Approaching the small clearing where the research cabin stood, Liz spotted a pile of material in the trail. It was full of grass fiber and rodent fur—scat, a great mass of it, fresh and still steaming with the internal heat of its owner. Grizzly excrement. Indistinct marks of the animal’s feet and claws were imprinted into the sopping soils and slipped away toward the little building just visible through the trees.
A wave of fear surged through her veins. She scanned the forest growth, the trees tall, trunks straight and without low branches to grip. There was no way to climb into them. The only safe haven anywhere nearby was the cabin, with its reinforced door and heavy bars on the windows. Bear or no bear, she had to get to it.
One deliberate step. Two. Liz crept along, taking pains to avoid twigs and step silently. She strained to hear any telltale sound, but the woods were filled with the quiet fluid trill of bird chatter.
On the edge of the clearing, Liz stopped to monitor the opening in the forest. The cabin porch beckoned just fifty feet away across the meadow. She stood perfectly still for several minutes, but nothing materialized. Taking a deep breath, she sprinted from the edge of the woods for the cabin steps, clamored up them, and threw the door latch. Once inside and feeling secure, she turned back onto the porch and surveyed the meadow once again from her new perch.
Luminous early morning sunlight slipped under the porch roof and cut friendly lodgepole-pine shadows across the wild lawn. Liz soaked in the golden aura. It was heavenly. She leaned against a porch post, crossed her arms and closed her eyes, basking in the pleasure of the moment and delighting in the banishment of her fears.
Easing her eyelids open, the color of cinnamon greeted her retinas. Along the margin of the forest, a large creature stood erect, its nose raised, nostrils sniffing the air intently. The rich warm color of the fur was pleasing to the eye, but the form of the grizzly triggered alarms in Liz’s soul.
The woman stared transfixed as the heavy animal lowered its head and faced directly toward her. The eyes of the two beings met and locked on one another. The bear’s orbs were a warm bronze, beautiful and awful to behold all at once. The human stood motionless and did not take her eyes off those of the great mammal. The beast stood its ground, too, unblinking.
In the confines of her skull, a high-pitched whine of tension sounded, but she stood as still as a cadaver.
The bear could not quite decipher what it was seeing. It snorted through its nose, then dropped down onto its front paws. The creature brought its great head down to the ground, raised a paw and scratched behind one ear. When it was done scratching, it shook its entire body, as if drying itself after a swim, then turned and shuffled to the spot where the trail entered the clearing. The great omnivore sniffed the ground there and swung its massive head back to glance at the cabin and the odd-smelling thing standing on the porch. Again the creature snorted, lazily turned away and lumbered up the path that Liz had just raced down. It was gone.
The scientist sat down on the porch steps and watched after the bear. A sensation of ease soon enveloped her, as if she had been awarded a blessed token from the gods. When in life, she pondered, did one ever have such a rendezvous with so grand a wild creature? Being in the presence of an adult grizzly? What would be analogous to that in the hurly-burly world of humans?
Liz flipped on the solar-powered lighting in the little research office and booted up her laptop. She plugged into the cabin’s satellite uplink technology. Systems were working well. She began a search for seismic data from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory system tied to the University of Utah, from the United States Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory near Portland, Oregon, and from UC Berkeley. Within half an hour, she had ferreted out a ream of data.
Triangulating the fresh figures, Liz pinned the epicenter of the new earthquake to Frank Island in Yellowstone Lake, seven miles north of the South Arm cabin. Preliminary figures placed the tremor at 6.6 on the Richter scale, nearly an order of magnitude larger than the 1975 quake at Norris Geyser Basin but of considerable less intensity than the massive Hebgen shock of 1959 that killed a dozen souls and dammed the Madison River to form grand Hebgen Lake. This new tremor, Liz mused, had been powerful enough to shift the eruption patterns of Yellowstone’s world-famous geysers and create or destroy thermal features all over the park.
More worrisome were the sudden uplift of the lands around Plover Point and the withdrawal of the lake waters from the shoreline. The geophysicist suspected the quake had caused the entire lake basin to tilt a few tenths of a degree. Tiltmeter data should back up her hunch, so she sought to retrieve it. Such immense forces might jeopardize the integrity of a massive, unstable geothermal dome that had been growing like a malignant tumor on the floor of the lake two mile south of Lake Village .
The mile-long formation—the inflated plain—bled superheated water into the lake depths, causing surface waters directly above to roil furiously. Liz wanted to drop thermal probes down into the massive swelling on the lake bottom. It was, she calculated, more than capable of a catastrophic blowout, similar to Holocene explosions that had created the well-known lake bottom deformations known as Mary Bay crater and Elliott’s Bay crater.
Nearby, the buried southern rim of the 640,000-year-old Lava Creek caldera lay restless. As Liz worked the data, minor tremors shimmied about the floor. She ignored the shaking but not a low rushing sound. She pulled her head away from the computer screen to listen. There it was, the hush of air moving, the voice of breath, lungs inflating and deflating in a mammoth torso.
Liz’s fingers went white on the keyboard. She trembled in her seat, then forced herself up from the desk and went to the door that stood ajar. Slowly, she brought an eye around the edge of the cabin door and gazed over the porch.
Cinnamon color again. The grizzly had returned. Its powerful body slung over its four massive clawed feet, the creature sniffed the cabin steps, pulling drafts of air into its body and releasing them in a rush. Liz inched back, trembling, and ever so slowly eased the door shut. Two heavy metal bear-bars leaned in brackets near the portal. She lifted one and set each pronged end into a metal receptacle on either side of the door. She put the second one in place, as well, then stood back from the wall.
Chapter Six
Raw red in the face from heat-soaked summer months under the South Dakota sun, Harland Sven was in no hurry to get the last loads of soybeans to Sweetly Growers Cooperative weighed and offloaded. In his dust-caked Ford F-150 pickup, he followed an old board-sided GMC farm truck, the one that last saw a sales lot in the late-seventies. Driven by a neighbor’s boy, the rig groaned and rocked under the weight of a load of soybeans as it wheeled south along old Route 212 first thing in the morning just a few feet west of the lapping waters of Big Stone Lake.
The lanky Swede, hair chopped to stubble in the fashion of cut silage-corn rows, ruminated on the lousy price his beans would fetch. Squinting through eye slits, lashes and brows bleached permanent white by the sun, he figured he’d give Coop manager Jim Bottomly a piece of his mind. He had to needle someone this morning. Might as well be Bottomly.
On the edge of Sweetly village, the farm truck pulled left off 212, ran the entrance lane past the defunct Sweet Spring Brewery to the agricultural coop and rumbled onto a weigh-station platform. Harland parked his F-150 in front of the simple corrugated steel-sided office, hunkered down beneath massive cylindrical concrete grain silos. He pushed through the steel door to find Jim Bottomly seated at an ancient wooden secretary, poking a manual adding machine with the blue-tinged fingers of one with emphysema.