"Oh, so you've been a ranger?"
"A lot of people in these parts go into the service. It's almost a rite of passage, you might say. But it gets tiresome after a time. It can be a lonely existence, 'specially in dead of winter at a ranger station. A man could go nuts, and some do." He looked at her again, studying her. Then he asked, "Where do you know Sam Fronval from?"
"Met him the last time I was at Yellowstone."
"Oh, so you've been to see Sam before? I get it. You're one of those Washington sanitizers, aren't you?"
"Sanitizer, me?"
"Sure, you want to sanitize the wilderness, as if it could be done! Make it safe for every little boy and girl whose parents cart them into the park in their trailers. You know it's impossible. When I was a park ranger, some years back, a tourist fella comes up to me and points at the thousand or so buffalo rooting around some hundred yards from a crowd of gawking onlookers. You know what this slicker asked me, lady? Doctor?"
"What's that, Mr. Rideout?"
"He says, 'Tell me, Ranger, these animals we're looking at, just rooting around out here… they couldn't be wild, right?' "
" 'They are that, sir,' I told him.
" 'No way,' he tells me. if they were wild, you couldn't just have them running around loose.' The man was an injury waiting to happen," Rideout finished.
Jessica laughed appreciatively.
"There're four thousand bison in the park, compared to seven hundred fifty bears, so visitors see a lot more buffalo than grizzly, but either way, many of them have only seen such animals through Disney or MGM studio releases, and they think they're as cute and mindless as, as say, Thumper and Bambi. Fools try to put their kids on the back of a buffalo to get a Kodak moment. The moment the two-thousand-pound, unpredictable, and belligerent animal erupts, they get more Kodak moments and home video funnies than they bargained for and someone dies, usually in great distress because the nearest hospital trauma center is in Bozeman. So they sue the park, and so Washington pencil-pushers hear about it's happened again, and a hue and cry goes up to make people safe from wilderness, to sanitize places like Yellowstone now that so many people visit annually."
"I'm not here to sanitize the park," she assured Rideout.
"Then what's the big rush to get there and see Fronval? Wait a minute: You're here about the brucellosis, sure, aren't you? Now, that figures. The government sends a government doctor to Yellowstone to stamp a USDA approval on the herd, right?"
"Herd?" she asked, confused. "What herd? Heard what?"
"The park bisons. You were sent to keep the cattlemen and ranchers thinking everything's being taken care of, right?"
"Oh, I see." Jessica had heard of the unfortunate outbreak of brucellosis among the buffalo, a disease ranchers and farmers across America had done battle with for more than sixty years, and they'd nearly eradicated the nasty livestock disease, one of the reasons why milk was pasteurized. The fight against brucellosis by American stockmen, ranchers, farmers, and the USDA was no less than a miracle victory. In the meantime, another great success story had also unfolded-the story of the century of conservation effort on behalf of the American bison that once numbered fifty million and had been hunted to extinction levels in the nineteenth century. Now the breed had been rescued from its extinction-level population of six hundred remaining in 1889, the largest herd at the time a mere twenty-one, who, coincidentally, grazed and lived in Yellowstone. Yellowstone's free-ranging buffalo herd now numbered some four thousand, and Yellowstone buffalo experts boasted it was the largest free-ranging buffalo herd in the country. It was also the only herd that, throughout its history, had remained free. Today the park was proud of its herd. But now it was estimated that half of the herd was infected by brucellosis, and there was no cure short of destroying the animals.
The ranchers and cattlemen had a strong argument. For sixty years they'd fought what was commonly called undulant fever, and now it was almost nonexistent in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Only forty-six livestock herds still carried the disease, as compared to 124,000 infected herds in 1957. In a couple of years, the USDA had an excellent chance of completely eradicating the disease in all fifty states.
Yellowstone, the nation's first national park, had a history of becoming ground zero for many a fight, and now it was ground zero for this puzzling debate in which park rangers believed the buffalo and its disease posed no threat to surrounding livestock, and ranchers felt their herds and profits threatened by the infected buffalo. The media, conservationists, and cattlemen were all asking the same perplexing question: How do you eradicate the last remnants of a disease, when it's carried by a species you want to save?
"I guess there is more than one creature I'd like to sanitize the park of," she teased, "but I have no cure for the one, only the other."
"Nobody's got a cure for that buffalo disease. But what do you mean, two creatures you'd like to clear outta the park?"
"I'm hunting for the worst kind of animal in the woods, Mr. Rideout."
"A man? You… you're on a manhunt?"
"I'm with the FBI, not the U.S. Interior or the Department of Parks and Recreation."
"A manhunt. Wow, I'm part of a manhunt. Wait'll I tell Eleanor and the kids about this one. They won't believe it."
After this, Rideout burned with curiosity about her, her reason for traveling alone into Yellowstone after this killer he'd read about in the morning papers concerning him greatly. He'd worked up to what he wanted to say, and he finally said it. ''Just the same, even if you are trained in such matters as detection and apprehension, Dr. Coran, someone enters a wilderness area like Yellowstone every day without the least preparation for its special dangers. I mean Yellowstone down there is more than just forty thousand elk, four thousand bison, ten thousand hot springs, and two hundred lakes. It's also full of grizzly bears that run around as freely as you or me."
"I'm tracking a more dangerous animal than grizzlies," she replied.
"Yeah, so you told me, but once you're down there in this.. this resource, remember, it's not a zoo or an amusement park. Danger is a part of the resource."
"I know the drill, Mr. Rideout."
"You do?"
"Wilderness is impersonal."
He was mildly impressed by this, smiling. ''Nature demands we pay attention, doesn't it? Whether we're putting out to sea or an overland trek."
"I know that there's good reason for why the rangers in such areas as Yellowstone preach rules."
"Good," he replied with little conviction, as if he didn't believe her just because she said so.
"Mr. Rideout, I know it's fool's play to walk amid standing burned trees from a forest fire, even one that ended years before… that such dead trees routinely fall on people because they come down without a sound. I know that hiking alone is deadly and again foolish. I know that wearing any sort of perfume can lure a bear faster than it can a man, and the aroma alone can turn you into his next meal, and that the bear wouldn't let a tent or a campfire stand in his way, that in fact nothing stands in the way of the most consummate eating machine nature's ever devised."
"Good, very good," he replied, conviction taking hold now.
She added for Rideout's benefit, "Wilderness doesn't care whether you live or die, and it does not care how much you love it."
"Spoken like someone who's been there."
"I have. I've hunted in some of the greatest wilderness areas left us. But this is the first time I've hunted a human in one."
This was met with an appreciative silence.
The pilot had finally gotten it, Jessica thought. Rideout couldn't tell Jessica Coran anything she didn't already know about this vast wilderness below them. She knew that there were disappearances in the national parks all the time, every day, and there were accidents involving the beasts and natural formations, and the natural flora when some fool ingested a poisonous plant in any given park, and that most of these deaths might have been avoided if and only if what rangers called "natural curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity" in the national parks could be stopped, but everyone knew that as the impossibility of all impossibilities. Still, of late, along with fire-related deaths in and around the parks, there had been a rash of deaths this year like nothing the major parks had ever faced before. No doubt Sam Fronval had already chalked it up to the turn-of-the-century blues, that people carried their phobias and eccentricities with them into the park, and there was no way for him to get them to check their deadly peculiarities at the gate.