Yellowstone Standoff (6 page)

10

C
huck scrambled to his feet and charged toward the stern of the boat between the stunned, seated researchers.

“Hey!” he yelled over his shoulder to the pilot.

“Overboard!” one of the scientists yelled.

Kaifong surfaced behind the boat. The wind blew her PFD, floating atop the water, away from her. She thrashed in the water while Clarence worked frantically to buckle the straps of his PFD. Randall stared at Kaifong, shock etched on his face, his own PFD hanging unfastened over one shoulder.

The wind would propel Kaifong's PFD away from her faster than she would be able to swim after it. There was no way she'd be able to tread water in her heavy clothing long enough for the boat to circle around and return to her; she would sink into the freezing lake well before the pilot completed the turn.

Chuck did not pause. He rushed past Clarence and Randall and dove from the stern into the lake. The cold poleaxed his head and chest as he entered the water. Pain exploded in his frontal lobes. The icy water slammed his chest, forcing his lungs to contract. He closed his mouth, fighting the panicked urge to inhale and take in a lungful of liquid.

His PFD, strapped tight around his torso, propelled him to the surface. He swam hard for Kaifong, fifty feet away from him, stroking his arms and kicking his booted feet. Behind him, the sound of the boat's engine deepened as the pilot cut the vessel into its turn.

Kaifong's pale face showed above the surface of the lake. She splashed toward her PFD, but her arms, weighed down by the water-absorbing fabric of her fleece jacket, barely broke through
the waves. Meanwhile, the breeze propelled the PFD quickly away from her.

Within seconds, Kaifong's arm movements grew clumsy and robotic, and she sank in the water until only her mouth and nose showed above the surface. By the time Chuck drew within twenty feet of her, only the top of her head remained visible above the surface of the lake, her fingers floundering weakly at the waves.

The cold knotted Chuck's legs as he churned toward Kaifong. She sank from sight. He swam, his gaze fixed on the spot where she'd disappeared. A wave slapped the side of his head, filling his ear with freezing water. He drew air into his lungs, forcing them to expand.

He reached the place where he'd last seen her. She hung suspended in the clear water below him, four feet beneath the surface, her outstretched arms speckled by the sun, her black hair floating like seaweed around her head and shoulders. Even as he spotted her, she sank deeper, her body still, her fingers curled inward.

Chuck porpoised out of the water and dove. He stretched his arms down against the buoyancy of his PFD but missed Kaifong by inches before the life jacket shot him back to the surface.

He sucked a mouthful of air, the cold settling in his bones. The diesel engine roared as the boat, having completed its arc, raced back. Kaifong was deeper now, slipping away.

He cursed. The PFD trapped him at the surface. He unclipped the three buckles at the front of the life jacket, his fingers stiff and unwieldy, raised his arms, and sank out of the shoulders of the jacket and beneath the surface of the lake. Snagging one of the PFD's dangling straps with his left hand, he dove again, plunging his right hand downward, his eyes fixed on Kaifong below.

Twelve inches away. Six inches. Clinging with his other hand to the strap of his life jacket, he reached the extent of his dive when the PFD, acting as a cork atop the water, halted his descent.

Kaifong continued to sink below him.

He clawed at the water while holding his breath, his cheeks bulging. If he took the time to return to the surface for more air, he would lose Kaifong to the depths.

He stretched full out, scrabbling with his fingers, but Kaifong was too far away.

He couldn't release the PFD, lest he follow Kaifong into the depths.

One last, desperate idea occurred to him. He spun his body and shoved his feet toward the surface. Slipping one boot through the shoulder strap of his PFD and hooking the ankle of his other foot around the strap, he secured his feet in place. Battling the urge to breathe, his vision blurring, he strained toward Kaifong's suspended body with both hands.

His fingers swept past her. Missed. She was too deep.

But the motion of his hands created an underwater wave that pressed the floating tendrils of her hair against her head, then lifted them toward him in a rebound.

Chuck jabbed his hands into the depths, his feet locked to the PFD, his lungs screaming. He grasped a few strands of Kaifong's hair and tugged upward. The strands ripped free from her scalp, but not before the action lifted her body a few inches in the water.

He grabbed a handful of her hair, now within reach, and swam upward, the last of the air in his depleted lungs bubbling from his nostrils. He broke the surface of the lake and gasped, sucking oxygen into his seizing chest.

He looped his free arm through a strap of his life jacket and hoisted Kaifong to the surface beside him. Her head fell backward, her wan face to the sky, her lips blue and slack.

“Breathe,” Chuck pleaded, clutching Kaifong. “Please. Breathe.”

The whites of her eyes showed between her eyelids. Blood vessels, purple against her blanched skin, spiderwebbed her cheeks.

Chuck held her at the surface as his own strength waned. She hung limp in his arms.

11

T
he boat powered up to Chuck and Kaifong. Its engine chunked hard into reverse, then idled as the boat drifted alongside them. The pilot appeared at the gunwale, her face white. Randall and Clarence lifted Kaifong over the railing. Chuck clung to his PFD until they dragged him into the boat seconds later.

He lay on his back in the open stern of the vessel, vaguely aware of Janelle crouched over him. “I'm okay,” he told her, his teeth chattering. He aimed a shaking finger at Kaifong, on her back beside him. “Her.”

Janelle reached beneath Kaifong's neck and gently lifted, opening the airway, then locked her hands together and compressed Kaifong's chest in a steady rhythm. She counted out loud with each compression. “One, two, three...”

Randall knelt at the other side of Kaifong.

“Two breaths after every fifteen compressions,” Janelle instructed him.

He hesitated.

“Now,” she commanded. “Pinch her nose. Keep her chin lifted so her airway stays open.”

Randall bent over Kaifong. All was quiet as he and Janelle worked, Kaifong's chest rising with each pair of forced breaths.

The other scientists stripped Chuck's wet clothes and wrapped him in fleece blankets pulled from beneath the bench seats by the pilot, who slid a PFD under his head as a pillow.

Enveloped in the blankets, Chuck rocked with the boat on the swells of the lake. Carmelita and Rosie knelt beside him.

“Are you okay?” Carmelita asked, her frightened voice little more than a whisper.

Chuck reached a hand to her. “Just...cold.”

Seconds ticked by as Janelle and Randall continued their efforts. Kaifong lay still. Chuck willed her to live.

Suddenly, Kaifong's body stiffened. Her heels pounded the deck of the boat. She gagged and coughed. Her chest heaved and water streamed from the corner of her mouth and she drew an enormous lungful of air. She turned her head to the side and spat weakly, then took a second, trembling breath. Her eyes opened and she stared dully at Chuck.

She blinked once, twice, three times, more awareness returning to her walnut eyes with each blink. Her breathing grew steady.

The researchers stripped her clothes and wrapped her in blankets.

She turned her head, taking in Janelle and Randall kneeling over her, the researchers and pilot hovering above. “What happened?” she asked, her voice weak.

“I'll radio in and get us headed back,” the pilot said.

“No,” Janelle responded. “She'll freeze if we try to go all the way back across.”

“Agreed,” Chuck said, his own body shaking. “We need to get her warmed up, fast.”

“The landing's only two miles away,” the pilot said. “There's lots of driftwood.” She darted to the wheelhouse and gunned the engine, aiming the boat across the last of the open water and into the southeast arm of the lake.

Kaifong lay on the deck, her eyes open but unfocused, her chest rising and falling.

“How is she?” Chuck asked Janelle.

“She was breathing and had a pulse the whole time, but I wanted to be certain. I wasn't sure what else to do.”

The boat shot up the narrow bay. Forested ridges rose from both shorelines. The vessel slowed a few minutes later. The pilot
worked the throttle, maneuvering the boat against an aluminum dock extending from shore.

Janelle and Randall lifted Kaifong, shivering and unsteady, to her feet. Clarence clambered from the boat and hustled off the dock past the pile of gear on shore. He and the other scientists collected driftwood from the rocky beach. Janelle and Randall helped Kaifong down the pier, supporting her between them, while the pilot secured the boat. Chuck made his way to shore. He clutched the blankets around him, glad to walk on his own.

By the time Clarence and the researchers assembled the driftwood in a tall pyre, the pilot arrived with a tin of gasoline from the boat. She doused the wood and put a lighter to it. The fuel ignited with an oxygen-sucking whoomp. Flames climbed into the air while smoke from the damp wood smudged the afternoon sky.

Janelle settled Kaifong on a patch of open sand close to the flames. Chuck slumped beside her. Welcoming heat emanated from the fire, warming his face.

Thirty minutes later, Kaifong sat before the roaring fire on a log next to Chuck, her palms held out to the flames. They wore fresh clothes from their personal duffles, their hiking boots drying on rocks beside them.

Kaifong's cheeks glowed. “Well, that sucked,” she announced.

“I'm sorry, Kaifong,” Randall said from where he stood on the far side of the fire, his voice cracking. “I'm so, so sorry, chickadee.”

She waved him off. “I shouldn't have gotten so close to the back of the boat—and I should have buckled my life jacket.”

“I never should've left my seat,” Randall said, twisting his hands in front of him.

“At least it all ended okay,” Chuck said. He glanced at the boat, where the pilot returned PFDs to the compartments beneath the bench seats. “About ready to head back across?” he asked Kaifong.

“I'm not sure I want to go back out to sea so soon.” She pressed her hands between her knees and gazed at the roiling water of the open lake beyond the mouth of the arm before turning to Chuck. “What about you?”

“I'm staying. But it wasn't me who almost drowned.”

Randall said to Kaifong, “Don't you think you should have a doctor check you out?”

“We've been waiting two years to get into the backcountry,” she replied. “We're finally here.”

She shifted on the log to face the upper Yellowstone River valley rising to the south, mile after mile of pristine forest broken by grassy meadows, every bit of it devoid of human development. Groves of whitebark pines climbed the sides of the broad valley, blanketing ridges that swept upward to alpine tundra studded by snowcapped peaks.

Janelle, standing behind Chuck, said, “There's still plenty of daylight. We can call in a med-evac if you have trouble on the hike to camp—in which case, you'll be choppered out instead of having to go back out on the lake.”

“Once the boat's gone, there'll be no radio,” Chuck warned. “Someone would have to make it to the cabin to use the satellite phone before any evacuation could happen. There's no cell phone service out here.”

“Or,” Janelle said, “she could press the button on her emergency beacon.”

“True, I suppose,” Chuck said. “As a last resort.”

A horse whinnied from out of sight in the forest to the south, followed by a pair of whinnies in response.

Janelle cocked her head at the sound of the horses. “Maybe you could ride to camp,” she told Kaifong.

“Me? Ride a horse?” Kaifong shook her head. “Never. Those things terrify me.” She reached for her boots.

“It's four miles,” Chuck warned her. He pulled the map from his pack, flipped it open, and showed her the trail winding upstream east of the river. “Not steep, but uphill all the way.”

“I'll be fine. I'm sure of it.”

A string of ten pack horses, their saddles empty, emerged from the woods. A mounted wrangler led the string, reins loose in his leather-gloved hand. A second wrangler brought up the rear. The two horsemen, square-jawed and middle-aged, wore Stetsons low over their eyes, their faces shadowed in the afternoon sunlight. The horses made their way along a well-trodden path toward the pier.

“Guess I'd better get to it, then,” Randall said.

He left the fire and worked alongside the others, placing the duffles, storage kegs, and plastic cases from the gear boat in an orderly line, ready for loading on the pack animals.

Kaifong stood up after lacing her hiking boots. “Thank you,” she said to Chuck as he tied his own boots, still damp from their dunking in the lake. “You saved my life.”

He looked up at her from his seat on the log. “Glad I could be of service.”

Beyond the pier, Clarence and the girls stood at the edge of the lake. They skipped rocks toward the Molly Islands, two rounded humps of sand and stone rising out of the southeast arm. White pelicans circled the barren islands in tight formations. The big, heavy birds skimmed the surface of the water like squadrons of World War II bombers. The islands served as the endangered pelicans' rookery, separating the birds from onshore predators. The upper Yellowstone emptied into the arm of
the lake south of the islands. The river's surface was dark in the shadows of the lodgepole pines rising close on both banks.

Chuck turned to Janelle, who held her hands out to the crackling flames. “You did an amazing job out there.”

“I felt good about it,” she admitted. She tucked her hands in her jacket pockets. “Like that was what I was supposed to be doing.”

“You've found your true calling: saving lives.”

Her cheeks reddened.

“I'm not joking,” he said.

“I know. That's why I'm blushing. I feel like, finally, I'm getting to grow up. You have no idea what having two little girls can do to you, especially if you're just a girl yourself when you have them.”

He grinned. “You're right. I have no idea what it's like to be a girl, or to give birth.”

Janelle shook her head. “Diapers and baby food and kiddie TV, that's been my life for as long as I can remember. I traded away my twenties—” She stopped, the color in her cheeks deepening. “Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade Carm and Rosie for anything.”

“I know that.”

“It's just, finally, they're getting bigger. I mean, look at them over there with Clarence.” She waved at the shoreline. “They couldn't care less if I'm here, which is about the first time that's ever happened.”

“They're great kids because you devoted yourself to them,” Chuck said.

She tucked her hands in her jacket pockets. “I know what it has cost me—in a good way, that is. But now, thanks to you—thanks to us, together—there's a real future out there for the four of us, and just for me, too. And that last part feels good.”

“I'm glad.” He slipped his hand into her jacket pocket and wrapped his fingers around hers. “So tell me, are you still up for this?”

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“You've watched two people almost get killed today.”

“The thing with Kaifong was an accident, the result of carelessness. And
el stupido
with the bear got exactly what he was asking for.”

Chuck waited, wanting her to be sure.

“The girls have been looking forward to this trip as much as I have,” she said. She aimed a finger from inside her jacket pocket at Kaifong, sorting the Drone Team's plastic storage cases.

“That's who I want the girls to be when they grow up. If she's not quitting after what she just went through, then the girls and I aren't quitting, either. Got it,
muchacho
?”

“
Sí, esposa mia
,” Chuck said. He squeezed her hand. “
Claro que sí
.”

He turned away before she could see the worry in his eyes.