Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (19 page)

“He’s fine.
Prob’ly
plottin
another breakout as we speak.”

“Each of the collars broadcasts on a slightly different frequency, so we know which elk each signal is
comin
from. The University uses
somethin
similar on bears. Last winter one of the graduate students was sent to the park to check on a bear that was in hibernation.

“The kid hiked in to where the bear’s territory was historically known to be. Then he turned on the
trackin
device that monitors the bears’ collars and tuned it to the frequency of the bear he was
lookin
for.

“He got a
real
strong
signal. When that happens, it’s a big relief because it means you’re close to the place you’re
lookin
for. He walked around,
tryin
to spot a den, but he couldn’t see it. He thrashed around in the woods for hours,
gettin
more and more frustrated and worn out, basically
goin
round and round in circles, but he never could find the bear.

“Finally he gave up and drove back to
Knoxville
. He called his professor and told him what’d happened. The professor asked the kid to take a look in his backpack at the extra collar he’d been
carryin
in case he’d needed to change out the one on the bear. He told him to see if the backup collar had somehow gotten switched
on
.

“It had. The student checked the central log book and discovered that the spare collar he’d been
carryin
broadcasted on a frequency close to that of the collar he’d been
tryin
to locate.

“So, he’d spent the better part of a day of
crashin
around in the wilderness,
followin
his own backpack.”

Phoebe burst out laughing and Henry joined in.

“Taking care of critters is harder than people think,” he said.

Taking care of people is even harder
, he thought, but didn’t say. He was thinking about the temperature at high altitudes of the park, the wind and the damp, and worrying that if the girl was out there somewhere she might die from exposure.
Especially if she was hurt.
But he didn’t say anything because Phoebe had enough sadness in her life.

It was twilight by the time Henry finally spotted the rascally elk No. 32. He needed to be able to catch the animal, so he loaded up a special cocktail of drugs into a dart. He was quick, cool, and efficient. Thank goodness there was no crowd to worry about this time.

“What’re you
usin
?” Phoebe asked.

“
Carfentanil
, it’s something like 10,000 times more potent than morphine.” Henry carefully inserted the sharp end of a long needle into in the
hole
in the sharp end of the needle on the dart. It looked like the two needles were trying to stab each other to death.
Phoebe’d
never seen anyone do that before. It made refueling a jet in mid-air look crude by comparison. 

“Why are you
doin
that?” she asked.

“This drug can be lethal to humans if it’s not used properly,” Henry said. “I don’t want any of it
splashin
onto a mucous membrane.”

Phoebe took a step back.

The next few minutes
was
so similar to countless scenes in documentary films it didn’t seem real until Henry asked her to hold the elk’s head up while he worked on it. As she stood holding the big fellow, Phoebe touched his antlers and was surprised at how warm they were, and velvety. “His antlers are hot!” she said.

“Yeah, when they’re
growin
out they’re like that they have a good blood supply. Their rate of growth is a real biological phenomenon, one of the fastest
growin
things on earth. Later they harden and the velvet gets scraped off. They’re cold then, and then finally, they shed them. Phoebe had a belated thought and quickly checked her hands in the dwindling light to make sure she’d wiped them clean before handling the elk. Thank goodness she had. She thought, embarrassed,
you might be a redneck if you petted a wild elk and left
Cheeto
stripes on its fur
.

Henry examined the elk, gave it an injection of antibiotics, and took some measurements. Then he changed out its collar. By then it was full dark. Really dark, like only a wilderness on a cloudy night can be. Phoebe hadn’t moved, so she knew she had to be standing within a few feet of where Henry and the elk were, but she couldn’t see either of them. She had no idea what was going on. Then she heard a strange grunt in the gloom.

Phoebe had grown up on a farm and knew better than to talk when a person was working closely with a skittish animal, but she couldn’t help herself. “Henry, is that you
makin
that noise?” she whispered.

“No!” he sputtered, sounding exasperated.

A few minutes later he said in a warning tone, “I’m
injectin
the reversal drug now.” 

Phoebe barely understood what he’d said, but at his tone of voice she bolted, stumbling clumsily across the murky field, a flurry of guttural noises and harsh breathing exploding out of the darkness at her back.

When she was safely behind the hood of the Explorer, Phoebe turned toward the meadow and waited, virtually blind. It was several minutes filled with more grunting before a human-sized shadow stepped calmly up onto the road beside her. 

“You okay?” Phoebe asked the indistinct shape. “Uh huh,” Henry said, out of breath.

“What was all that
scufflin
and racket?” she asked.

“Can’t let go of
em
too quick,” he said. “You
wanna
make sure they’re good and awake before you let
em
loose. I wouldn’t want him be
walkin
around groggy this close to a river. He might fall in and drown.”

Ah, like the angel who’d wrestled with Jacob at the
Jabbok
ford.
But mercifully, in this battle neither participant had been lamed. The worst that happened was the elk got a brand new funny-looking necklace.

Phoebe began to realize that as a routine part of his job Henry had to wrestle bears, elk, and pretty much anything with fangs, tusks, claws, or horns. She mentally compared fighting large wild animals with fighting Wanda over a box of doughnuts.

Henry had a huge advantage though, Phoebe wasn’t allowed to use a dart gun on her patients no matter how hard they were to handle. She made a mental note to mention this to
Waneeta
. A dart gun would be perfect for dealing with Wanda.

Henry was a professional critter wrangler, and had been one for thirty years. That was how he’d earned his living. She wasn’t sure why, but somehow, his having physical courage at night, in total darkness, seemed even more impressive than being brave during the day. Phoebe often felt brave first thing in the morning, but in the dark she was a big chicken.

“How many wildlife rangers are there?” Phoebe asked.

“Five,” said Henry, “but two are part-time.”

“
Five
?”

Phoebe marveled that a handful of people were responsible for the wildlife in the
Smokies
,
all
the animals in the 800 square mile, 520,000 acre park. Five guys, two of them part-time, were supposed to oversee
all
the animals in the park.

“When do you sleep?”

“In the winter when the bears do,” Henry said. “In the last four months I’ve put in five weeks worth of overtime.”

It had never occurred to Phoebe that rangers would have to work day and night. This night shift work out in the sticks, handling wild animals, was something she’d never thought about before. She wondered if it was any less scary for Henry to do his job if he couldn’t see what he was
doing?

***

Later, in the wee hours of the morning, they sat together in the Explorer atop a ridge astride the North Carolina-Tennessee state line. Henry said, “Here, try this on,” and offered her a confusing web of black elastic straps laced through the fingers of both hands.

“What is it?” Phoebe asked. “Some sort of thong thing? You can forget about it, mister.” She was really disappointed in Henry. She’d thought he was different.

“It’s not a thong! It goes on your head for goodness sake,” he explained as he reached out to roughly position the straps. “You’ll like it, Phoebe, I promise.”

“I’ve heard that before,” she mumbled, but allowed him to place the mysterious snarl of fabric over her hair and adjust it. It was part hairnet and part helmet. It seemed designed not to protect your head from injury, but only to hold the major bits of it in place in the event of a serious accident.

Then something like a jeweler’s loupe dropped down to cover her right eye. “Oh my Lord!” she said. “It’s night vision!”

She swiveled her head to scan the woods around where they were sitting. “This is amazing! I can see
better
than in daylight! How’s that possible?”

Phoebe expected the Americans to have something better than the only other night vision optics she’d ever used – the Russian military surplus gear her father had borrowed years ago from a friend. All she and her father had ever used it for was to watch possums amble through the yard in the dark. The
old
Russian technology was built like a heavy oversized pair of binoculars. And the image it produced had been disappointingly green and fuzzy.

This was something else all together. It was wonderful.

“It’s third
generation optics,” Henry said. “For only six thousand dollars, you can have one just like it.”

“Six thousand dollars?” she repeated, fiddling with the monocle and the headbands to get the eyepiece just right. “Well, if you’ve got the money, this wouldn’t be a bad way to spend it. I can distinguish every leaf and twig out there. My poor human eyeballs can’t manage that under any light conditions.”

She swiveled on the seat to face him and lifted the monocle up, “This is some pretty
pervy
stuff. Tell me, what’s the freakiest thing you’ve ever done with it? And don’t lie.”

He laughed, then held up his right hand like he was swearing and said, “Aside from strictly regulation activities, I’ve only ever used it to hide from people who were
comin
toward me on a trail when I wasn’t in a
talkin
mood.”

“By
not in a talking mood
, you mean not
wantin
to be discovered
hikin
in the park at night in full
camo
with a silenced sniper rifle and night vision?”

He smiled and nodded, “Exactly. When I’m hog
huntin
, if anybody got a load of me all decked out like that, it’d give
em
the scare of their lives. They’d never believe I was a ranger and
doin
it for their own protection. It’s better if people don’t know we hunt hogs on the AT
at
night.”

“If they knew you were out there terminating dangerous animals with a high-powered rifle, right outside their tents while they snored, with only a thin layer of mosquito netting or rip-stop polyester between them and … you.”

“Yeah,” he smiled.

“You’re
The Night Stalker
.”

“I am not!” he said. “When I was young I used to love to hunt. And straight out of college I was lucky enough to get a job right here in the park as a full time hunter. But, I’ve had to kill so many wild hogs, now it’s just work. There’s not much sport in it. “

He sighed. “Somebody’s
gotta
do it, though, they’re
ruinin
the ecology of the park, but it’s too big a job. There’s too many of
em
. It’s ruined
huntin
for me forever.”