Читать книгу Yellowstone Standoff - Scott Graham - Страница 7

Prologue

She saw them only as a result of happenstance and thin air. The most remote place in the lower forty-eight, the three friends had crowed to one another via email. They would ride in on horses, enter the park from the south, head up Trident Peak from there. A dude-ranch vacation with a day climb tagged on.

They’d planned the trip for July, but busy schedules pushed it back to October. They hadn’t understood that the park’s grizzlies would be in the midst of their pre-hibernation feeding frenzy by then, on the lookout for anything—or anyone—capable of adding to their monstrous caloric intake. The horse packer pointed out four of the massive creatures during the ride in from the south, all, thankfully, in the distance.

The wrangler dropped them with their gear high above tree line on the Absaroka divide, south of the peak. He departed at the head of his string of horses with the promise to return in two days, muttering to himself about the hunting parties he needed to resupply.

As with the grizzlies, they hadn’t realized how thick with elk hunters the area would be this time of year. They’d thought their camp would be in the national park, where hunting was illegal. That’s where the peak was located, after all. Actually, they admitted to each other upon consulting their map following the wrangler’s departure, the summit of the massif was located across the park boundary a mile north.

A rifle shot cracked beyond a sloping ridge. Two dozen big, blocky elk topped the ridge and galloped across the divide, a pair of antlered bulls in the lead, making for the safety of the park.

After a freeze-dried dinner, they hunkered in their tent atop the divide through the night, blasted by wind and rain and ice pellets. The morning dawned calm and clear. They packed up camp and climbed hard and fast, leaving the grizzlies and elk hunters below.

She took a break a hundred feet below the summit, preparing herself for the final push behind the others. She planted her ice axe in the snow and leaned on it, drawing deep breaths, her boots wedged in the snowfield blanketing the ridge.

Yellowstone Lake spread expansively to the north. The Absaroka Mountain Range rose from the lake’s near shore and spilled out of the park to the east, an immensity of granite and tundra skirted by conifers.

Thorofare Creek snaked across a flat, upper basin at the foot of the massif’s west face. A grizzly, little more than a brown speck, foraged in a meadow beside the creek a mile below.

A tight drainage climbed east away from the creek between two ridges to the base of the massif. At the head of the drainage, far below where she stood, something unusual caught her eye. Something extraordinary, in fact.

They—whatever they were—stood like soldiers in a straight line, dark spots against bright white, early season snow. From this distance, she could determine with her naked eye only that, based on the uniformity of the line and the consistent shape of the objects, the distant spots were not the product of natural processes.

Someone or something had placed them at the base of the peak, out here in the middle of nowhere, for a reason.