Extreme Instinct

NINETEEN

The helicopter pilot taking Jessica to Yellowstone had at first balked at taking her, a lone woman, into Yellowstone's wilderness area. She'd shown him her badge, explained to him that she worked for the FBI, and that she must get to Old Faithful Lodge at the greatest possible speed. He then wanted to take the time to sketch out a flight plan for the tower, and she told him it would delay them too much. It was then that she offered him twice his normal rate for a ferry to Yellowstone.

He agreed, and they began their journey together. Still, he remained skeptical of her purposes, the familiar paranoia about government types filtering in, she believed. With the rhythmic scream of the rotor blades overhead, the flume of whirring sound and vibration rocking the carriage of the chopper, they spoke to one another through the headphones.

"You got business in the park, huh? With the rangers, huh?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"Fronval know you're coming?"

"You know Fronval?" she asked, surprised.

"Doesn't everybody? Man's something of a legend in these parts. So, does he know you're coming?"

"Not yet, but when we're in range, I'd like to call Sam on the radio. Do you know Sam personally?"

"Sure, everybody whose ever rangered knows Sam," the pilot, who'd introduced himself as Corey Rideout, said, more curious about her now than ever.

"Oh, so you've been a ranger?"

"A lot of people in these parts go into the service. It's almost a rite of passage, you might say. But it gets tiresome after a time. It can be a lonely existence, 'specially in dead of winter at a ranger station. A man could go nuts, and some do." He looked at her again, studying her. Then he asked, "Where do you know Sam Fronval from?"

"Met him the last time I was at Yellowstone."

"Oh, so you've been to see Sam before? I get it. You're one of those Washington sanitizers, aren't you?"

"Sanitizer, me?"

"Sure, you want to sanitize the wilderness, as if it could be done! Make it safe for every little boy and girl whose parents cart them into the park in their trailers. You know it's impossible. When I was a park ranger, some years back, a tourist fella comes up to me and points at the thousand or so buffalo rooting around some hundred yards from a crowd of gawking onlookers. You know what this slicker asked me, lady? Doctor?"

"What's that, Mr. Rideout?"

"He says, 'Tell me, Ranger, these animals we're looking at, just rooting around out here… they couldn't be wild, right?' "

" 'They are that, sir,' I told him.

" 'No way,' he tells me. if they were wild, you couldn't just have them running around loose.' The man was an injury waiting to happen," Rideout finished.

Jessica laughed appreciatively.

"There're four thousand bison in the park, compared to seven hundred fifty bears, so visitors see a lot more buffalo than grizzly, but either way, many of them have only seen such animals through Disney or MGM studio releases, and they think they're as cute and mindless as, as say, Thumper and Bambi. Fools try to put their kids on the back of a buffalo to get a Kodak moment. The moment the two-thousand-pound, unpredictable, and belligerent animal erupts, they get more Kodak moments and home video funnies than they bargained for and someone dies, usually in great distress because the nearest hospital trauma center is in Bozeman. So they sue the park, and so Washington pencil-pushers hear about it's happened again, and a hue and cry goes up to make people safe from wilderness, to sanitize places like Yellowstone now that so many people visit annually."

"I'm not here to sanitize the park," she assured Rideout.

"Then what's the big rush to get there and see Fronval? Wait a minute: You're here about the brucellosis, sure, aren't you? Now, that figures. The government sends a government doctor to Yellowstone to stamp a USDA approval on the herd, right?"

"Herd?" she asked, confused. "What herd? Heard what?"

"The park bisons. You were sent to keep the cattlemen and ranchers thinking everything's being taken care of, right?"

"Oh, I see." Jessica had heard of the unfortunate outbreak of brucellosis among the buffalo, a disease ranchers and farmers across America had done battle with for more than sixty years, and they'd nearly eradicated the nasty livestock disease, one of the reasons why milk was pasteurized. The fight against brucellosis by American stockmen, ranchers, farmers, and the USDA was no less than a miracle victory. In the meantime, another great success story had also unfolded-the story of the century of conservation effort on behalf of the American bison that once numbered fifty million and had been hunted to extinction levels in the nineteenth century. Now the breed had been rescued from its extinction-level population of six hundred remaining in 1889, the largest herd at the time a mere twenty-one, who, coincidentally, grazed and lived in Yellowstone. Yellowstone's free-ranging buffalo herd now numbered some four thousand, and Yellowstone buffalo experts boasted it was the largest free-ranging buffalo herd in the country. It was also the only herd that, throughout its history, had remained free. Today the park was proud of its herd. But now it was estimated that half of the herd was infected by brucellosis, and there was no cure short of destroying the animals.

The ranchers and cattlemen had a strong argument. For sixty years they'd fought what was commonly called undulant fever, and now it was almost nonexistent in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Only forty-six livestock herds still carried the disease, as compared to 124,000 infected herds in 1957. In a couple of years, the USDA had an excellent chance of completely eradicating the disease in all fifty states.

Yellowstone, the nation's first national park, had a history of becoming ground zero for many a fight, and now it was ground zero for this puzzling debate in which park rangers believed the buffalo and its disease posed no threat to surrounding livestock, and ranchers felt their herds and profits threatened by the infected buffalo. The media, conservationists, and cattlemen were all asking the same perplexing question: How do you eradicate the last remnants of a disease, when it's carried by a species you want to save?

"I guess there is more than one creature I'd like to sanitize the park of," she teased, "but I have no cure for the one, only the other."

"Nobody's got a cure for that buffalo disease. But what do you mean, two creatures you'd like to clear outta the park?"

"I'm hunting for the worst kind of animal in the woods, Mr. Rideout."

"A man? You… you're on a manhunt?"

"I'm with the FBI, not the U.S. Interior or the Department of Parks and Recreation."

"A manhunt. Wow, I'm part of a manhunt. Wait'll I tell Eleanor and the kids about this one. They won't believe it."

After this, Rideout burned with curiosity about her, her reason for traveling alone into Yellowstone after this killer he'd read about in the morning papers concerning him greatly. He'd worked up to what he wanted to say, and he finally said it. ''Just the same, even if you are trained in such matters as detection and apprehension, Dr. Coran, someone enters a wilderness area like Yellowstone every day without the least preparation for its special dangers. I mean Yellowstone down there is more than just forty thousand elk, four thousand bison, ten thousand hot springs, and two hundred lakes. It's also full of grizzly bears that run around as freely as you or me."

"I'm tracking a more dangerous animal than grizzlies," she replied.

"Yeah, so you told me, but once you're down there in this.. this resource, remember, it's not a zoo or an amusement park. Danger is a part of the resource."

"I know the drill, Mr. Rideout."

"You do?"

"Wilderness is impersonal."

He was mildly impressed by this, smiling. ''Nature demands we pay attention, doesn't it? Whether we're putting out to sea or an overland trek."

"I know that there's good reason for why the rangers in such areas as Yellowstone preach rules."

"Good," he replied with little conviction, as if he didn't believe her just because she said so.

"Mr. Rideout, I know it's fool's play to walk amid standing burned trees from a forest fire, even one that ended years before… that such dead trees routinely fall on people because they come down without a sound. I know that hiking alone is deadly and again foolish. I know that wearing any sort of perfume can lure a bear faster than it can a man, and the aroma alone can turn you into his next meal, and that the bear wouldn't let a tent or a campfire stand in his way, that in fact nothing stands in the way of the most consummate eating machine nature's ever devised."

"Good, very good," he replied, conviction taking hold now.

She added for Rideout's benefit, "Wilderness doesn't care whether you live or die, and it does not care how much you love it."

"Spoken like someone who's been there."

"I have. I've hunted in some of the greatest wilderness areas left us. But this is the first time I've hunted a human in one."

This was met with an appreciative silence.

The pilot had finally gotten it, Jessica thought. Rideout couldn't tell Jessica Coran anything she didn't already know about this vast wilderness below them. She knew that there were disappearances in the national parks all the time, every day, and there were accidents involving the beasts and natural formations, and the natural flora when some fool ingested a poisonous plant in any given park, and that most of these deaths might have been avoided if and only if what rangers called "natural curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity" in the national parks could be stopped, but everyone knew that as the impossibility of all impossibilities. Still, of late, along with fire-related deaths in and around the parks, there had been a rash of deaths this year like nothing the major parks had ever faced before. No doubt Sam Fronval had already chalked it up to the turn-of-the-century blues, that people carried their phobias and eccentricities with them into the park, and there was no way for him to get them to check their deadly peculiarities at the gate.

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.

It was as if this place could not be touched by such gross evil, but Fronval had to know better. Still, it was a vacation destination for hundreds of thousands annually. People came here to view the fantastic geological wonders of the infinitely varied hydrothermal features of this region, from the obsidian sand at Black Sand Geyser Basin to the vivid blue, giant eye of Morning Glory Pool in Upper Geyser Basin. People came here to marvel at the extraordinary silica that dissolved in hot water precipitates as the minerals brought from the depths of the planet cooled to create grottoes and fountains and caverns turned inside out. Algae did the rest, painting the geyserite in all the hues of the rainbow. Rainbows captured in rock, strewn about the earth.

Jessica recalled in particular the spectacular Minerva Terrace at Mammoth hot springs as an outstanding example of the variegated patterns that travertine formed as it was deposited on the surface of the cooling waters of the hot spring. The place looked like a limestone cave turned inside out. The place made the clumsiest of amateur photographers suddenly gifted.

People were indeed here to play, to party, to have fun, and not to be concerned about what went on in the world at large. The fact that there was a serial killer at work, and that he was winding his way from vacation spot to vacation spot here in the West, and that he was bent on taking people's lives by burning them to death for some hideous purpose no one would ever fully understand except for the killer himself, remained of no consequence to the typical tourist or merchant preying upon the tourist. And God forbid that Jessica's manhunt should interfere with business as usual here.

Oddly, however, Jessica's radio call to Fronval below seemed to ''devil'' the helicopter pilot more than anyone on the ground. Fronval had promised to put extra men on alert in and around Old Faithful Lodge, the grand hotel of the park, within shouting distance to Old Faithful, where every thirty to thirty-five minutes, the magnificent, most famous geyser of them all spouted its hot whale spray to an adoring American public.

Still, Fronval promised Jessica a full green light when she arrived by having her way cleared, pleased to be hearing from her after all these years. Fronval had kept up with her career, and she his. He remained one of Yellowstone's best loved and most respected rangers.

Coming back to Yellowstone would, under normal circumstances, have been a balm to her, a reunion for her heart and soul. The place held a spectacular appeal that no words could capture; rather, it silenced men-and even women, she jokingly thought. It was a spiritual place, a place to renew body and soul. Perhaps this was its appeal to one Feydor Dorphmann as well.

Off the left side of the helicopter now, she could see the billowing clouds rising from hot water pools, searing hot springs that welled up out of the earth's crust at temperatures of more than 180 degrees, 205 degrees in other places here. Enough boiling water to scald the entire human race, she thought.

A handful of the pools were swimmable, but every hot spring in the park remained outlawed, off-limits to everyone, since only a trained park ranger could tell the difference between a safe and a deadly pool, and even some of these so-called experts had, on occasion, become victims of the pools and their own bad or impaired judgment, ignorance, or possible suicidal thoughts.

Jessica was immediately shocked back to the present when Corey Rideout shouted, "There's a fire down there at the lodge!" Rideout pointed down toward the lodge.

Jessica stared down at the scene, certain there lay a body in the flames below, a body that the killer, in his obsession, knew only as number seven. ''Damn him… He is here. He is here!"