Suddenly another jay appeared, then another. Winnie was in a state of wonder. “I can’t believe this. They’re so tame.”
Pelee chimed in. “Whiskey jacks come to see me all the time. They love me and I love them.”
“I love them, too,” said Jennifer, the first words she had spoken since crawling out onto the ledges.
Winnie watched the children as they patiently coaxed the big gray jays to sit in their hands while the birds nabbed a morsel and gobbled it down. In her adult life, she had not once shared a private moment like this with little humans reveling in the joy of being alive in so magical a setting. The apparent danger of sitting on the cliff ledge no longer troubled her. The rocks were stable enough. This was one moment she was not going to let dribble away unappreciated. She savored the seconds.
The woman leaned over to Abel and sought his attention. He pulled his eyes away from the kids and the birds and glanced over at her.
“You know, Abel,” Winnie purred, stretching her arms out and dropping her hands atop her head, “I haven’t had a day like this in a dozen years. This has been a delight. Thank you for inviting me.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The cell phone next to Liz’s bed jingled to life. Startled awake, she slapped the device down to her covers. She fumbled with it, flipped it open and stared at the illuminated call panel as if in trance. Grunting, she answered: “This is Liz.”
“Ms. Embree, it’s Jamie Hebert. Sorry to wake you,” rasped the voice of the park biologist.
“Jamie? What is it? What time….”
“Things are happening here.”
“Where’s here?”
“I’m on the lake below Signal Point at the outflow from Brimstone Basin, down where the ice has gone out. I’ve been on the lake for several days monitoring a big fish kill here.”
“Why did you call me at this hour?”
“Listen, something big is underway. I set up a spike camp on the point three days ago, on the shoreline. I had to move the tent today. The lake shore is drowning.”
Liz shook her cranium to loosen the film of sediment in her brain. “Jamie, you have water in camp?”
“I went to sleep Tuesday night and things were fine. When I awoke yesterday morning, water was up to the tent flap. All around me, water was infiltrating the grasses, the sedges. I’m telling you, I could see the water creeping eastward. It’s been going on all day. I’ve moved my spike camp back fifty feet into the pine, maybe a vertical foot or two higher.
“That’s, ah, that’s remarkable?” Liz rocked out of the bed sheets and placed her feet on the cold floor.
“There’s more to it. I turned in tonight once the sun went down. Liz, the water is now at my feet.”
“What?”
“You have to get down here and have a look at this lake. There are some big new fumaroles steaming away a quarter of a mile from here. They’ve just opened up with a bang. There’s a dense fog over the water. The place reeks like hell and it’s heating up underfoot. The ice is going out like lightning. We’ve never ever had ice out at the end of March.”
“Okay, okay, Jamie, let me get myself together here and get down to you. Where exactly are you?”
“I’m at the lake below the new research outpost, just off the Thoroughfare trail, near Alluvium Creek.”
“I can’t get down the Thoroughfare with the car.”
“You can four-wheel, can’t you?”
“Yes, but….”
“You can get through, Ms. Embree. The pack trail was widened a little last summer so researchers could get to the cabin more easily, now that it’s outfitted with equipment. The trail is packed hard right now by snowmobile groomer. It will support you.”
There was silence on other end, then a low hum. “Jamie, Jamie, you there?” A modest shaker passed under Liz’s feet.
“Tremor!” the biologist exclaimed.
“That’s Flat Mountain fault, Jamie. It’s been making noise day and night. You’re in that newly discovered fault extension. It’s running right under you.”
“I guess. This place has been shaking all day. When I try to get some sleep, I can make out the tremors very well. Poor man’s massage.”
“Harmonics, Jamie,” Liz said, drifting with fatigue.
The roar of a small ordnance explosion rifled through the receiver.
“Jamie, Jamie, what was that?” yelled Liz into the mouthpiece. A jolt passed under the woman’s feet.
“What in the hell was that?” the biologist yodeled through the hiss of a dragon. “Got something here, lots of steam. God, we’ve got something big.”
The thunder of the explosion spun the park biologist around. As he turned, a white superheated genie materialized, swelled and rocketed into the heavens, 100, 200, 300 feet. In the lake, countless splashes pocked the surface, as rock fragments, violently blown away from the terrain, were ejected away to the northwest.
“Look at that!”
Yammering into the phone: “What do you see, Jamie?”
“What’s going on? I have never!”
Funnels of steam erupted along a fissure, marching toward the northeast. As the biologist stood stuttering, the horizon coughed out a parade of ghosts, boiling up out of the crust and flashing into the atmosphere in columns. Close to the shore of the lake, upwelling water burped massive opaque steam bubbles. The man dropped his phone and slammed his hands to his ears as the screech of superheated steam burrowed into his head.
The wail of roaring steam in the phone earpiece catapulted Liz into action. She didn’t remember dressing, hastily shouldering some gear and diving in behind the wheel of her car. She rammed her foot down on the accelerator but the vehicle promptly spun out and pivoted one-eighty degrees around on black ice that had accumulated under the rear tires late the day before.
“Whoa. Careful, careful!”
Liz piloted the Forester away from the restored officers’ quarters of old Fort Yellowstone and motored into the cavern of the night east toward Tower Junction and south. As she drove, the car bounced over fracture cracks in the road surface and rocked occasionally as fresh, moderate tremors swept through the landscape and undulated beneath the road like a serpent on its belly in a hurry to get somewhere.
Yellowstone was galloping. Against the night sky, the tops of the evergreens swayed as pulse after pulse of earth tremor rippled through the surface of the park. South of Park Point and stretching eastward toward the Absaroka uplands, lake water infiltrated new fissures being wedged apart by upwelling magma below. In the depths of the cracks, lake waters percolated down to meet the fires of Hades. As biologist Jamie Hebert made his phone call, superheated steam from the depths blew away earthly shackles in a small but violent hydrothermal explosion. Plumes rocketed into the night sky, first one, then two more, then what seemed like a dozen, all in a linear plane, pulling way to the northeast toward the little explored Brimstone Basin thermal fields.
The biologist blanched at the spectacle. As the seconds stumbled over themselves, the near horizon disintegrated, foamed and writhed as the giant steam columns launched themselves in a parallel line, building a skyscraping bridal-veil curtain shot through with white moonlight brilliance. The atmosphere shrieked with the whine of fighter jets, so loud that the park employee could not tolerate the crushing decibels. He had no choice but to cover his ears and try to leave the area.
Boiling with heat, the geyser-like columns billowed in the freezing air. The atmosphere quickly loaded with thick cloud vapor. A heavy cloak of fog descended and masked out features in the landscape with its flat silver dazzle. Suddenly the biologist was enveloped by an altogether unknown phenomenon, a warm air whiteout. Dimensions disappeared in a shining ocular blindness. His senses betrayed him. There was no way to orient, no logical course to take. Panicking, the biologist decided he must strike out in a direction he thought would be toward his snowmobile and away from the geological gladiators about him.