Throughout the month of April, Yellowstone beckoned the scientific community with a siren song of continuous tremors. Harmonic disturbances rattled park headquarters offices and soon-to-reopen village stores, campgrounds and inns. For the first time since the dawn of the millennium, when the Park Service closed many of the foot trails in Norris Geyser Basin because of ground temperatures as hot as boiling water, there was talk in the offices and down the halls about closing great stretches of terrain in the park for the tourist season, and not just the heavily damaged Bridge Bay marina compound and shattered Lake Village.
Every day brought new surface anomalies. The dormant spigots at largely forgotten Monument Geyser Basin were howling for the first time anyone could remember.
At Hell’s Half Acre along the Firehole River, sprawling Excelsior geyser blew out rocks and sinter debris from its football field-size crater and roared to a spectacular 300-foot eruption, the likes of which had not been recorded since the Hayden exploratory expedition took blurry tintype photographs thirteen decades in the past.
Away to the southwest, Fishing Cone, perched low in the water at the very edge of the shoreline, was unapproachable. Where anglers once caught fish in the lake and cooked them in a minute by dangling them into the little maw of the hot spring, violent, spasmodic jets of boiling water spiraled into the atmosphere.
The flooded realm beneath Yellowstone Lake was not at peace, either. Liz and her colleagues were now convinced that magma was upwelling, invading strata very close to the floor of the lake. All her probes, from West Thumb basin to Elk Point, were registering extraordinary heat levels. Data left no doubt that the lake bottom basins were bleeding torrents of superheated water into the depths. As troubling to researchers and Park officials as the surface thermal features was the propagation of miles of concentric ring fractures snaking through the landscape and slowly defining a vast convoluted oval shape nearly seventy miles across. Geologists, park employees and backcountry hikers stumbled upon the fractures with greater and greater frequency, yet it was only in the last few months that the true extent of them became known.
But it was Friday and the YVO lab staff and researchers were leaving for watering holes at Jackson Hole and Cody. Liz decided to vacate the headquarters offices and try for the Park Point cabin for an overnight or two to pick up notes, data CDs and some other things that she had left behind on several trips to the outpost.
Wesley Couch paced about the halls outside his office, reluctant to pack for a scheduled trip to Washington, DC. He was agitated, blood pressure medicine doing little to relieve his tension. He was tormented by the devil of indecision. All the data, all the withering seismic activity pointed to the onset of volcanic activity. But the seismic signals were so diffuse and covered an area of such grand scale that neither Wesley, the YVO team nor university geo-lab personnel across the West could decide precisely where the greatest danger lay.
He and others thought it prudent to recommend a general volcano advisory, the first such warning ever issued. But he balked. What areas of the park should be closed? Should he insist the administrators shut down the park altogether? If he authored an advisory now, with the summer season approaching, there would be hell to pay internally, within the park hierarchy. There was sure to be fallout from the region’s governors and from the congressional troika. Who would be called on…?
“Wesley.”
Wesley’s startle response shook him like a sock in a puppy’s mouth, he was so taken aback by the sudden call of his name.
“Wes, there’s some trouble at Obsidian.”
The voice was that of Liz Embree.
“God, you scared me, Ms. Embree.”
“Sorry, Wes. Parks is looking for you.”
“What for?”
“There’s been an untimely death. Several, actually.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Benjamin White Elk was road weary, his spinal ligaments stiff as cold highway tar at the end of a seven-hour drive south from the border country. He pulled his eighties-vintage GMC pickup into the lot beside the county nursing home in Livingstone, Montana. The severe rectangular building rambled across the prairie, its red brick facade unbroken by even a single decorative feature.
It was dinner hour at the nursing home. White Elk found his way to the dining hall and peered in. Under the flood of cheerless florescent lighting, the Blackfoot elder knew just where to look, across a sea of gray heads to the west corner, to a table that always captured the last rays of the setting sun at dinner. There he could see her, facing away from the room interior and out toward the prairie expanse. He could make out the features of his tiny mother, chewing her food in silence, watching the solar disc disappear into the folds of distant peaks.
White Elk crossed the room to the table where his mother sat. He seated himself without saying a word. For many seconds, the elder gazed at the profile of his centenarian mother. Great age served Native Americans well. The march of the years chiseled elaborate, sharp-edged features into the skin, valleys and ridges, canyons and steep slopes. Each reflected light or swallowed it up to create a face of stony contrasts. Fellow Native Americans saw these features as badges of wisdom, hard won and proudly displayed. To White Elk, it was an honor to be in the presence of his mother, a being who had lived a full century and whose grandparents had witnessed the Plains holocaust at the hands of white cavalry soldiers and land-hungry European immigrants.
Stretching his left arm, White Elk reached out to his mother and touched her lightly on the forearm. He said nothing. His mother did not turn to acknowledge her son’s touch, but a smile spread across her lips and she reached out with her right hand and placed it over his.
“Benjamin, my son,” said his mother very quietly.
“Hello, mother.”
The centenarian smiled yet sat as still as rock. “Benjamin.”
“Yes, mother.”
“I have a story to tell you.”
“You do, then?”
“Yes, I do. You must listen carefully. I have seen things.”
“Seen things? What is it you have you seen, mother?” White Elk asked softly.
The aged woman grasped the shawl about her shoulders and pulled it tight under her chin as if to ward off cold. Finally, she turned to look into the eyes of her son.
“Benjamin,” the old woman began in a voice little more than a whisper. “Your namesake visited me yesterday.”
“My namesake?”
“The white elk, Benjamin, the white ponoká, it came last evening while I ate dinner. It came to the window here.”
White Elk leaned forward to hear better, folding his hands before him.
“Last night, the earth moved again. It has moved many times now, many times since the fall. Last evening, the earth shook for a long time. Did you see the ceiling tiles? The cracks?”
“I did see, mother. The building has not done well.”
“Many tiles fell last night. Many of the people in the dining room were frightened. Some cried.”
“Yes, mother.”
“I did not. At the end of the shaking, a dozen ponoká came to stand by the building, right by the window where I was sitting. They were seeking shelter from danger, I think.”
“Yes, that could be.”
“The last one to come to the building was white, Benjamin. It was the great ponoká you saw as a young man.”
White Elk could see that his mother was completely serious. He had no doubt that she had seen what she said she had.
“Benjamin, the ponoká, the white one, he spoke to me. No one saw him but me and he spoke to no one but me. He spoke with his beautiful eyes.”