Читать книгу Yellowstone Standoff - Scott Graham - Страница 14

6

She 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.”