“One day at college I called home to tell Dad that I had gotten an honors in photography. Danette said that he’d taken an assignment to Yellowstone to document the grizzly bears and that no one was picking up at the motel or at the biologists’ center in the Lamar Valley, she’d tried. And I tried and tried both numbers anyway. And he never came home from that trip.”
“What?”
“He never came back.”
Celine was standing at the rail looking across the East River to two tall ships, square-riggers, docked at the Seaport. The current seemed to be flowing faster now and kicking up waves under the bridge. At some point in Gabriela’s story she had closed her eyes for a moment and lifted her nose to the river and the harbor where she always went to get her bearings. The wind had picked up and it came from the open ocean and it smelled of salt.
“Where’d he go?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Like, you never saw him again?”
“No. I never saw him again.”
Just when she thought Gabriela’s story couldn’t get any stranger or more sad.
“Did he die?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t you talk to the biologists or park rangers or whatever they were?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“He drove into Cooke City one night, just out of the northern boundary of the park. Said he was going for more batteries and bourbon—his words. It was a rainy early-October night, the rain turning to snow. They found his truck at the Soda Butte Creek bridge, just off the park boundary.”
“You’re not joking. Of course you aren’t. I mean—”
“No.”
“Give me a sec.” Celine turned her back to the railing and leaned against it. She labored for breath. It was like a hot flash. She broke into a sweat and her head throbbed. At the same time, the harbor breeze raised goose bumps along her arms. Better. What was it about the story? Had what happened to Lamont struck in Celine some deep primal fear? She didn’t think so. It was that Gabriela had lost her mom, and her cat, and then her father. And in each loss was some further exile. Celine wondered just then what the word “home” must mean to her. Probably a space within the relative safety of her own skin.
“Is that a sec?” Gabriela said after what may have been several minutes.
“That was, like, twenty-odd years ago, right?”
“It’s been a while.”
“And nothing’s surfaced? There was no investigation, no findings?”
“Of course there was an investigation. It made the news and everything. All the evidence pointed to a bear.”
“A bear. A grizzly?”
“Yes. Pop had that Invincibility Gene. He took pictures of wildlife no one should ever take—with no zoom lens. He was crazy. Nobody should take a portrait of a wild hippo with a twenty-eight millimeter lens. He said he could sing to crocodiles. When I ask myself if he really loved me, those dangerous wildlife pictures go in the No column. He was that careless with his life.”
“Huh.”
“There had been a big boar grizzly marauding right in town, in Cooke City, that very week. Locals told tourists that if they went out on the town at night—ha! there’s one main street—to go in pairs and bring defense. To a local that means at least a .44 Magnum, what they like to call the Bear Minimum. To a tourist it means pepper spray or more probably a cell phone and a scream.”
“My son, Hank, had a .44 Magnum once. Told me the same thing about Bear Minimum. Sounds like you’ve been there.”
“Three times. I didn’t have a last name up there. It was Gabriela Whose Dad Disappeared That Time.”
“That Time? Was there more than one?”
“Two or three people disappeared like that.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Over, like, fifteen years. If it was a bear it was one ornery old SOB.”
“Huh. Were there any signs, signs of—”
“A struggle? Robbery? A note? Suicide? Nothing. His keys were in the ignition. His wallet was in the glove box. Along with a handmade hunting knife he always carried. He took his down sweater and his Carhartt. He was an outdoorsman. If he’d been planning on being out in the woods any length of time in the snow he would have worn a Gore-Tex shell or something, not a canvas work coat. It’s like he stopped to pee, or check out an animal.”
“How about tracks? Up there they must have all sorts of Grizzly Adams tracker guys.”
“His name is Elbie Chicksaw. He’s like half Blackfoot, half mountain lion, half pine bark, half quartzite. He’s like five two and his card says Tracking, Hunting, Spirit-Travel. Not joking. But he’s pixilated. His spirit animal or totem or whatever is a guppy. He had one in an aquarium growing up in Teaneck.”
“The tracker grew up in New Jersey?”
“Yep. His mother was Blackfoot, she was a traveling nurse. Like Danette, but I bet a lot nicer.”
“So there must have been tracks.”
Gabriela nodded. “So Pop was supposed to meet the bear biologists at daybreak on the road at a spot just below Druid Peak. When he didn’t show up they figured he was hungover. He had a bit of a reputation. When he hadn’t appeared by midday they got a little concerned. One, an Ed Pence, ran into Cooke City in the afternoon on a mail run and saw Pop’s truck just off the road and radioed the cops. Cop. Who called the State Police. Who waited a day and initiated a search. The weather did not cooperate. It had been raining, and the night he went missing it got cold and snowed. By the time Chicksaw got there he was looking mostly for signs like scrapes and broken twigs. He did find grizzly tracks, drag marks, blood, but no Pop.
“It’s a story, huh?” Gabriela said.
“I don’t know. It seems stranger after all the rest of it.”
“You mean the way I was brought up?”
“Yes.”
“I know. It’s not like life gets less strange.” Gabriela reached back with both hands and pulled her ponytail free of the band. Her thick hair fell to her shoulders and she shook it loose. It reminded Celine of something but she couldn’t say what. “It’s why I called you.”
“It is?”
“Nothing about Pop’s disappearance has ever sat right with me. There was a sheriff up there, a man named Travers, who was very kind to me, and I’ll never forget how he looked when he surveyed the scene. It didn’t seem to sit right with him either. When I saw that story in the alumni magazine about the Prada PI, I thought about calling you. The story mentioned your friendship with Dean Renato, whom I knew, and I called him instead. When he said you were maybe the best anywhere at solving cold cases—I came to Brooklyn.” Gabriela stopped. She was looking north, under the bridge, away. “I have a son,” she said. “He’s eight. I’d love for him to meet his grandpa.” She didn’t turn around and Celine thought that Time Does Not Heal All Wounds, not by a long shot.
FOUR
It has almost never happened that a grizzly bear kills more than one man. Or woman. If they do, it’s usually in the same incident, a mama bear’s rampage protecting cubs or, as in the terribly sad incident featured in Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man, a furious attack on a couple in their camp by what was probably a gaunt and desperate boar arriving at the end of the salmon run and wild with hunger. The history books are not replete with serial grizzly man-eaters. Pete checked it out after listening closely to Celine tell Gabriela’s story. There was the famous vengeful Old Two Toes, who killed and partially ate at least three men in Montana, and was probably responsible for two more deaths, but that was in 1912. In Alaska, in 1995, a pissed-off boar grizzly attacked and killed one hiker, then his friend, but the incident was a response to being surprised on a moose carcass—a crime of passion so to speak. The incidents of premeditated, or habitual, serial assaults were very rare. No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.