Mountain Rampage (35 page)

“Yep. The fall before last.”

The video had been yanked from the internet the instant it appeared.

“Can't say as I have,” Chuck said.

Justin's blue eyes glowed. “Want to?”

Chuck hesitated long enough to convince himself viewing the infamous footage qualified as worthwhile research. He nodded.

Justin cocked a finger and headed for a windowed door leading to the building's side porch.

As reflected in the door's glass panes, Chuck looked a lot like the other researchers—hiking boots, work jeans, flannel shirt—though his shirttail was tucked in and he needed no bandanna to keep his short, thinning hair in place. The door's reflection displayed his lean, weather-beaten frame, which spoke of his having survived much on the journey to his mid-forties, as did
the deep crow's feet cutting from the corners of his blue-gray eyes to his silver-tinged sideburns.

Outside, the chilly air bit through Chuck's cotton shirt. It was eight in the evening, the second week of June, the days long and lingering in the northern Rockies. The sun, a white disk behind a thin veil of clouds, still hung above the tall stand of spruce trees rising beyond the parking lot to the west. He drew in his shoulders and shivered. How could it possibly be this cold?

Back home, at the edge of the desert in the far southwest corner of Colorado, daytime highs were in the nineties by now, and the nights, while crisp, weren't anywhere near as frigid as here in Yellowstone, where the last vestiges of winter held sway even as the longest day of the year approached.

“Let's make this quick,” Chuck told Justin, rubbing his palms together. “Hancock will be here any minute.”

Justin fished his phone from his pocket. “The video-frame sequence is every three seconds, but the sound runs in real time. That's what's so brutal.”

The young researcher swiped the phone's face with his finger. “Martha forwarded this to me,” he said. Martha Augustine was the backcountry coordinator for the Grizzly Project. “She said I should see it so I could decide for sure if I was in.” He tapped at his phone as he talked. “It happened in the upper Lander Valley, at the foot of Saddle Mountain.”

“A long way from where we're headed,” Chuck said.

“Twenty miles or so,” Justin agreed. “With the lake in between.”

He held up his phone and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Chuck. A paused video feed filled the phone's tiny screen. The trunk of a tree framed one side of the shot, a few feet in front of the camera. The remainder of the frame was filled with a view of a sloping meadow, brown with autumn. Dark green fir trees blanketed a hillside on the far side of the grassy meadow.

Justin punched play. A rasping noise issued from the phone's small speaker. Chuck cocked his head.

“That's the griz,” Justin said. “Snoring.”

A low-pitched grunt of alarm came next. The bear had awakened—and something had awakened it.

“The Cluster Team showed up, just doing their job,” Justin explained. “Blacktail Pack had taken down an elk at the base of Saddle a week before; a GPS cluster of the wolves' transmitters told the wolfies as much.” Justin used the informal term for the park's Wolf Project researchers. “The two members of the Cluster Team hiked in and rigged the camera to film the pack's behavior around the carcass. They were coming back to retrieve the camera and find out what they'd managed to record. Little did they know, the griz had chased off the wolves and was sleeping right on top of the kill.”

A dark shadow covered the video feed, causing Chuck to flinch. When the video stream advanced to its next frame three seconds later, the shadow drew away to become the back of a grizzly bear's broad, brown head.

The bear remained still through the video's next three-second frame, its unmoving head captured from behind by the camera, the fur on its neck standing straight up, its stubby ears erect. A distinctive, V-shaped notch cut deep into its right earflap.

Over the sound of the bear's gravelly breaths came unintelligible human voices, those of a young man and woman. The tone of their conversation, relaxed and jovial, was that of co-workers comfortable in one another's presence.

A high-pitched peal of laughter from the young woman issued through the phone's speaker. The bear's head dropped from view when the next three-second frame clicked past. The animal growled deep in its throat, the pitch so low it rattled the phone.

The woman's laughter cut off in mid-peal. “Bear,” she cried out. “There! See it?”

The bear reappeared on the video feed. The camera captured the grizzly's entire body, stretched full out as it sprinted toward the sound of the voices.

Chuck's heart tattooed his chest as three interminable seconds passed, the sounds from the phone that of the bear's harsh breaths as it charged, and that of the young man hollering, “Whoa, bear!”

The next screen shot captured half the bear's body as it angled out of the picture, still running flat out across the meadow toward the off-screen man and woman.

The grizzly woofed, a dog-like exhalation of warning.

“Stop!” the young man cried out. “I said stop!”

Chuck gulped. The man's exclamation should have given the bear pause. Instead, the bear woofed again, the sound farther from the camera, while the video feed returned to what it had been before, a serene shot of the meadow and forested hillside beyond.

Chuck squeezed his eyes shut, dreading what he knew came next. He wanted to plug his ears as well.

He forced his eyes open, taking in the immutable grass and trees on the phone's screen as a terrified screech from the young woman came over the speaker, after which her voice and the young man's joined together in a full-throated, “No!”

“Stop!” the man yelled a millisecond later. Then, under his breath, “Get behind me, Rebecca. Back up.”

A savage roar shook the phone's speaker.