The geophysicist ran her tongue into the space where a wisdom tooth had been extracted. Working the tooth hollow absentmindedly, she slithered into the wet gray memory banks stored in her skull. There she tiptoed up to a geyser under the Vatnajokull glacier in Iceland, sitting right atop the tectonic rift in the Atlantic’s mid-oceanic ridge. It was an impossible, steam-soaked sight in the headlamps, standing in hot geyser rain at the bottom of a vast amphitheater of dirty glacier ice, which, in turn, towered over 1,000 feet in elevation above the ice cavern. Maybe Yellowstone Lake, like the Icelandic ice sheet, was playing host to a new submerged geothermal feature near the north shore.
In the depths off Storm Point more than a dozen miles to the north, United States Geological Survey scientists had discovered a mile-long, 120-foot tall bulge in the lake bottom strata that they dubbed the inflated plain. It oozed superheated water. Maybe the inflated plain needed a second look. With an array of shallow sediment thermal probes, she could, she thought, determine what was underway beneath the lake.
Liz stood up from her sedge bed and took one last glance at the gleaming ocean of moon water. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would download the most recent global positioning satellite, gravimeter and Landsat thermal outflow data from the park network and compare it with earlier data. Maybe it would reveal some clues. She scanned down to the dead forest in the southeast corner of the lake. Perhaps some data would shed light on the forest die-off there.
As she rolled her plans about in her cranium, her eyes detected a distant blur in the utter silence of the night. She squinted and raised a palm over her eyes to shield them from the bright lunar photons. Wolves—three, no, four, six, and moving away toward the deadwood—running like demons, as if committed to chasing prey. Liz could see nothing ahead of them in the void.
Homo sapiens, she knew, was not the top predator in the park. That distinction belonged to the grizzly bear, a species that would take down a human from time to time. The cougar could do the same, particularly young children walking out of view from their parents or a small adult woman. Rarely did a big cat attack an adult male. Wolves were of no concern. There was no record anywhere of wolves troubling a human, even though folklore everywhere was riddled with the blood fear of fanged attack.
On the trek back to her Plover Point research station cabin, Liz was more concerned with the possibility of running into a bull moose. The rut was underway, now that the days were shorter and crisp with fall cold. Big males were roaming all over the park day and night, looking for mates. On a full moon night in autumn, there was always the possibility of wandering along a path only to find a moose moving on it, too.
Amidst the patchwork quilt pattern of light and dark along the trail, there was nothing stirring, no pops or snaps to perk up an ear. Liz drifted into a rhythmic cadence as she moved rapidly through the forest near the lake. She always felt strong, on top of her game, at the start of a new project. Fresh problems, new material to work with, the buzz of data, matching intellect against intellect—all of it was an opiate, a high. Opportunities like this always triggered a manic-like state. When she was immersed in it, she wished nothing more than for the heady sensations to stay, to make themselves at home permanently. But they never stayed. Endorphins decayed. The mood slipped and would usually give out completely after waking in the morning. Liz often said she could wash her good spirits down the drain with a hot morning shower two weeks into any new project.
Mood was complicated by the duration of time she was away from her ten-year-old daughter, Pelee. The child was safe with her father and busy at the new intentional-community farm in western Minnesota, the place her ex-husband founded and called Independency. They would reunite soon enough after the work at Yellowstone. Liz was always sick with longing for her daughter’s voice and antics by the second week on the job. Still, Pelee so loved the life at Independency farm that she complained vehemently when confined with her mother in a small apartment near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.
Liz reached the small research cabin after midnight. The two-room log building had been built a century ago by cavalry troops as one of six remote outposts in the park. All six still existed, and two of them, including the South Arm cabin, had been converted into remote walk-in or float-in research stations for scientists. The cabin’s solar panels gleamed under the moon in stark contrast to the raft of ebony antennae sprouting from the roof. She entered the lunar-frosted front workroom, felt her way to the bunkroom door and slipped through. She kicked off her boots and tossed her knit wool skullcap and parka into the inkwell of night. Feeling for her sleeping bag, she zipped it open, rolled in and curled into a fetal ball to conserve body heat until the bag’s interior warmed. The devil with data retrieval tonight.
The confines of the arctic sleeping cocoon worked its magic. Within minutes, the little body pocket was a warming oven, perfectly comfortable for easing the night traveler off on the sweet voyage of nod. Liz could sleep the sleep of ages. Chained to the gears of hummingbird metabolism by day, she went into torpor within minutes of closing her eyes at night. Down she would fall through the sedimentary layers of sleep’s deepest canyons only to splash into fathomless and weightless dream oceans. The falling and floating, Liz tried to hold onto them and not let the sensations out of her grasp. They were such simple yet exquisite pleasures.
Liz drifted out of the reach of dreams. The endless hours of travel the day before, the early briefing, the long boat ride and trek to the research station and her late foray out to the lake had conspired to rob her of consciousness. She slumbered as deep as coma.
The earth would not sleep. Deep in the night the cabin timbers encompassing the sleeping woman rattled and chattered quietly as persistent shallow earth tremors infiltrated the foundation stones and pylons.
Chapter Two
“Shhh, shhh, look, have a look. Don’t move now.” Abel Whittemore, peeking through circular prescription lenses, pointed a finger toward an expanse of greenhouse glass. Two ten-year-old girls beside him turned to the windows and slapped their hands over their mouths and giggled.
“Shhh. See it?” whispered the forty-five-year old.
“Mmm hmm.”
Beyond the glass, a yellow ochre form, all legs and head, was sniffing at the building. A moose fawn stretched its neck as far as its vertebrae would allow, reaching over a protective fence. The black nose of the young animal twitched close to the glass. The man smiled as he watched the two children react to the comic face of the young creature just a dozen feet way. It seemed to be longing for the lush vegetation growing inside the building.
Abel rose early every morning and headed uphill to the greenhouse complex to await the sun. There were crops to check and temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels to record in the dozens of sprawling glass and polycarbonate grow-houses at Independency village, arrayed along the ledge-riddled glacial moraine country of Prospect Bluffs Township, Minnesota.
“Dad, can Jen and I go up to the CC? We want to help Penny make breakfast.”