Congress wanted more legislation to protect people in the national parks, while the people who lived, worked, and understood the parks tried to explain-once they stopped laughing at Congress-that you couldn't put a fence around the Yellowstone gorge, the hot springs, or such wonders as the Grand Canyon. There wasn't that much fence in the world, for one; for another, any fence or sign in the wilds detracted from the very nature of nature. To develop a national park was tantamount to not having one.
Still, some people, usually people who thought of a park as something akin to Central Park in New York City, wanted the immense parks of the West to be wild as long as they weren't too wild, so wild that it might harm them personally. These people, often the first to sue a park, required a park's wilderness, yet they denied its right to exercise its wilderness character upon them.
She recalled something Fronval had said to her on the subject once. He'd often been quoted as saying the same in articles she'd seen in National Parks, the magazine mouthpiece for the NPCA: "Unfortunately, when people visit the national parks, they don't always leave their suicidal, masochistic, or sadistic tendencies at the park borders."
The quote certainly fit in with the manhunt she was about to propose to Fronval.
Jessica thought the argument, even the fact there was an argument of this kind, a commentary on where society was heading, that so much of society hadn't the least idea of what the wild outdoors meant, that somehow wild buffalo, bears, and cougars had been confused with movie-friendly beasts seen in Disney versions of the great outdoors. This led visitors to Yellowstone to believe they could not only feed the bears but also pet them, and that a snapshot of Junior on the back of an elk or a mountain goat was as natural an idea as a snapshot of Junior on the back of a statue. People ascribed cartoonlike, friendly characteristics to the wildest of beasts that roamed free here, but this in effect negated the very meaning of free.
She had given thought to when the outdoors was natural and when indoors in the American wilderness was unnatural. History, time, and the march of progress had turned reality inside out, and people with it.
While she and her friend Melissa Gilmore had been staying at the lodge during her first and only other visit to Yellowstone, they'd heard of an incident in which a young man, in an attempt to rescue his dog from a hot spring, had lost his life to the searing, boiling cauldron he'd dove into. Dogs in Yellowstone caused great concern to the rangers. There was good reason for the signs posted everywhere that read: do not take your dog on trails in Yellowstone. Dogs were never allowed off-leash in the park, and never to be taken on trails, especially trails through thermal areas. Hot springs amounted to only one reason for the ban on dogs here. Other reasons involved the fact that dogs were predatory on small animals; they chased and harassed larger animals such as moose and elk and buffalo. Dogs also attracted bears-indeed these two animal breeds hated one another. Finally, dog excrement introduced exotic plants into an ecosystem.
Disregarding all of this, the young man allowed his dog to escape his car, and the dog, panting from the heat, leaped into a hot spring of 192 degrees Fahrenheit. The young man dove in to save the yelping, helpless animal, somehow thinking himself less vulnerable to the scalding than his pet. Both man and dog died of their injuries and massive dehydration.
Another like story involved a little boy who thought the spring inviting when he purportedly shouted, "I wonder just how warm the water is'' and promptly stepped off the wooden-planked path to tumble in. The boy's skeletal remains were recovered days afterward when the hot spring spat them back up, finished with the child.
Devastated, the parents sued the park in a wrongful-death action.
Jessica could see little of the majesty of Yellowstone below her now, shrouded as it was in darkness. She and Rideout had remained silent for some time as their approach brought them nearer Old Faithful Lodge and the ranger station there. Then without warning, Rideout erupted with words that seemed to burst forth like water from a busted dike. "In your line of work, Dr. Coran, you've probably seen it all, but you ever see a man killed by a grizzly?"
"No, no… I can't say I have."
"I did, once. When I was rangerin'. Went out with a search party for a hiker who disappeared. I'm telling you, it looked like a chainsaw had been taken to the man. He was cut clean in two at the belt. Blood everywhere, all over the snow."
"Sounds awful."
"It was high snow season, late November, most roads into the park closed by then. Guy's name was Teller, a real smartass who wouldn't listen to any words of caution, and him wanting to be a ranger someday. Who knows? Maybe he mighta made a good ranger if he'd lived. Hiked out alone one day, like a fool."
"How old was he?"
"Oh, nineteen, maybe twenty. His entire neck was missing. Head we found later, and the torso'd been left behind, but the kid's neck was clean chewed away. Sam figured he was running when the bear caught him on the fly at the neck and just ripped away with those massive teeth."
Jessica gulped at the image while the whirring and dipping of the helicopter vibrated through her ears and down to her stomach.
"Teller's other parts were scattered and buried in so many places, we never did come back with all of him. But we found his head under a hefty mound the bear had churned up."
"Put away for later feeding," she said with a knowing nod.
"They hunted that bear down. Rangers all knew him as Number 63, tagged the year before, but after the killing, we all began calling him 01' Claw."
"They put him down as a man-killer," she said matter-of-factly.
"Yeah, like it's going to teach a lesson to all the other bears-Hanna-Barbera, Jellystone Park thinking, you know. We always had to deal with that kind of mentality, sanitizers… but to appease the public, you know…"
"Yeah, 'fraid I do in my business, too."
He shrugged. "Sam says, 'We do what we gotta do,' but hell if I ever could understand the thinking. I mean, I just don't get it. Never did. Probably what made me a bad ranger. Whole thing was Teller's own stupid fault. The bear was only doing what come natural to bears."
"Maybe I'll get lucky," she said. "Maybe my man will run up on a grizzly or get gored by an angry bison."
"You can always hope…"
As the chopper neared Yellowstone's fantastic cauldera filled with lodge pole pine, Jessica imagined the thousands of tourists below, settling in for the night after long treks in the park of geysers and free-roaming bison.
Despite full disclosure in the newspapers about the killer, there still remained, she could be absolutely sure, an enclave of people here in the vast wilderness of Yellowstone who had been wholly untouched by the story. Few if any down at Old Faithful Lodge would show the least alarm, she imagined.
She learned that she was right, that there would be no general alarm sounded-nor did she want one-as she explained over the radio to Samuel Marc Fronval, a descendant of French-Canadian Native Americans and the head guy among the rangers here. She knew Fronval from years past, and he'd taken her warnings in such calm stride that she wondered if he'd gone feeble, but then maybe it was the place.