Three-Inch Teeth, page 6
Joe winced. Then he thought of Clay Junior.
*
“TELL ME,” JOE asked Gordon and Cress as they made their way through the open gate for the river and the exhumed cache, “how unusual is it for an attack to happen on the water?”
“It’s rare, but it’s not unheard of,” Cress said. “You can find a video on YouTube of a bear charging a boat on a river in Alaska. And we’ve had reports of grizzlies swimming after drift boats and rafts. In one instance, the fisherman in the boat grabbed an oar and started whacking the bear when it got too close. That happened just last summer.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing before,” Joe said.
“We’ve learned to never say never when it comes to grizzly bears,” Gordon added.
“What is the likelihood that it’s still around?” Joe asked.
“Pretty good,” Cress answered. “Most of the bears we’ve hunted stick close to their kill. They’re very territorial that way.”
*
THEY FOUND THE exhumed cache as well as the bear track that Joe had described. The cache was dismantled when the coroner removed Clay Junior’s body, but the track was undisturbed. Gordon knelt down and measured it with a cell phone app.
“Not as large as a full-grown male,” she said. “So our killer is either a large yearling male or more likely a sow.”
“Can you guess how big it is?” Brodbeck asked her.
“Based on how deep the depression is, maybe three-fifty, three-eighty,” she said.
The snare Joe had set was sprung but empty, its steel cable coiled like a rattlesnake near the tree line.
“You had her for a while in your snare,” Hoaglin said to Joe. “You probably made her mad and she broke loose.”
“I’ve used these snares for black bears before,” Joe said. “But nothing this big.”
He tried to imagine the power it would have taken to snap the cable. Joe wasn’t sure that he could do it even by attaching the snare to the bumper of his truck and gunning the engine.
While Gordon took more photos of the cache, the track, and the broken snare, Cress retrieved a telemetry device from his backpack and powered it up.
“There’s no signal from a collar,” he said after a minute of tuning the handheld device.
Then: “Let’s go find her the old-fashioned way.”
*
JOE KEPT HIS eyes open and his senses at full alert as they departed the cache site. Brodbeck was apparently the best tracker on the team because he led the way and the others fell in naturally behind him. They carefully moved down the left bank to where the river bent to the east.
After an hour, Brodbeck said, “Nope. No tracks along the riverbank at all. She didn’t come down this way and she didn’t leave this way.”
“Then where is she?” Hoaglin asked.
Brodbeck pointed across the river toward the steep wooded slope. Joe followed his gesture. The intense fall colors made it hard to pick out individual objects through the foliage. Every dark boulder or sheet of rotting bark looked—for a second—like a bear.
“I think she ran off the same way she came down,” Brodbeck said.
“This is where I can help,” Joe said. “I’ll go back to my truck and get waders for everybody.”
“You’ve got five pairs of waders?” Cress asked, incredulous.
“I find them all the time where fisherman take them off and forget them,” Joe said with a shrug. “I’ve got a whole duffel bag full of them from over the years.”
*
AFTER WORKING THEIR way across the river over slippery smooth river rocks, the team made its first discovery when Brodbeck found a trail coming down the slope. The topsoil on the trail was churned up, and small pines were flattened in the path. Rocks had been dislodged from the soil, and on two flat spots, grizzly tracks could be clearly seen. One track was coming down the mountain and the other was going up.
“What’s this?” he asked, nudging a one-inch triangle-shaped piece of green fabric with the toe of his boot.
Joe bent down and studied it. “That’s Gore-Tex material,” he said. “From Clay Junior’s waders. It must have stuck to the bear’s teeth or claws and come off here.”
“Which meant she climbed back up the mountain sometime last night after she broke free of the snare,” Hoaglin said. “Which means we’ve got a unique situation: our bear didn’t hang around.”
“That’s unusual?” Joe asked Gordon.
“We’ve never hunted a hit-and-run bear before,” she said.
*
IT TOOK ANOTHER hour to climb the slope. They hiked on the left side of the bear path. Joe was out of breath by the time they reached the summit, and he reminded himself to take more breaks because he needed to be ready if they came face-to-face with the sow. He knew from experience how difficult it was to aim accurately when he was out of breath.
But there was no bear to be found on the top of the slope. Instead, a huge mountain meadow stretched out to the east until it was bordered by a wall of dense black timber that continued for miles. Beyond the timber, humpback peaks of the Bighorns stretched on for as far as they could see.
“We’re going to have to request aerial assistance,” Gordon said.
“Can we ask for a fixed-wing plane with an FLIR?” Joe asked.
FLIR was the acronym for forward-looking infrared, and Joe was familiar with the device because it was used by search and rescue teams to detect the thermal images of lost hunters in thick timber.
“An FLIR won’t work for finding a grizzly,” Gordon said. “The bear’s hair is too thick to emit much heat, and it’s easy to mistake a bear-sized boulder that retains heat from the sun from a grizzly. Believe me, there are a million bear-sized boulders on this mountain.” Then, suddenly, she exclaimed, “Oh no.”
Joe turned to her, expecting to see her pointing at the target grizzly in the distance. Instead, she had wheeled completely around and was gesturing toward their vehicles parked across the river. At the altitude they’d climbed, they could see them clearly: three green Wyoming Game and Fish Department pickups.
A gleaming white new-model SUV was slowly making its way across the hay meadow toward their trucks.
“Oh shit,” Cress said. “It’s them.”
“How’d they find us so fast?” Hoaglin asked.
“This has been all over the news,” Brodbeck said.
“Who are they?” Joe asked. “Do you recognize the vehicle?”
Gordon turned and scowled. “Oh, we know them all too well. They’re known as the Mama Bears. They’ve come to save the life of our killer.”
“I wish we’d found her,” Cress spat. “It’s gonna be a shit show now.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Double Diamond Ranch
JOE PICKETT TRUDGED back down the mountain with Jennie Gordon and Bill Brodbeck to intercept the Mama Bears.
Brody Cress and Tom Hoaglin had stayed on the ridge to look for tracks and signs of the bear. Cress had already been on a satellite phone requesting flyovers by fixed-wing aircraft from the Game and Fish Department and the Wyoming Wing Civil Air Patrol.
Meanwhile, Hoaglin had climbed to the top of a large boulder and was sitting there, glassing the mountain meadows and openings in the timber for signs of the target. The two of them had agreed to stay put and in radio contact until Joe, Gordon, and Brodbeck could rejoin them.
Brodbeck had volunteered to return to the vehicles. Because the grizzly hadn’t been found in the first few hours, it would be necessary to set up trail cameras and snares with heavier-gauge wire to try and trap it during the night. Because Brodbeck was the youngest and fittest and newest to the team, everyone seemed fine with letting him shoulder the gear and equipment back up the slope.
“So tell me about the Mama Bears,” Joe said to Gordon as they worked their way down through the trees.
“Well, I’d say they’re well-meaning activists,” she said over her shoulder. “But we’ve got to try and persuade them to stay back and out of our way while we hunt for this grizzly. Of course, it’s for their safety as well.”
“The Mama Bears are a pain in our butts,” Brodbeck added from behind Joe. “They consider us the enemy because we’re out here trying to deal with these grizzlies—even when the bears are killers.”
“What can the Mama Bears do?” Joe asked.
“What they’ve done before,” Gordon said. “Try and save the bear from us evil, fanatical bear murderers. That’s the way they see it, anyway.”
“Where do they come from?” Joe asked.
“Jackson Hole.”
“I’m shocked,” Joe said.
Brodbeck chuckled.
Gordon said, “There are two of them. You’ve probably heard of that big ‘Save Our Bears’ fundraiser they do every year in Teton County. They bring in Hollywood celebrities and social media influencers and the national media covers it all. It makes a lot of money for their cause.”
“Even though they don’t need it,” Brodbeck interjected. “I’ve heard these two ladies are married to multimillionaires.”
“You have to be if you live in Jackson,” Joe said. “My mother-in-law lives there.”
Gordon said, “It’s amazing what happens when the Mama Bears show up on the scene. Our traps get sprung, and logs get pushed out in the road so we can’t drive where we need to go. People show up from all over the country to protest in front of our offices and block us from getting out. Signs go up saying we should be defunded. Posts appear on social media showing old photos of dead bears that were shot to death.
“We’ve never caught them in the act of messing up our snares or using air horns to chase the bears away,” she said. “But it’s not a coincidence that none of those things happen until the Mama Bears swoop in and start the outrage on social media.”
“Why do they do it?” Joe asked.
Gordon shrugged. “Like I said, they’re well-meaning, I think. But I’m a scientist and biologist, so that’s not the way I think. There are just some people who identify with bears in what I’d consider a very unhealthy way. You’ve heard of anthropomorphism? You know, attributing human characteristics to nonhuman species?”
“Yup,” Joe said, thinking that Marybeth and his daughters were somewhat guilty of it when it came to their horses and dogs. Of course, he probably was, too, when it came to Daisy …
“That’s what the Mama Bears do,” she said. “But to an extreme degree. They go out into Yellowstone to view bears and they think they understand them. They claim to know a few of the grizzlies personally, and even give them names.”
“How are you going to make them go away?” Joe asked.
“I might need your help with that,” she said to him.
“Glad to help.”
He thought about how much of his job, and apparently Gordon’s as well, was becoming less concerned with managing wildlife and more about dealing with people who fetishized animals. He blamed it partly on the disconnect between modern Americans and nature. Although it was beautiful and fascinating, Joe knew how rough it was out there in the wild. Brutal, bloody, and completely ruthless. The circle of life, he knew, was amoral at best.
*
AS THEY CROSSED the river, Joe looked back over his shoulder at the slope they’d traversed. He could see the silhouette of Cress on top, still on his phone. Hoaglin was out of view.
When they approached the exhumed cache, Joe felt another chill run through him. The proximity of the scene triggered a reprise of the raw fear he’d felt when he found Clay Junior’s body: real, bone-chilling fear. He unslung the .308 and carried it at his side as a cautionary measure.
“I’m going to get the gear gathered up,” Brodbeck said to Joe and Gordon. “I’ll leave the persuading to you two.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, not really meaning it.
*
LYNN FOWLER AND Jayce Calhoun stood with their hands on their hips as Joe and Gordon approached them. Both women were in their late fifties, Joe guessed. They were thin and fit and had expensive haircuts, and the skin on their faces looked stretched tight and wrinkle-free, which belied how much time they apparently spent outdoors tracking grizzly bears. Fowler had a mane of dark hair streaked with ginger, and Calhoun’s long wild tresses of pure white made her blue eyes and plumped lips stand out like a child’s drawing. Both wore matching anoraks with Patagonia embroidered on one breast and Mama Bears on the other.
Their new-model white Range Rover had County 22 plates, meaning Teton County.
“Jennie,” Fowler said to Gordon, “you know why we’re here. This just has to stop.”
“Meet Joe Pickett,” Gordon said. “He’s the local game warden.”
Joe nodded his hat brim to them, but neither responded in kind.
“We know this bear,” Calhoun said. “We know her and we know her tragic circumstances. You cannot kill this beautiful creature. We forbid it.”
Gordon leaned against the grille of her pickup, crossed her arms, and said, “Explain to me how you know the bear.”
Calhoun and Fowler exchanged glances, and Fowler addressed Joe instead of Gordon. Apparently, he guessed, he must look like the softer touch.
“We call her Tisiphone,” she said. She pronounced it “Tie-sif-o-nee.” “After the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution. This woman you’re with,” she said, pointing at Gordon, “calls her ‘Number 413.’”
Gordon rolled her eyes but didn’t interrupt Fowler, who continued. “Tisiphone is one of the most tragic stories you will ever hear, game warden. She is the embodiment of a mother whose entire world is destroyed by man. The incident was so horrible and violent that Tisiphone lost her mind, and she travels the earth exacting revenge against those who destroyed her family.”
Joe squinted, trying to understand. He looked at Gordon for support, but Gordon looked away.
“Are you a father?” Calhoun asked Joe.
“Yup. Three daughters.”
“Three,” Calhoun said, once again exchanging looks with Fowler. “How interesting. How connected you’ll be when you hear this story.
“Now imagine, Mr. Pickett, that you are on a hike with your three young daughters. Imagine that during that hike you cross a road, you leading and your three daughters following you one by one. Maybe you’re holding hands.”
She paused for effect, then said, “Now imagine that a careless driver just plowed into all three of your daughters at the same time, killing two instantly. Imagine turning around and seeing your third daughter still alive, but bleeding out in the road. How would you feel?”
“Not good,” Joe said.
“This actually happened last August,” Fowler took over for her colleague. “In Yellowstone Park, near the junction of West Thumb and the road to Old Faithful. A California man distracted by his phone slammed into three eight-month-old cubs following their mother and killed them all. Killed them all.
“You can imagine the manic rage Tisiphone felt. She went briefly insane for weeks afterward, roaring and crashing through trees in the forest.”
Joe winced.
“That’s what I would do,” Fowler said, placing her hands on her heart and leaning forward. “I would howl at God and I would curse him. I would blame the species that did it. I would want vengeance. I am Tisiphone.”
“I am Tisiphone,” Calhoun echoed.
“Is that story true?” Joe asked Gordon.
“Yes, it is, partly,” Gordon said. “A tourist hit and killed the three cubs of 413 last August. It was a tragedy.”
“It was more than a tragedy,” Fowler said while blowing a stray wisp of hair from her face. “It was triple infanticide. Of course Tisiphone has gone mad with grief and rage. What would your wife do, Mr. Pickett, if all three of your daughters were murdered in front of her eyes?”
Joe couldn’t even imagine the scenario.
“Time out,” Gordon said, putting her palms up as if to hold back the Mama Bears. “Just hold it. First, we have no evidence at all that the bear that caused our fatality is 413. Bear number 413 had a collar on her and we’ve picked up no signal here at all. Second, and with all due respect, Jayce and Lynn, what you’re contending here flies against all the behavioral science we’ve studied on female grizzly bears. No mother of any species wants to lose her offspring, but we’ve got no instances where the mother went insane and sought revenge.
“I hate to say it, but bear cubs get killed all the time. It isn’t rare and their mortality rate is high. In many instances, it’s the male grizzly that kills them. Sows have two or three cubs per litter and sometimes even four. When a little one dies, the mama bear just kind of goes on with life. It’s like raising puppies or kittens. The mother doesn’t go into mourning when they’re sold or given away to new owners. They don’t go crazy and they don’t seek vengeance.”
“So you say,” Fowler responded with anger. “You’d be happy if they were all dead.”
“You know that’s not true,” Gordon said. “I’d rather our bears thrived—as long as they don’t kill people.”
Fowler and Calhoun began to talk over each other and direct their vehemence at Gordon, who remained very calm. Joe held his ground but said nothing.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Brodbeck shoulder a heavy pack from the bed of the other truck. There was so much weight in it that when he swung it on his back he stumbled a few steps before slipping his other arm through the strap to regain his balance. Joe didn’t envy Brodbeck packing it all up the slope.
Despite the weight on his back, it was obvious that Brodbeck was eager to get going and not let himself be pulled into the dispute between the Mama Bears and Jennie Gordon. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and waved goodbye to Joe with a wry grin. Joe nodded back to him.
“Do either of you have any evidence this is 413?” Gordon asked when there was a break in the stream of accusations. “If so, I’d like to hear it.”
“When we last saw her two weeks ago, she was headed east,” Calhoun sniffed.
“East from Yellowstone?”
Calhoun indicated yes.
“Do you think she covered two hundred miles to get here?” Gordon asked. “Female grizzlies traditionally have smaller home ranges than males and rarely go out on excursions. Do you have any real reason to suspect that she decided to leave her stomping grounds and jet in a line to the east? All the way to the Big Horns, where she’s never been before?”
*
“TELL ME,” JOE asked Gordon and Cress as they made their way through the open gate for the river and the exhumed cache, “how unusual is it for an attack to happen on the water?”
“It’s rare, but it’s not unheard of,” Cress said. “You can find a video on YouTube of a bear charging a boat on a river in Alaska. And we’ve had reports of grizzlies swimming after drift boats and rafts. In one instance, the fisherman in the boat grabbed an oar and started whacking the bear when it got too close. That happened just last summer.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing before,” Joe said.
“We’ve learned to never say never when it comes to grizzly bears,” Gordon added.
“What is the likelihood that it’s still around?” Joe asked.
“Pretty good,” Cress answered. “Most of the bears we’ve hunted stick close to their kill. They’re very territorial that way.”
*
THEY FOUND THE exhumed cache as well as the bear track that Joe had described. The cache was dismantled when the coroner removed Clay Junior’s body, but the track was undisturbed. Gordon knelt down and measured it with a cell phone app.
“Not as large as a full-grown male,” she said. “So our killer is either a large yearling male or more likely a sow.”
“Can you guess how big it is?” Brodbeck asked her.
“Based on how deep the depression is, maybe three-fifty, three-eighty,” she said.
The snare Joe had set was sprung but empty, its steel cable coiled like a rattlesnake near the tree line.
“You had her for a while in your snare,” Hoaglin said to Joe. “You probably made her mad and she broke loose.”
“I’ve used these snares for black bears before,” Joe said. “But nothing this big.”
He tried to imagine the power it would have taken to snap the cable. Joe wasn’t sure that he could do it even by attaching the snare to the bumper of his truck and gunning the engine.
While Gordon took more photos of the cache, the track, and the broken snare, Cress retrieved a telemetry device from his backpack and powered it up.
“There’s no signal from a collar,” he said after a minute of tuning the handheld device.
Then: “Let’s go find her the old-fashioned way.”
*
JOE KEPT HIS eyes open and his senses at full alert as they departed the cache site. Brodbeck was apparently the best tracker on the team because he led the way and the others fell in naturally behind him. They carefully moved down the left bank to where the river bent to the east.
After an hour, Brodbeck said, “Nope. No tracks along the riverbank at all. She didn’t come down this way and she didn’t leave this way.”
“Then where is she?” Hoaglin asked.
Brodbeck pointed across the river toward the steep wooded slope. Joe followed his gesture. The intense fall colors made it hard to pick out individual objects through the foliage. Every dark boulder or sheet of rotting bark looked—for a second—like a bear.
“I think she ran off the same way she came down,” Brodbeck said.
“This is where I can help,” Joe said. “I’ll go back to my truck and get waders for everybody.”
“You’ve got five pairs of waders?” Cress asked, incredulous.
“I find them all the time where fisherman take them off and forget them,” Joe said with a shrug. “I’ve got a whole duffel bag full of them from over the years.”
*
AFTER WORKING THEIR way across the river over slippery smooth river rocks, the team made its first discovery when Brodbeck found a trail coming down the slope. The topsoil on the trail was churned up, and small pines were flattened in the path. Rocks had been dislodged from the soil, and on two flat spots, grizzly tracks could be clearly seen. One track was coming down the mountain and the other was going up.
“What’s this?” he asked, nudging a one-inch triangle-shaped piece of green fabric with the toe of his boot.
Joe bent down and studied it. “That’s Gore-Tex material,” he said. “From Clay Junior’s waders. It must have stuck to the bear’s teeth or claws and come off here.”
“Which meant she climbed back up the mountain sometime last night after she broke free of the snare,” Hoaglin said. “Which means we’ve got a unique situation: our bear didn’t hang around.”
“That’s unusual?” Joe asked Gordon.
“We’ve never hunted a hit-and-run bear before,” she said.
*
IT TOOK ANOTHER hour to climb the slope. They hiked on the left side of the bear path. Joe was out of breath by the time they reached the summit, and he reminded himself to take more breaks because he needed to be ready if they came face-to-face with the sow. He knew from experience how difficult it was to aim accurately when he was out of breath.
But there was no bear to be found on the top of the slope. Instead, a huge mountain meadow stretched out to the east until it was bordered by a wall of dense black timber that continued for miles. Beyond the timber, humpback peaks of the Bighorns stretched on for as far as they could see.
“We’re going to have to request aerial assistance,” Gordon said.
“Can we ask for a fixed-wing plane with an FLIR?” Joe asked.
FLIR was the acronym for forward-looking infrared, and Joe was familiar with the device because it was used by search and rescue teams to detect the thermal images of lost hunters in thick timber.
“An FLIR won’t work for finding a grizzly,” Gordon said. “The bear’s hair is too thick to emit much heat, and it’s easy to mistake a bear-sized boulder that retains heat from the sun from a grizzly. Believe me, there are a million bear-sized boulders on this mountain.” Then, suddenly, she exclaimed, “Oh no.”
Joe turned to her, expecting to see her pointing at the target grizzly in the distance. Instead, she had wheeled completely around and was gesturing toward their vehicles parked across the river. At the altitude they’d climbed, they could see them clearly: three green Wyoming Game and Fish Department pickups.
A gleaming white new-model SUV was slowly making its way across the hay meadow toward their trucks.
“Oh shit,” Cress said. “It’s them.”
“How’d they find us so fast?” Hoaglin asked.
“This has been all over the news,” Brodbeck said.
“Who are they?” Joe asked. “Do you recognize the vehicle?”
Gordon turned and scowled. “Oh, we know them all too well. They’re known as the Mama Bears. They’ve come to save the life of our killer.”
“I wish we’d found her,” Cress spat. “It’s gonna be a shit show now.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Double Diamond Ranch
JOE PICKETT TRUDGED back down the mountain with Jennie Gordon and Bill Brodbeck to intercept the Mama Bears.
Brody Cress and Tom Hoaglin had stayed on the ridge to look for tracks and signs of the bear. Cress had already been on a satellite phone requesting flyovers by fixed-wing aircraft from the Game and Fish Department and the Wyoming Wing Civil Air Patrol.
Meanwhile, Hoaglin had climbed to the top of a large boulder and was sitting there, glassing the mountain meadows and openings in the timber for signs of the target. The two of them had agreed to stay put and in radio contact until Joe, Gordon, and Brodbeck could rejoin them.
Brodbeck had volunteered to return to the vehicles. Because the grizzly hadn’t been found in the first few hours, it would be necessary to set up trail cameras and snares with heavier-gauge wire to try and trap it during the night. Because Brodbeck was the youngest and fittest and newest to the team, everyone seemed fine with letting him shoulder the gear and equipment back up the slope.
“So tell me about the Mama Bears,” Joe said to Gordon as they worked their way down through the trees.
“Well, I’d say they’re well-meaning activists,” she said over her shoulder. “But we’ve got to try and persuade them to stay back and out of our way while we hunt for this grizzly. Of course, it’s for their safety as well.”
“The Mama Bears are a pain in our butts,” Brodbeck added from behind Joe. “They consider us the enemy because we’re out here trying to deal with these grizzlies—even when the bears are killers.”
“What can the Mama Bears do?” Joe asked.
“What they’ve done before,” Gordon said. “Try and save the bear from us evil, fanatical bear murderers. That’s the way they see it, anyway.”
“Where do they come from?” Joe asked.
“Jackson Hole.”
“I’m shocked,” Joe said.
Brodbeck chuckled.
Gordon said, “There are two of them. You’ve probably heard of that big ‘Save Our Bears’ fundraiser they do every year in Teton County. They bring in Hollywood celebrities and social media influencers and the national media covers it all. It makes a lot of money for their cause.”
“Even though they don’t need it,” Brodbeck interjected. “I’ve heard these two ladies are married to multimillionaires.”
“You have to be if you live in Jackson,” Joe said. “My mother-in-law lives there.”
Gordon said, “It’s amazing what happens when the Mama Bears show up on the scene. Our traps get sprung, and logs get pushed out in the road so we can’t drive where we need to go. People show up from all over the country to protest in front of our offices and block us from getting out. Signs go up saying we should be defunded. Posts appear on social media showing old photos of dead bears that were shot to death.
“We’ve never caught them in the act of messing up our snares or using air horns to chase the bears away,” she said. “But it’s not a coincidence that none of those things happen until the Mama Bears swoop in and start the outrage on social media.”
“Why do they do it?” Joe asked.
Gordon shrugged. “Like I said, they’re well-meaning, I think. But I’m a scientist and biologist, so that’s not the way I think. There are just some people who identify with bears in what I’d consider a very unhealthy way. You’ve heard of anthropomorphism? You know, attributing human characteristics to nonhuman species?”
“Yup,” Joe said, thinking that Marybeth and his daughters were somewhat guilty of it when it came to their horses and dogs. Of course, he probably was, too, when it came to Daisy …
“That’s what the Mama Bears do,” she said. “But to an extreme degree. They go out into Yellowstone to view bears and they think they understand them. They claim to know a few of the grizzlies personally, and even give them names.”
“How are you going to make them go away?” Joe asked.
“I might need your help with that,” she said to him.
“Glad to help.”
He thought about how much of his job, and apparently Gordon’s as well, was becoming less concerned with managing wildlife and more about dealing with people who fetishized animals. He blamed it partly on the disconnect between modern Americans and nature. Although it was beautiful and fascinating, Joe knew how rough it was out there in the wild. Brutal, bloody, and completely ruthless. The circle of life, he knew, was amoral at best.
*
AS THEY CROSSED the river, Joe looked back over his shoulder at the slope they’d traversed. He could see the silhouette of Cress on top, still on his phone. Hoaglin was out of view.
When they approached the exhumed cache, Joe felt another chill run through him. The proximity of the scene triggered a reprise of the raw fear he’d felt when he found Clay Junior’s body: real, bone-chilling fear. He unslung the .308 and carried it at his side as a cautionary measure.
“I’m going to get the gear gathered up,” Brodbeck said to Joe and Gordon. “I’ll leave the persuading to you two.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, not really meaning it.
*
LYNN FOWLER AND Jayce Calhoun stood with their hands on their hips as Joe and Gordon approached them. Both women were in their late fifties, Joe guessed. They were thin and fit and had expensive haircuts, and the skin on their faces looked stretched tight and wrinkle-free, which belied how much time they apparently spent outdoors tracking grizzly bears. Fowler had a mane of dark hair streaked with ginger, and Calhoun’s long wild tresses of pure white made her blue eyes and plumped lips stand out like a child’s drawing. Both wore matching anoraks with Patagonia embroidered on one breast and Mama Bears on the other.
Their new-model white Range Rover had County 22 plates, meaning Teton County.
“Jennie,” Fowler said to Gordon, “you know why we’re here. This just has to stop.”
“Meet Joe Pickett,” Gordon said. “He’s the local game warden.”
Joe nodded his hat brim to them, but neither responded in kind.
“We know this bear,” Calhoun said. “We know her and we know her tragic circumstances. You cannot kill this beautiful creature. We forbid it.”
Gordon leaned against the grille of her pickup, crossed her arms, and said, “Explain to me how you know the bear.”
Calhoun and Fowler exchanged glances, and Fowler addressed Joe instead of Gordon. Apparently, he guessed, he must look like the softer touch.
“We call her Tisiphone,” she said. She pronounced it “Tie-sif-o-nee.” “After the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution. This woman you’re with,” she said, pointing at Gordon, “calls her ‘Number 413.’”
Gordon rolled her eyes but didn’t interrupt Fowler, who continued. “Tisiphone is one of the most tragic stories you will ever hear, game warden. She is the embodiment of a mother whose entire world is destroyed by man. The incident was so horrible and violent that Tisiphone lost her mind, and she travels the earth exacting revenge against those who destroyed her family.”
Joe squinted, trying to understand. He looked at Gordon for support, but Gordon looked away.
“Are you a father?” Calhoun asked Joe.
“Yup. Three daughters.”
“Three,” Calhoun said, once again exchanging looks with Fowler. “How interesting. How connected you’ll be when you hear this story.
“Now imagine, Mr. Pickett, that you are on a hike with your three young daughters. Imagine that during that hike you cross a road, you leading and your three daughters following you one by one. Maybe you’re holding hands.”
She paused for effect, then said, “Now imagine that a careless driver just plowed into all three of your daughters at the same time, killing two instantly. Imagine turning around and seeing your third daughter still alive, but bleeding out in the road. How would you feel?”
“Not good,” Joe said.
“This actually happened last August,” Fowler took over for her colleague. “In Yellowstone Park, near the junction of West Thumb and the road to Old Faithful. A California man distracted by his phone slammed into three eight-month-old cubs following their mother and killed them all. Killed them all.
“You can imagine the manic rage Tisiphone felt. She went briefly insane for weeks afterward, roaring and crashing through trees in the forest.”
Joe winced.
“That’s what I would do,” Fowler said, placing her hands on her heart and leaning forward. “I would howl at God and I would curse him. I would blame the species that did it. I would want vengeance. I am Tisiphone.”
“I am Tisiphone,” Calhoun echoed.
“Is that story true?” Joe asked Gordon.
“Yes, it is, partly,” Gordon said. “A tourist hit and killed the three cubs of 413 last August. It was a tragedy.”
“It was more than a tragedy,” Fowler said while blowing a stray wisp of hair from her face. “It was triple infanticide. Of course Tisiphone has gone mad with grief and rage. What would your wife do, Mr. Pickett, if all three of your daughters were murdered in front of her eyes?”
Joe couldn’t even imagine the scenario.
“Time out,” Gordon said, putting her palms up as if to hold back the Mama Bears. “Just hold it. First, we have no evidence at all that the bear that caused our fatality is 413. Bear number 413 had a collar on her and we’ve picked up no signal here at all. Second, and with all due respect, Jayce and Lynn, what you’re contending here flies against all the behavioral science we’ve studied on female grizzly bears. No mother of any species wants to lose her offspring, but we’ve got no instances where the mother went insane and sought revenge.
“I hate to say it, but bear cubs get killed all the time. It isn’t rare and their mortality rate is high. In many instances, it’s the male grizzly that kills them. Sows have two or three cubs per litter and sometimes even four. When a little one dies, the mama bear just kind of goes on with life. It’s like raising puppies or kittens. The mother doesn’t go into mourning when they’re sold or given away to new owners. They don’t go crazy and they don’t seek vengeance.”
“So you say,” Fowler responded with anger. “You’d be happy if they were all dead.”
“You know that’s not true,” Gordon said. “I’d rather our bears thrived—as long as they don’t kill people.”
Fowler and Calhoun began to talk over each other and direct their vehemence at Gordon, who remained very calm. Joe held his ground but said nothing.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Brodbeck shoulder a heavy pack from the bed of the other truck. There was so much weight in it that when he swung it on his back he stumbled a few steps before slipping his other arm through the strap to regain his balance. Joe didn’t envy Brodbeck packing it all up the slope.
Despite the weight on his back, it was obvious that Brodbeck was eager to get going and not let himself be pulled into the dispute between the Mama Bears and Jennie Gordon. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and waved goodbye to Joe with a wry grin. Joe nodded back to him.
“Do either of you have any evidence this is 413?” Gordon asked when there was a break in the stream of accusations. “If so, I’d like to hear it.”
“When we last saw her two weeks ago, she was headed east,” Calhoun sniffed.
“East from Yellowstone?”
Calhoun indicated yes.
“Do you think she covered two hundred miles to get here?” Gordon asked. “Female grizzlies traditionally have smaller home ranges than males and rarely go out on excursions. Do you have any real reason to suspect that she decided to leave her stomping grounds and jet in a line to the east? All the way to the Big Horns, where she’s never been before?”
