Off the Grid (6 page)

Other findings were even more ominous, she said, and they involved hunters. The research teams asked men to volunteer in the study by carrying GPS devices of their own. That way, the biologists could track both grizzlies and humans at the same time and chart their movements. What they found in some instances was that grizzlies stalked hunters without ever being seen as the men moved through the trees. In some cases, the bears got within fifty yards of unsuspecting hunters. In other cases, it appeared the bears were scouting the humans the way they’d stalk other prey.

The new findings created a good deal of debate and the controversy was getting bigger. Factions were lining up on different sides: animal rights advocates, outdoor groups, biologists, environmentalists, anti- and pro-hunting groups, guides and outfitters, sportsmen’s clubs. A recent article about the findings in the
New York Times
had stirred nationwide media interest and questions Joe couldn’t begin to answer:

Had grizzly bears always behaved this way or was it something new?

If the behavior was new, what had triggered it?

Had something evolved in the genetics of bears that caused them to think of humans as a food source?

Had studying the bears itself led to breaking down the natural wall between humans and the large carnivores?

Should people just stay out of the forests altogether to lessen the chances of bear-human encounters?

•   •   •

J
E
SSICA
N
ICOL
W
HITE
and Marcia Mead were obviously distraught when Joe arrived at their camp in the meadow. Both worked for the department out of the Jackson Hole office, and they looked it, Joe thought. There was a veneer of resort town chic in their dress and manner.

White was in her late twenties and wore a fleece vest, heavy jeans, and glasses designed to make her look smart. She had her brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Mead was a cowgirl in boots, an untucked shirt with snap buttons, and a King Ropes cap that held her hair out of her eyes. Both women were smart, schooled, and professional. They were also a little naive, Joe thought. He’d strongly suggested that, in addition to the bear spray they both had within easy reach, they should have a large-caliber gun in their camp in case one of their study subjects got too close. They didn’t like that idea.

Although it had warmed to the low fifties during the day, it was cooling fast as the sun chinned the western peaks. The aroma of pine and sage hung in the air. It was not yet deep enough into the fall that the grass crunched under his boot soles.

White motioned to him from the open van door as Joe pulled up and parked between the tree line and the meadow.

“You have to come look at this,” she said.

Mead stood off to the side of the van, her face blank. She looked to be in shock.

As Joe approached and clamped on his hat, he saw Tyler Frink,
the tech guy, roll back in his chair inside the van so that Joe could get his shoulders in.

“Did you call Sheriff Reed?” Joe asked.

“Yes. He says he can’t get up here for at least an
hour
.” White sounded annoyed.

“It’s thirty-five miles. It takes an hour to get here from town,” Joe said. “That’s actually pretty quick.”

“It’ll be almost dark by then,” she said, her voice rising in pitch.

“Yup,” Joe said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

He leaned inside and Frink pointed at a computer monitor on a small inset desk. Tyler Frink had mussed hair, an oversized flannel shirt, and hipster glasses that looked as out of place in the Bighorns as the panel van itself. When Joe had first met him, Frink had said he liked to be called “T-Frink.” Joe said, “Okay, Tyler.”

On the background of the screen was a high-altitude satellite view of the Crazy Woman Creek drainage with two lines going through it.

“The red line is GB-53,” Frink said, pressing his fingertip against the screen. “You can see him moving through the heavy timber from west to east.”

“How often does the collar transmit?” Joe asked.

“We’ve got it set to transmit every twenty minutes.”

“Isn’t that a lot?” Joe asked skeptically. He knew that one of the big issues with the new GPS tracking collars was battery power. The more the collar transmitted, the faster the charge was depleted. Joe knew it because he’d heard researchers over the radio complaining about “lost” bears.

“It is a lot,” White said defensively over Joe’s shoulder. “But we
increase the transmissions if we think there’s a greater likelihood of a human encounter.”

“Got it,” Joe said.

“The blue line is our hunter,” Frink said, clicking to another screen and moving his finger.

“Does he have a name?” Joe asked.

“Bub-something,” Frink said. “Really:
Bub
.” He had a slight smirk.

“Bub Beeman,” Joe said. “I know him. Good guy.”

Bub Beeman was actually a no-account roofer from Winchester who was in and out of the county jail on possession charges. On September 1, Joe had cited him for killing too many mourning doves. He really wasn’t known around the county as a model citizen, but Joe wanted to impress upon the researchers that Bub wasn’t just a test subject—he was an actual human being. Joe’s experience with biologists was that they sometimes saw the world through the point of view of the creatures they were studying and they discounted the citizens who paid their salaries.

Frink exchanged looks with Jessica White. They were thinking that over.

“Go on,” Joe prompted.

“So Bub is moving from west to east as well, kind of following this drainage as it curves around. What we’re looking at here is about ten this morning.”

“Where’s your bear?” Joe asked.

“Way up here,” he said, widening the scope.

“How far apart are they at this point?”

“A mile and a half, I think. There’s a high ridge and lots of trees
between them. Now watch this,” Frink said, and clicked to the next image. “This is about ten-forty.”

Joe narrowed his eyes. The red line had turned sharply toward the blue line.

“Now the bear is about a quarter of a mile away from Bub.”

“Could a grizzly smell a man from a mile and a half away?” Joe asked.

“It’s unlikely but possible,” White said from behind Joe. “Their sense of smell is amazing. We’ve watched a grizzly make a beeline toward a dying moose from three miles away and all we can guess is that he was using his olfactory assets.”

“His nose,” Joe said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me,” Joe said, “did you hear any shots around then?”

White turned to Marcia Mead. “Remember when you said you heard a couple of gunshots? When was that?”

“Around ten-thirty,” Mead said. “I didn’t look at my watch.”

Joe said, “Don’t these grizzlies like to feed on gut piles?”

A gut pile was made up of organs and viscera after a big-game animal was dressed in the field. Birds circling around gut piles was the way he found where most hunters had made their kills.

“They do,” White said.

“So a couple of shots might be just like a dinner bell to your grizzly.”

“It’s possible,” White said. “I hope that’s not the case.”

“Anyway,” Joe said, turning back to Frink, “if it was Bub who took a couple of shots, he must have missed. He wouldn’t leave a dead animal, and it doesn’t look like he’s tracking one he hit. It looks like he just moved on after he shot.”

“That works,” Frink said. “I’ll advance the screenshots hour by hour.”

Joe felt his stomach clench as he watched. At eleven, the bear was less than a hundred yards from Bub. Bub apparently couldn’t see it, though, because he stopped at a single location from noon to two. Joe guessed Bub stopped at a vantage point where he could see out into the creek drainage below him. Bub probably looked for elk and ate some lunch. Maybe he even took a nap. The whole time Bub was there, GB-53 had stopped as well. Keeping close to Bub.

At three, Bub moved again. The grizzly tracked him, and on the screen the lines were a quarter inch apart. On the ground, Frink said, it was probably seventy to eighty yards. Joe knew the timber was thick where Bub hunted, and he probably couldn’t have seen the bear even if he’d known it was there and was looking for it.

“Is this when you tried to call him?” Joe asked.

“Yes,” White said. “We couldn’t get any response.”

“And what happened to the handheld you forgot to give him?” Joe asked.

“We didn’t forget,” White said. “But somebody forgot to put it on the charger overnight.” She looked accusingly at Frink.

“Dude, since when is that my job?” he asked back heatedly. “I man the tracking equipment and download the data. Where in my job description does it say I have to keep your radios charged up at all times, too? Are you going to pay me overtime for that when I’m off the clock?”

“It’s implied,” White said.

“Implied,”
Frink repeated under his breath, as if it were the most outlandish thing he had ever heard. “Look, we didn’t cause this to
happen. We’re not liable for any of this. We didn’t know GB-53 would go after Bub. How could we?”

Joe wanted to smack him.

“We can talk about this later, T-Frink,” White said.

“Okay,” Frink said after a deep sigh. He looked over at Joe and gestured to the monitor. “Here’s where things went bad.”

The lines merged sometime between three-ten and three-thirty. The tracking devices continued to send out signals every twenty minutes, but they didn’t move.

“How far is that from here?” Joe asked.

“Three miles,” White said.

Joe leaned out of the van and scanned the terrain to the west where Bub had stopped moving. Across the open meadow was a wall of trees that continued as far as he could see.

“There’s no way to drive there,” Joe said. “But if we take my horse, we can get there in less than an hour, if we go now.”

Frink quickly sat back in his chair with his hands up in a
Not me
gesture.

“I don’t want you along anyway,” Joe said. To Jessica White and Marcia Mead, he said, “One of you should stay here to direct the sheriff. The other one can come with Rojo and me.”

“I’ll go,” White said, instinctively reaching back for the can of bear spray on her belt to make sure it was there.

“Bet you wish you had that gun now,” Joe said, grim.

“We’re here to save bears, not to kill them,” White said.

“Best not let Bub’s family hear you say that.”

“GB-53 is on the move,” Jessica White reported to Joe, even though he’d just clearly heard Marcia Mead say exactly that on the handheld radio White had looped around her neck.

“Which way?” Joe asked, which White repeated.

“South,” Mead said.

“South,” White said, looking up.

“Away from us,” Joe said. “That makes me feel a little more secure.”

“Me too,” White said.

They were on foot in the black timber. Joe was leading Rojo with a loose rope as they shinnied through closely spaced trees and stepped over downed logs. He’d thought about trying to ride double with Jessica White, but because Rojo was worn out from the day and the close timber was all around them, he’d decided against it. Too many low-hanging branches to navigate with two riders. The reason for walking Rojo in was in case Joe had to transport a body out.

Much to Daisy’s dismay, Joe had closed her in the cab of his truck with the windows cracked. He didn’t want to risk losing his Labrador.

•   •   •

I
T WAS NOT YET
DUSK
above the crown of the trees, but inside the forest it was already twilight and muted. The only sounds were from unseen squirrels, announcing their encroachment up the line to other squirrels, and the heavy footfalls of Rojo in the pine needle mulch.

Jessica White had a battery-powered GPS tracking device hanging from around her neck, as well as the radio. She’d said she preferred to be in contact with Marcia Mead and Tyler Frink back in the van rather than use the unit. Their electronics had better capability than the portable unit, she’d told Joe.

He thought it an odd decision at first until he realized that she was scared and she needed to maintain constant contact with her colleagues. She was used to doing research by staring at computer monitors and analyzing what she saw, not taking off across mountains as the sun slipped behind the western peaks. Otherwise, he thought, what they were doing and what they might encounter would seem too
real
.

•   •   •

B
EFORE THEY
’
D LE
FT
, she’d asked T-Frink to increase the rapidity of the transmission rate on GB-53’s collar to fifteen-second pulses. She’d said, “Too much can happen if we can only track him in twenty-minute increments.” At the time, Joe saw the sense in that,
even though he knew it meant it would draw down further on the battery capability of the collar.

In addition to his .40 Glock semiauto, Joe carried his Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge shotgun. He’d replaced the buckshot shells with slugs for close-in lethality. An M14 carbine chambered in .308 Winchester was in the saddle scabbard on Rojo. A fresh canister of bear spray was clipped to his belt.

“I’ve done this before, you know,” he said to White. “We had a rogue grizzly bear about ten years ago in the Bighorns. I saw him attack a man from behind. I still can’t get that image out of my mind—how fast and how powerful that bear was.”

“Did you kill it?” she asked, sure of his answer.

“I was too slow,” he said, surprising her. “It ran off.”

“Did you ever see it again?”

“Nope.”

“Good for both of you, I guess,” she said. “What are you going to do if we walk into GB-53?”

Joe hesitated a moment and said, “Whatever I have to.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said.

•   •   •

GB-
53 WAS YOUNGER
and bigger than the grizzly Joe had encountered ten years before. At that time, a terrific drought had caused some bears in Yellowstone to wander out of the park in search of food. The reintroduction of gray wolves into the park by the federal government had skewed the balance, and there was terrific competition for carrion and other staples. The rogue bear was four hundred pounds of desperation.

This five-year-old, 550-pound male grizzly was another matter. Some males, known as silvertips because their heavy coats eventually looked frosted, reached eight hundred to a thousand pounds and could be eight to nine feet tall when standing up. A single swipe from their three-inch razor-sharp claws could disembowel a horse. They had no natural predators. Jessica White or Marcia Mead couldn’t provide a good reason why it had left Grand Teton Park on its own and had subsequently covered so much ground. That it had apparently stalked and attacked Bub Beeman would make it—and them—infamous.
A fed bear is a dead bear,
Joe thought again.

“Ursus horribilis,”
Joe said, citing the scientific name for the grizzly.

“We don’t use that name,” White said.

“Of course you don’t,” Joe said. “If you don’t say it out loud, it can’t mean ‘horrible bear.’ Right?”

•   •   •

“I
HEARD A THEORY
about why the grizzly bears are acting the way they are,” Joe said as they probed deeper into the forest. “I heard it from an old hunting guide. He wasn’t a biologist and I don’t think he even finished high school, but he’d spent his life hunting elk and bighorn sheep in the most rugged country in Wyoming. Want to hear it?”

White sighed and said, “Sure. I love these old unscientific mountain-man theories.”

Joe smiled and said, “His theory was that by overstudying grizzly bears we’re creating a whole new and more dangerous strain of them.”

She rolled her eyes. “That makes absolutely no sense.”

Joe continued anyway. “His theory was that the bears are constantly being tranquilized, transported, measured, weighed, and tracked. From when they’re cubs there are people knocking them out and checking their teeth, then buckling tracking collars on them. These bears, which maybe a hundred years ago stayed as far away from humans as they could get because they might get shot on sight, now grow up with people sticking their hands in their mouths and crowding everything they do. They no longer have a built-in fear of humans, and why should they? Besides, maybe we taste good and we’re easy to kill because we no longer think of them as ‘horrible bears.’”

“That’s ridiculous,” White said with heat. “Are you saying people should go back to killing them on sight? That’s probably what your old mountain man would want to do.”

“I’m not sure what his solution was,” Joe said. “I just thought it was an interesting theory.”

“He never told you his solution?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.

“He died before he could,” Joe said. “A grizzly bear killed him in his hunting camp last fall.”

“Oh, very funny,” she said. Then she thought about it and her tone changed. “Last fall? Was it up near Dubois?”

“Yup.”

“GB-38. I wasn’t tracking him, but the other research team said that the old man hadn’t hung his camp meat in the trees far enough away from his tent. They said GB-38 must have been drawn to that elk camp because of that man’s bad practices.”

“That must have been it, all right,” Joe said.

“If you’re being sarcastic . . .” she began, but stopped speaking in
midsentence because she noticed Joe had dropped the subject and was pointing off to the side of the skinny game trail they were on.

•   •   •

T
HE GROUND WAS CHURNED UP
between the bases of a half-dozen pine trees as if someone had brought in a piece of heavy machinery. At the edge of the disturbance was a large mound of fresh dirt, dry branches, and turned-up mulch.

Twenty feet from the mound, a scoped hunting rifle was leaned carefully against a tree trunk, as if someone had taken the rifle from his shoulder, propped it against the tree, and started to relieve himself or light a cigarette.

Joe whispered, “You know that sometimes they bury their meat in a cache for later.”

White nodded, her eyes wide. “Do you think he’s in there?” she asked, gesturing to the mound.

“Yup,” Joe said. He could see glimpses of bloody flesh and clothing through the crosshatched branches.

To confirm that they were where they should be, she asked Mead, back at the van, to read the coordinates.

“Yes,” Mead said. “You’re right on top of the volunteer location.”

Joe bent over and dug a GPS tracking unit from the upturned soil.

“Is this the one you gave to Bub?” he asked quietly.

She nodded that it was.

Her radio crackled alive. “Jess, GB-53 is coming back. Can you hear me?”

She raised the radio. “Yes, I can hear you. Are you sure about GB-53?”

“I’m sure. He’s coming fast.”

Joe said, “He knows we found his cache . . .”

•   •   •

R
OJO TUGGED BA
CK
on the lead rope in Joe’s hand and snorted through his nostrils. The gelding could either hear the grizzly coming or smell its scent. Rojo’s eyes showed white as they rolled back in his head.

“Whoa, whoa,” Joe said, trying to calm his horse.

“What do we do?” White asked with pleading eyes.

“Get ready,” Joe said. He managed to coax Rojo to the side of the trail and he quickly tied him off around the trunk of a spruce.

“I can hear him coming,” White said, fumbling for the bear spray she had clipped to her belt. She mishandled the canister and it fell to the ground. “Oh my God . . .”

Joe could hear him, too. GB-53 was coming up the trail like a freight train, snapping branches and shouldering through dense brush. There was a guttural
woof-woof-woof
that sent Rojo into a kicking fit. Joe wasn’t sure his horse wouldn’t break the lead rope or pull the tree down on top of them all. Needles in the pine tree rained down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw White scramble for the canister and inadvertently kick it farther away from herself.

Joe had his bear spray canister in his right hand and his shotgun in his left. The bear was coming so fast he didn’t know which one to toss aside. He could feel the ground vibrate through the soles of his boots.

Glimpses of a heavy, low-to-the-ground dark brown form strobed through the trees to the south. The speed of the bear was incredible,
and Joe recalled that a grizzly at full speed could run down and catch a quarter horse in full gallop.

There was no way they could get away before the bear was on them.

What happened next took place in seconds.

The grizzly crashed through the brush less than fifteen yards away and stopped. Joe could see the bear’s tiny eyes set in its hubcap face and the nascent hump on its back. The short fur around its mouth was tinged pink with dried blood—Bub Beeman’s blood. The plastic GPS collar was partially visible on the bear’s thick neck. The grizzly rocked back and looked like a five-hundred-pound fist ready to strike a fatal blow.

Joe sensed confusion from the bear. The grizzly had three targets in front of it—Jessica White, Rojo, and Joe—and it wasn’t sure which one to attack. Jessica White screamed and flailed her arms in the air, one of two methods that supposedly worked to spook a bear. The other was playing dead. No one seemed certain of the correct method. Joe glanced over to see the dropped can of bear spray was still beyond White’s reach.

GB-53 hunched its front shoulders and leaned its head back and roared, a sound Joe knew would haunt him in his dreams, if he ever dreamed again. His heart raced and he could barely get a breath.

Without thinking, Joe raised his own canister of bear spray, thumbed off the safety catch, and pulled the red trigger. It hissed and blew out a cone-shaped fountain of red mist toward the grizzly. He knew that the canister supposedly worked at thirty feet for nine seconds and that the spray itself was packed with capsaicinoids—superconcentrated red pepper.

The cloud of red spray enveloped the bear and it roared again, then yelped like a kicked dog while it spun a hundred and eighty degrees and rocketed back down the trail to the south.

It was gone.

•   •   •

P
INE NEEDLES STILL RAINE
D
around Joe as Rojo flung himself back and the rope snapped with a crack like a pistol shot. Joe realized, when the sound jarred him, that he was still pressing the trigger of the bear spray even though it was empty. The spray can continued to hiss.

Branches snapped in the forest as Rojo ran north and the grizzly stormed south.

Joe took a deep breath now and closed his eyes for a moment. His heart pounded and his limbs burned with adrenaline. He lowered the canister and let it drop to the ground.

“I thought we were going to die,” White said.

“So did I,” Joe said. His voice was thin and reedy.

“I dropped my bear spray and I think I need a change of pants.”

Joe grunted.

“I also thought you were going to use your shotgun.”

“Spray seemed like it would work better,” Joe said. “What if I missed or wounded him? He might have kept coming.”

“You made the right call,” she said, hunkering down until she was in a squatting position. She was feeling the aftereffects of pure terror as well. He could tell by the way her hands shook as she tried to clip her bear spray canister back on her belt.

“Maybe,” Joe replied, turning and squinting to the north. “I wonder where my horse went.”

•   •   •

B
UB
B
EEMAN
’
S MUTIL
ATED BODY
was under the mulch and branches. Joe could smell blood and viscera as he got close to the mound, and he photographed the crime scene with his phone before he disturbed it. To be sure that Beeman wasn’t still somehow alive, Joe leaned down and reached into a gap in the cover to see if he could find the hunter’s throat to check for a pulse. Jessica White stayed on the trail as if it somehow provided a safe haven. She obviously had no desire to see up close what a grizzly bear could do to a man.

“Can you track it?” she asked Mead over her radio with a panic-tight voice.
“Is it coming back?”

“No, it’s still going south. What happened?”

“GB-53 was right in front of us . . . I could literally look into his eyes . . .”

Joe overheard from her radio conversation with Mead that Sheriff Reed and his search-and-rescue team had arrived. So had Rojo, who had come running from the forest with empty stirrups flapping against his sides. One of Reed’s deputies who had horses of his own caught Rojo and led the sweat-soaked gelding into Joe’s horse trailer.