Savage Run

20

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

July 5

It was dusk when the Old Man realized he had truly become evil.

The setting had nothing to do with it. The heavy evening sun had painted a wide bronze swath through the tall buffalo grass of the clearing below them and had fused through the lodgepole pines that circled the clearing like a spindly corral. Breezes so gentle they could barely be felt rippled across the top of the grass and looked like gentle ringlets on water. The air was sweet with pine and sage but there was an occasional whiff of sulfur from seeping, newly punctured pockets in a swampy hot spring flat where they had ridden the horses a few minutes before. And there was another smell, too. It was the smell of slightly rancid pork.

Earlier that day they had located Tod Marchand, attorney at law, near his tent on the bank of Nez Perce Creek. Marchand had been remarkably easy to find. He had checked in at the ranger station the day before at the South Entrance of the park and noted where he intended to camp. Tibbs had found the entry while the Old Man chatted with the female ranger and filled out the forms that permitted them to transport their newly acquired horse trailer and horses through the park.

They had ridden up on Tod Marchand just after noon, while Marchand was scrubbing his lunch plate clean with biodegradable soap. Marchand had looked back over his shoulder when he heard the horses approach, and stood up and turned around just in time for the butt of Charlie Tibbs’s rifle to crack down hard on the top of his head.

“Counsel, approach the bench,” Charlie Tibbs had said, without explanation, as Tod Marchand crumpled to the grass.

They had gagged and hog-tied Marchand and thrown him across the back of the Old Man’s saddle. They took the horses up into the trees far away from the trail and the creek-away from the places other hikers or trekkers might be.

Yellowstone was remarkably big and wild beyond the tourist traffic that coursed along the figure-eight road system in the park. As they rode up into the timber and over a rise, the sounds of the distant traffic receded, replaced by a light warm breeze wafting through the treetops. The chance of anyone seeing them, or of the two men stumbling upon another person, were remote.

Still, to the Old Man, Yellowstone Park was a disquieting place to do business. Despite unreasonable demands by environmentalists and mismanagement by the federal government, Yellowstone was a special place, in his opinion. It was somehow sacrosanct. It had just felt wrong to be riding through the lodgepole pine with a bound and gagged lawyer on his horse.

They had ridden down the slope to where the trees cleared and the creek wound through a draw with very high eroded banks. They let their horses droop their heads to drink. It was then that they heard a splash upstream, somewhere over the high bank and out of view. The instant they heard the sound, Charlie Tibbs slid his big.308 Remington Model 700 rifle out of his saddle scabbard. The Old Man fumbled for his pistol.

Within two minutes, the water on the stream was covered with floating feathers within a swirl of a dark oily substance. They watched the feathers float by in front of them. It was as if a duck had exploded on the water less than 100 yards away.

Both horses had begun to snort and act up. When the Old Man’s horse reared and turned back the way they had come, he muscled the horse around to face the water. The Old Man knew well enough that even experienced horses might be uncontrollable this close to bears.

They had quickly retreated back into the trees, tied off the horses, and tried to calm them. Marchand had been thrown to the ground when the Old Man’s horse spooked, but as Charlie said, he probably couldn’t feel it anyhow. Armed, they walked back down to the stream and cautiously climbed the bank. They heard muffled grunting and woofing even before they actually saw the bears-grizzlies, a sow and her two cubs. The sow was a shimmering light brown color with a pronounced hump on her back. Her snout was buried in the rotting bark of a downed tree, feeding on larvae. The cubs, already over a hundred pounds each, were further down on the tree trunk taking off shards of bark with lazy swipes of their paws. Apparently, the duck hadn’t been much of a meal.

Tod Marchand was propped against a tree trunk when he regained consciousness. The Old Man and Charlie had carried Marchand across the stream through a swampy meadow and into the timber on the other side of the slope. The bears had remained across the river. The first thing Marchand did when he awoke was pitch over sideways into the grass and throw up. When he was through, the Old Man helped him sit up again with his back against the tree. It took a while for Marchand to seem lucid.

The Old Man studied Marchand, while he waited for him to fully regain his senses. Marchand was, by all accounts, a good-looking man, the Old Man decided: tall, with thick blond hair cut into an expensive, sculpted, swept-back haircut. He was tanned and fit and he looked much younger than his fifty-three years.

The Old Man had, of course, seen his photograph in the newspapers and had watched him several times on television news shows. Tod Marchand was the most successful environmental lawyer in America when it came to winning court decisions. Marchand had been the lead attorney in the five-year case that forced the National Park Service to dismantle several recreational vehicle campgrounds because the area the campgrounds were located in was thought to be prime grizzly bear habitat. The RV campgrounds had, in fact, been within ten miles of where Marchand was camped.

The Old Man distinctly remembered a shot of Marchand standing outside the federal courthouse in Denver talking to reporters after successfully arguing for a halt to a multimillion-dollar gold mine about to be started up in southern Wyoming.

“Gold is a matter of perception,” Marchand had told reporters. “Gold for many of us is wildlife running free in untrammeled wilderness.”

Marchand had paused for effect and looked straight into a major network’s camera (he was so experienced at this sort of thing that he knew by sight which were the network’s cameras and which belonged to local stations), Our gold won, Marchand had said, which had since become a rallying cry.

Tod Marchand looked much different now, the Old Man thought. The lump on his head from Tibbs’s rifle butt was hidden under tinted layers of hair, but a single dark red track of blood from his scalp had dried along the side of Marchand’s sharp nose.

Tod Marchand also looked different because he was now tied up with a thin horsehair cord. The horsehair cord bit into Marchand’s shoulders in several places, and continued down his waist and then was crisscrossed around his legs from his thighs to his ankles.

Horsehair was good, Charlie had said, because the bears would eat every inch of it and leave nothing. To make sure the bears would be attracted, Charlie had bound thick slabs of raw, uncured back-bacon under each of Marchand’s arms and between his legs. The pork was pungent.

Now fully awake, Marchand looked slowly at the cord and the bacon. His thoughts were transparent. He was very scared, and not in a noble way, the Old Man thought. Marchand was scared out of his wits.

Charlie Tibbs walked past the Old Man and squatted down in front of Tod Marchand. Tibbs tipped his Stetson back on his head, then pulled an envelope with a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

“I found this in your pack,” Tibbs said, in his low deep drawl. “It says: ‘Dear Tod: We need your help fast. Run like the fucking wind.’ It is signed ‘Stewie.’ ”

Marchand’s eyes were white and wide. It reminded the Old Man of the look the horses had when they first smelled the bears.

“Then there are some directions to a cabin. This Stewie wouldn’t happen to be Stewie Woods, would it?” Tibbs asked. “How come you’re up here camping, if your celebrity client needs you so badly?” Tibbs said, not unkindly.

Marchand’s eyes darted from Tibbs to the Old Man and back.

“I’ve been planning this long weekend all year,” he said.

“Some pal you are.” Tibbs snorted. “Unless you’re not really sure that Stewie Woods is even alive. Unless you think someone mailed you this as a joke.”

Marchand quickly broke down and nodded his head yes. “It’s Stewie,” he said. “I know exactly where he’s at. I’ll tell you if you’ll let me go. I’ll never say a word about this to anyone.”

The Old Man dropped his eyes and stared at the ground for what became an interminable amount of time. Marchand shook visibly. Marchand looked to the Old Man for some kind of reassurance or humanity, but the Old Man refused eye contact. The Old Man knew Tibbs well enough to know that Tod Marchand had said exactly the wrong thing, and much too fast.

Finally, Tibbs swiveled slightly and looked back at the Old Man. “This is going to be a good one,” Tibbs said. “Maybe the best one yet.”

The Old Man nodded blankly. Charlie Tibbs, he suddenly knew, was a man beyond his own understanding. This would be ugly to watch. He was sure Tod Marchand felt the same way. The Old Man decided at that moment that things had gone too far. Maybe so far into evil he could never go back.

“I smell bacon.” Tibbs said, turning back around to Tod Marchand. “It makes me kinda hungry. D’you suppose those grizzlies over the hill smell it, too?”

Charlie Tibbs was eating piece after piece of beef jerky and drinking from a Thermos of iced tea. Periodically he would lift his binoculars to his eyes. Below them, in the swampy meadow, the grizzlies were eating Tod Marchand.

The sow had found him quickly after Tibbs had dumped the lawyer in the grass between her and her cubs and ridden away on horseback. She had killed Marchand by taking his entire head into her mouth and shaking it violently from side to side, like a puppy with a knotted sock. Marchand’s scream stopped so suddenly that it seemed to hang in the air like a lost ghost. A powerful swat from her paw had sent the body flying end over end. The strength of the bear was awesome.

“The cubs are feeding now,” Charlie Tibbs said, lowering the binoculars. “It would be a shame if those cubs ate every bit of the lawyer and nobody ever found him out there.”

Since they had ridden up on him that day, Tibbs always referred to Tod Marchand as “the lawyer.” He had never once spoken his actual name.

The Old Man felt sick. He had waved away the offers of jerky and iced tea by saying he thought he thought he was coming down with the flu.

“If folks just knew that the lawyer vanished and not that he was attacked by the grizzlies he saved, it would be a shame,” Tibbs said.

“I understood the first time,” the Old Man said with irritation.

Tibbs’s face had a way of going dead that had unnerved a lot of people. It unnerved the Old Man now.

“I just don’t like this, Charlie,” the Old Man said.

“It’s nature at work, is all,” Tibbs said, his face assuming life again.

Nature and four pounds of bacon, the Old Man thought.

“Far as I can tell those cubs gobbled that horse hair straight away,” Tibbs said, still peering through the binoculars. “No one’ll ever know he was tied up.”

I wonder who is impersonating Stewie Woods?” Tibbs asked suddenly, lowering the binoculars. It had become so dark that the Old Man could no longer make out the individual forms of the bears in the clearing, but he knew that Tibbs’s glasses gathered what little light there was, so he could still see. Tibbs also had a night-vision scope in his saddlebag. “Whoever he is, he was trying to draw the lawyer into some kind of situation.”

It was so still that the Old Man could hear the bears feeding, hear bones crunching.

“Who would do a thing like that?” the Old Man asked. His mouth was dry and he had trouble speaking. If Tibbs knew what he had been thinking, the Old Man figured he’d be in danger.

“Don’t know,” Tibbs shrugged.

“We couldn’t have screwed up with Stewie Woods, could we?”

Tibbs snorted. The question was beneath him.

From the clearing they could hear the sound of the two cubs fighting over something.

“I like this,” Tibbs said. “Great Grizzly Bear Savior Eaten by Bears in Yellowstone Park.”

“Yup,” the Old Man said, not agreeing, not disagreeing. He slowly stood up.

“Charlie, how much longer you going to wait here?”

“Couple a hours. Just to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?”

Tibbs didn’t answer. Long enough to make sure you see everything there is to see, the Old Man thought.

“I think I might ride back and get some sleep in the truck. My stomach’s doin’ flip-flops and I think I’m coming down with something.”

Tibbs leveled his gaze on the Old Man. The Old Man was glad it was almost dark, but knew he looked miserable anyway.

“It’s not a good idea to split up,” Tibbs said.

“Yeah, I know,” the Old Man said. “But it’s not a good idea to move in on that pretender tomorrow with me feeling like I do now. I need some rest.”

The Old Man sensed Tibbs giving consideration to the argument. Then without a word, Tibbs turned back to the bears.

“See you in a little while,” the Old Man said. “I’ll just stretch out in the horse trailer in some blankets. Don’t forget to wake me up.”

Tibbs said nothing. They both knew that the Old Man wasn’t going to get away, that he was in this until Charlie let him go. Charlie Tibbs had the keys to the truck, and the Old Man had never had a set. Tibbs didn’t offer them now, and the Old Man didn’t ask. They also knew how unlikely it would be for the Old Man to try to ride the horse away. Charlie was twice the tracker and horseman the Old Man was, and would be upon him within a few hours.

The Old Man mounted after being sure his horse had calmed down and likely wouldn’t bolt because of the bears. The horse was still spooked and white-eyed, but was under control.

Before he left, he looked over his shoulder. He could see Charlie Tibbs’s wide back in the moonlight, his shirt stretched tight between his shoulder blades. For a brief moment, the Old Man thought of how easy it would be right then to put a bullet in Tibbs’s back. Right into his spine, between the shoulder blades. Then he considered the possibility of the horse bolting as he fired, or of simply missing. He knew if either happened, it would be his last act on earth.

The Old Man had literally felt himself cross over a line and truly become evil. He knew it for a fact. There was nothing he could do to redeem himself in full. But he could, at least temporarily, stop the killing. He wasn’t doing it for Stewie Woods or Hayden Powell or Peter Sollito or Emily Betts or Tod Marchand. He still didn’t like what any of them stood for. He was doing it for himself.

Someday, in some place, he would need to answer for what he had done these past two months. He at least wanted to be able to tell the inquisitor about one good thing.

He shifted in his saddle and rubbed the right thigh of his trousers. The keys for Tod Marchand’s green Mercedes SUV, that the Old Man had found back at the Nez Perce Creek campsite, made a hard little ball in his pocket.