”

“The girls are growing up. I'm about to turn thirty. You've got your archaeology, your thing. It's time for me to find my thing, too.”

“And you've decided medicine is it.”

“You have to admit, it goes well with this outdoorsy life you've got us living.”

They approached a slow-moving recreational vehicle on the narrow road. The lumbering vehicle blocked the lane ahead, leaning as it negotiated the curves.

The dense forest through which they traveled was one of the three major features of the Central Yellowstone Plateau, along with Hayden Valley just ahead and Yellowstone Lake beyond. The sprawling grasslands of Hayden Valley served as home to vast herds of elk and the wolves and grizzlies that fed on them. Yellowstone Lake, the largest natural body of water above seven thousand feet in North America, occupied the plateau's southeast corner.

They'd left the canyon of the Yellowstone River and the river's famous, thundering waterfalls behind. To the east, the river meandered northward from Yellowstone Lake across the central plateau before plunging over the falls at the north edge of the plateau and on to its junction with the Missouri River outside the park.

The fifty-mile-wide Yellowstone caldera, the national park's seething heart, bounded the plateau. The first reports of European fur traders who witnessed the caldera's erupting geysers, steaming hot springs, and bubbling mud pots had been met with disbelief and derision in the East. Not until members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition explored and provided official reports on the region did Americans accept the truth about the land of fire and brimstone that had come into their possession as a result of the Louisiana Purchase.

The road broke from the forest into the open. Prairie-like Hayden Valley stretched to the south and west, its grasslands interspersed with stands of lodgepole pines. The valley's lush, early summer grasses glowed emerald green in the morning sun.

“Wow,” Janelle said.

Chuck goosed the truck, preparing to pass the camper on the open straightaway. He fell back when he spotted cars and RVs lining both sides of the road half a mile ahead, at a bridge over Elk Antler Creek, a tributary of the Hayden River.

Chuck caught the girls' eyes in the rearview mirror. “Bear jam,” he announced.

Carmelita sat up, her sleepiness disappearing. “Really?”

Rosie punched the air with her pudgy fist. “Yes!” she hollered.

Janelle studied the line of vehicles. “You really think it might be a bear this time?”

“They're parked at a stream,” Chuck said. “Maybe it's a moose.”

Janelle's mouth turned down. “Or more ducks.”

They'd come upon three so-called bear jams—lines of cars and campers halted along the park's roads—during their drive north through the park to Canyon Village the day before. Each time, they'd parked and joined the tourists thronged outside their vehicles, some peering through spotting scopes attached to tripods set up on the shoulders of the roads. The first group of tourists was fixated on a mallard duck and chicks nibbling shoreline grasses along the edge of a roadside stream. The second group ogled an osprey nest in a treetop several hundred yards from the road, with no ospreys in sight. The third admired a bison herd in a meadow nearly a mile away, the grazing bison little more than brown specks in the distance.

The recreational vehicle pulled to the side of the road behind the last of the parked vehicles, a hundred feet shy of the bridge.

Chuck parked behind the RV and turned to the girls. “Might be another mama duck and her chicks. That'd still be okay, wouldn't it?”

“Sure,” Carmelita said.

“You betcha,” Rosie agreed.

They made their way along the edge of the road past the line of cars. The vehicles' occupants, more than two dozen in all, stood together where the bridge crossed the stream. They looked northward from the road's raised shoulder. Children held the hands of their parents. Elderly couples in matching jackets stood close beside each other. A pair of heavyset, middle-aged men were positioned at the front of the group, their eyes to head-high spotting scopes.

Chuck stopped at the edge of the gathered tourists. “What have we got?” he asked a woman in loose slacks and thick-soled walking shoes, her gray hair twisted into a bun.

“I'm not sure.” She stood next to an elderly man in a navy overcoat. “We just got here.”

One of the men in front turned from his scope and addressed the group. “Bear,” he said, pointing past his tripod at a thick stand of willows sprouting at the side of the stream thirty yards from the road.

Carmelita pressed herself against Chuck's side. He put an arm around her shoulders.

“Are you sure?” the elderly man asked. He raised his hand to his brow, shielding the morning sun. “I don't see anything.”

“We were the first ones here,” the man at the spotting scope said. “It went into the willows when we pulled up.”

The tall bushes filled a stream-side depression a hundred feet long and half again as wide.

The second spotter spoke without taking his eye from his scope. “It won't come back out,” he said. “Not as long as all of us are here.”

“Black or brown?” Chuck asked.

“Brown,” the first spotter said. “We got a good look at it. It's a grizzly, all right.”

“Black bears can be pretty light colored.”

The man squinted at Chuck. “This is my nineteenth summer spotting in the park.”

“Did you hear that, Daddy?” a boy's voice asked from among the onlookers. “A grizzly! There's a grizzly bear in the bushes!”

“Yes, Henry. I heard,” replied a man in his late thirties, the nine- or ten-year-old boy jumping up and down in excitement at his side.

The man wore an urbanite's idea of a wilderness visitor's outfit: khaki slacks and an oiled-cotton jacket featuring shoulder epaulets and shiny brass snaps at the wrists. “My son wants to see the bear,” the father said to the pair of men standing behind their spotting scopes.

“Too bad,” the second spotter said, still without removing his eye from the scope.

“It's right there in the bushes?”

“It's waiting for everyone to leave.”

“Well, then,” the man declared, “I'll flush it out.”

The father nudged the boy to the side of the woman standing next to him, then strode off the shoulder of the road and along the stream bank toward the willows.

The second spotter removed his eye from the scope for the first time, watching the father's progress. “Wouldn't do that if I was you.”

7

I
promised my boy we'd see a grizzly bear,” the man called over his shoulder as he walked away from the road. “That's why we drove all this way.”

Chuck gathered Carmelita and Rosie to him, his hands on their shoulders. “Idiot,” he muttered in Janelle's ear.

“Shouldn't somebody stop him?” she asked.

The man was fifty feet from the road now, nearing the willows.

“Too late. Besides, it'll just run away, like he wants.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm pretty sure.”

Despite Justin's declaration last night that grizzlies were unpredictable creatures, Chuck knew Yellowstone's famed predators to be precisely the opposite. As Lex had noted over breakfast, when presented the opportunity to attack or flee, grizzlies almost always fled, even sows protecting their cubs. On the rare occasions they did go on the offensive, they were usually startled, and were prone to attack only those traveling alone or in pairs.

Given the absence of surprise and the two dozen onlookers at his back, the man faced virtually no risk from the hidden grizzly. Even so, Chuck held his breath as the man neared the thicket. He slowed, shortening his stride, then stopped before the wall of willows. The bushes stood fifteen feet high and grew so close together it was impossible to see more than a few feet into their depths.

“Hey!” the man hollered.

Seconds passed. Nothing.

“Hey,” he repeated with less certainty.

The woman with the boy stepped forward. “Russell,” she barked. “Get back here this instant.”

Russell responded by straightening to full height and stepping forward, parting the pliant stalks in front of him with his hands. He disappeared into the willows, the tops of the spindly shoots waving as he wormed his way deeper into them. The willows stopped moving ten feet into the dense stand of brush. “Hey,” he said again, his voice faltering.

In silent answer, a three-foot section of willows quivered with movement near the far end of the thicket.

A collective gasp rose from those gathered at the side of the road. The gray-haired woman next to Chuck stepped backward, her hand covering her mouth.

The heads of the displaced willows bent forward and returned to their upright position in a shimmering wave that advanced through the center of the willow patch, headed straight for the place where the man had come to a stop.

A snarl broke from the thicket, identical to the recorded growls of the grizzly that had come from Justin's phone the night before. Chuck tightened his grip on the girls' shoulders, his fingers digging into their fleece jackets.

“Aaahhh!” the man cried, his voice squeaky with terror.

Chuck clamped his lips together. Carmelita and Rosie slipped behind him, their heads poking around his sides. The tourists drew back as one.

The tops of the willows twitched as the father thrashed his way back the way he'd come, racing toward the front of the thicket. The wave from the rear of the patch rolled toward the man, marking the bear's continued advance. The bear surged through the willows, moving twice as fast as the man. The wave almost reached him before he stumbled into the open and sprinted for the roadside.

The wave came to a stop just shy of the front of the thicket. The bear, unseen, snarled once more, low and threatening. Then the motion of the willows reversed as the bear changed course, its movement back through the willow patch slow and leisurely.

The bear emerged from the far end of the patch and strode westward, away from the road, across the open ground beside the stream. It was a grizzly all right, medium-sized at about three hundred pounds, its broad shoulders tapering only slightly to its haunches, its fur the light brown color of coarse sand, the distinctive hump between its shoulders blond in the mid-morning sun.

Fifty feet from the thicket, the grizzly turned and rose on its hind legs, forelegs dangling in front of its chest. Standing taller than a human, it looked over the top of the willow patch at the tourists.

As cameras clicked around him, Chuck shivered at the memory of the grizzly staring at the Territory Team's remote camera after its attack. He leaned forward, squinting at the bear. Its ears swiveled one way, then the other, its right earflap smooth and undamaged.

The bear dropped to all fours and padded away through the knee-high grass until it disappeared into a stand of pines a quarter-mile downstream.

The man stood, quaking, at the side of the road, his hand on his son's shoulder as if for support, gawking at the place where the grizzly had vanished in the trees. The two spotters remained at their scopes. Tourists headed for their cars, chattering excitedly with one another about what they'd just seen. Chuck took the girls' hands and led them back along the roadside with Janelle.

“That was scary,” Rosie announced.

“Will there be bears like that where we're going?” Carmelita asked, her eyes wide.

Chuck drew a quick breath. Last night, the video of the Territory Team attack. Earlier this morning, Lex's wild suppositions about the killer grizzly. And now, the idiot father.

In three hours, Janelle and the girls were scheduled to board a boat with him that would take them across Yellowstone Lake to the Thorofare region in Yellowstone National Park's isolated southeast corner, by many accounts the single most remote region in the lower forty-eight states, an area as populated with grizzlies as anyplace in North America, and where help was a long way off.

He pressed his hands to his stomach, containing a full-body shudder. No one had told him about the fears for Carmelita and Rosie he'd be subject to the instant he became a stepfather—worries of their being bullied at school, irrational concerns for their health, anxiety about the hits their self-esteem might take when they reached middle school.

What had possessed him to bring the girls here?

He lowered his hands, flexing his fingers. “Bears live everywhere in the park,” he said, offering reassurance to himself as much as to the girls and Janelle. “This is their home. We're headed higher in the mountains on the south side of the central plateau where there'll be less for them to eat until later on in the summer and fall. They'll still be passing through, though, mostly going over the Absarokas from one side of the mountains to the other.”

“Like on a road?” Rosie asked.

“Yep. Except there aren't any roads where we're going. Just trails up and over passes to the headwaters of the Snake River and on south to the Tetons.”

They reached the truck. He took a map from the front seat, unfolded it, and pressed it against the side of the pickup with one hand.

“See?” he said to the girls, pointing at the small, green square with a peaked roof that marked the location of Turret Cabin at the foot of Turret Peak. “Here's where we'll be camped.”

He slid his finger south, where two trails Y'ed, heading up matching, broad valleys above the junction of Thorofare Creek and the upper Yellowstone River. He tracked the Thorofare Creek drainage with his finger to where 10,971-foot Trident Peak climbed high above tree line near the head of the valley, the map thick with topo lines rising to the mountain's summit just inside the park's southern boundary. He tapped the map at the base of the peak, where three ridges fell away to the west in parallel lines. “This is where the mystery is.”

“Oooo,” Rosie murmured.

“You and Uncle Clarence are going to figure it out, aren't you?” Carmelita asked Chuck.

“That's what we've been hired to do.”

He drew a circle with his finger around the area between the peak and cabin, taking in the Thorofare Creek and upper Yellowstone River drainages. “These are big valleys with lots of forests and meadows that climb all the way to high passes over the Absaroka Mountains. When the summer grasses get tall and thick there later on, big herds of elk will come to graze on them, and the bears will follow. Things won't really get crowded with bears until the end of the summer, though, when the whitebark pine nuts drop from the trees.”

“I thought grizzly bears ate meat,” Carmelita said.

“They like meat and plants both. They're omnivorous, the same as us. They eat almost anything.”

“Including people?” Rosie asked, her eyes wide.

“Mostly they avoid people, like what happened back there. They just want to be left alone.”

“They'll leave us alone where we're going?”

“Yes.”

Rosie nodded. “If they don't, we'll spray them with our cans, won't we?”

“That's why we practiced. But we'll always be in a group, so they'll stay away from us.”

Carmelita and Rosie climbed into the rear seat of the truck. Chuck closed the door and turned to Janelle. “I'm having second thoughts,” he admitted.

Janelle looked at him, giving him time.

He cleared his throat. “You could drop me off at the dock and go back to Canyon Village with the girls. It's only five nights. Clarence and I can go on in and do the survey on our own. We might even be able to finish up and come out early. We'd be back in no time.”

“You've been building up this discovery to the girls for the last six months.”

“It
is
a big discovery.”

“Which is what you've been telling them, over and over—that it's such a cool mystery, that they'll get to help solve it. You know how disappointed they'll be if you take that away from them.”

“It's a site survey, Janelle. That's all the contract calls for. A simple, straightforward site survey. Stake it out, do the measurements, report back.”

“Try telling the girls that, after what you've led them to believe. To them, it's the biggest thing ever.”

Chuck's face flushed. “Yes, it's a site survey. But it's a survey of what might prove to be a truly significant discovery.”

“Then stick to your guns. You just told Carm and Rosie we'll be fine out there as long as we stay in a group. That's exactly what we've planned to do all along.”

“Yes, but...” Chuck looked at the patch of willows.

Janelle waited until he turned back to her before she spoke. “Were you telling them the truth?”

“Yes, I was.” He took a deep breath. “But I have to tell you about something else, something I saw last night.”

He described the video of the Territory Team attack, leaving nothing out. “Lex thinks the grizzly might actually have been hunting the team,” he concluded.

“There were two team members?” Janelle asked.

“Yes.”

“Grizzlies don't attack large groups, right? Just ones or twos. And we're going out there with forty or so people,
verdad
?”

“
Sí
.”

Janelle looked Chuck in the eye. “All of this might give me second thoughts if we were going camping on our own. But we're heading out there with an army.” She stuck out her chin. “The girls and I are going with you. I want them to experience the world, your world, and I want to experience it, too.”

Chuck hid the start of a smile. “Did I know you were this stubborn when I married you?”

“You didn't know the first thing about me when we got married.”

“I thought the learning curve would be over by now.”

“You thought wrong.” She hesitated, searching his face. “We will be safe out there, won't we?”

He looked at the ground. The cold ache of responsibility gripped him with icy fingers. He'd promised his family the adventure of a lifetime. All this was his doing.

He'd been ecstatic two years ago when Janelle had agreed to marry him. Like Lex, he'd never been happier than the last twenty-four months, as a family man.

He settled himself on the soles of his feet. He was in Yellowstone with his family by choice, and he was heading into
the backcountry with them today by the same choice. No need for mental histrionics.

He raised his eyes to Janelle. “Any bears in the vicinity of Turret Cabin will want nothing to do with our busy camp. That's why Lex is requiring everyone to base out of the same place this summer. As long as we're in camp or in a group, we'll have nothing to worry about.”

“You're sure about that?”

He took her in his arms. “Absolutely.”

His eyes strayed to the place where the grizzly had risen on its hind legs to observe the tourists gathered at the side of the road. Though only medium-sized, the grizzly had been tall and striking, and it had shown no hint of fear.