Off the Grid Page 7

  This five-year-old, 550-pound male grizzly was another matter. Some males, known as silvertips because their heavy coats eventually looked frosted, reached eight hundred to a thousand pounds and could be eight to nine feet tall when standing up. A single swipe from their three-inch razor-sharp claws could disembowel a horse. They had no natural predators. Jessica White or Marcia Mead couldn’t provide a good reason why it had left Grand Teton Park on its own and had subsequently covered so much ground. That it had apparently stalked and attacked Bub Beeman would make it—and them—infamous. A fed bear is a dead bear, Joe thought again.

  “Ursus horribilis,” Joe said, citing the scientific name for the grizzly.

  “We don’t use that name,” White said.

  “Of course you don’t,” Joe said. “If you don’t say it out loud, it can’t mean ‘horrible bear.’ Right?”

  • • •

  “I HEARD A THEORY about why the grizzly bears are acting the way they are,” Joe said as they probed deeper into the forest. “I heard it from an old hunting guide. He wasn’t a biologist and I don’t think he even finished high school, but he’d spent his life hunting elk and bighorn sheep in the most rugged country in Wyoming. Want to hear it?”

  White sighed and said, “Sure. I love these old unscientific mountain-man theories.”

  Joe smiled and said, “His theory was that by overstudying grizzly bears we’re creating a whole new and more dangerous strain of them.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  Joe continued anyway. “His theory was that the bears are constantly being tranquilized, transported, measured, weighed, and tracked. From when they’re cubs there are people knocking them out and checking their teeth, then buckling tracking collars on them. These bears, which maybe a hundred years ago stayed as far away from humans as they could get because they might get shot on sight, now grow up with people sticking their hands in their mouths and crowding everything they do. They no longer have a built-in fear of humans, and why should they? Besides, maybe we taste good and we’re easy to kill because we no longer think of them as ‘horrible bears.’”

  “That’s ridiculous,” White said with heat. “Are you saying people should go back to killing them on sight? That’s probably what your old mountain man would want to do.”

  “I’m not sure what his solution was,” Joe said. “I just thought it was an interesting theory.”

  “He never told you his solution?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.

  “He died before he could,” Joe said. “A grizzly bear killed him in his hunting camp last fall.”

  “Oh, very funny,” she said. Then she thought about it and her tone changed. “Last fall? Was it up near Dubois?”

  “Yup.”

  “GB-38. I wasn’t tracking him, but the other research team said that the old man hadn’t hung his camp meat in the trees far enough away from his tent. They said GB-38 must have been drawn to that elk camp because of that man’s bad practices.”

  “That must have been it, all right,” Joe said.

  “If you’re being sarcastic . . .” she began, but stopped speaking in midsentence because she noticed Joe had dropped the subject and was pointing off to the side of the skinny game trail they were on.

  • • •

  THE GROUND WAS CHURNED UP between the bases of a half-dozen pine trees as if someone had brought in a piece of heavy machinery. At the edge of the disturbance was a large mound of fresh dirt, dry branches, and turned-up mulch.

  Twenty feet from the mound, a scoped hunting rifle was leaned carefully against a tree trunk, as if someone had taken the rifle from his shoulder, propped it against the tree, and started to relieve himself or light a cigarette.

  Joe whispered, “You know that sometimes they bury their meat in a cache for later.”

  White nodded, her eyes wide. “Do you think he’s in there?” she asked, gesturing to the mound.

  “Yup,” Joe said. He could see glimpses of bloody flesh and clothing through the crosshatched branches.

  To confirm that they were where they should be, she asked Mead, back at the van, to read the coordinates.

  “Yes,” Mead said. “You’re right on top of the volunteer location.”

  Joe bent over and dug a GPS tracking unit from the upturned soil.

  “Is this the one you gave to Bub?” he asked quietly.

  She nodded that it was.

  Her radio crackled alive. “Jess, GB-53 is coming back. Can you hear me?”

  She raised the radio. “Yes, I can hear you. Are you sure about GB-53?”

  “I’m sure. He’s coming fast.”

  Joe said, “He knows we found his cache . . .”

  • • •

  ROJO TUGGED BACK on the lead rope in Joe’s hand and snorted through his nostrils. The gelding could either hear the grizzly coming or smell its scent. Rojo’s eyes showed white as they rolled back in his head.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Joe said, trying to calm his horse.

  “What do we do?” White asked with pleading eyes.

  “Get ready,” Joe said. He managed to coax Rojo to the side of the trail and he quickly tied him off around the trunk of a spruce.

  “I can hear him coming,” White said, fumbling for the bear spray she had clipped to her belt. She mishandled the canister and it fell to the ground. “Oh my God . . .”

  Joe could hear him, too. GB-53 was coming up the trail like a freight train, snapping branches and shouldering through dense brush. There was a guttural woof-woof-woof that sent Rojo into a kicking fit. Joe wasn’t sure his horse wouldn’t break the lead rope or pull the tree down on top of them all. Needles in the pine tree rained down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw White scramble for the canister and inadvertently kick it farther away from herself.

  Joe had his bear spray canister in his right hand and his shotgun in his left. The bear was coming so fast he didn’t know which one to toss aside. He could feel the ground vibrate through the soles of his boots.

  Glimpses of a heavy, low-to-the-ground dark brown form strobed through the trees to the south. The speed of the bear was incredible, and Joe recalled that a grizzly at full speed could run down and catch a quarter horse in full gallop.

  There was no way they could get away before the bear was on them.

  What happened next took place in seconds.

  The grizzly crashed through the brush less than fifteen yards away and stopped. Joe could see the bear’s tiny eyes set in its hubcap face and the nascent hump on its back. The short fur around its mouth was tinged pink with dried blood—Bub Beeman’s blood. The plastic GPS collar was partially visible on the bear’s thick neck. The grizzly rocked back and looked like a five-hundred-pound fist ready to strike a fatal blow.

  Joe sensed confusion from the bear. The grizzly had three targets in front of it—Jessica White, Rojo, and Joe—and it wasn’t sure which one to attack. Jessica White screamed and flailed her arms in the air, one of two methods that supposedly worked to spook a bear. The other was playing dead. No one seemed certain of the correct method. Joe glanced over to see the dropped can of bear spray was still beyond White’s reach.

  GB-53 hunched its front shoulders and leaned its head back and roared, a sound Joe knew would haunt him in his dreams, if he ever dreamed again. His heart raced and he could barely get a breath.

  Without thinking, Joe raised his own canister of bear spray, thumbed off the safety catch, and pulled the red trigger. It hissed and blew out a cone-shaped fountain of red mist toward the grizzly. He knew that the canister supposedly worked at thirty feet for nine seconds and that the spray itself was packed with capsaicinoids—superconcentrated red pepper.

  The cloud of red spray enveloped the bear and it roared again, then yelped like a kicked dog while it spun a hundred and eighty degrees and rocketed back down th
e trail to the south.

  It was gone.

  • • •

  PINE NEEDLES STILL RAINED around Joe as Rojo flung himself back and the rope snapped with a crack like a pistol shot. Joe realized, when the sound jarred him, that he was still pressing the trigger of the bear spray even though it was empty. The spray can continued to hiss.

  Branches snapped in the forest as Rojo ran north and the grizzly stormed south.

  Joe took a deep breath now and closed his eyes for a moment. His heart pounded and his limbs burned with adrenaline. He lowered the canister and let it drop to the ground.

  “I thought we were going to die,” White said.

  “So did I,” Joe said. His voice was thin and reedy.

  “I dropped my bear spray and I think I need a change of pants.”

  Joe grunted.

  “I also thought you were going to use your shotgun.”

  “Spray seemed like it would work better,” Joe said. “What if I missed or wounded him? He might have kept coming.”

  “You made the right call,” she said, hunkering down until she was in a squatting position. She was feeling the aftereffects of pure terror as well. He could tell by the way her hands shook as she tried to clip her bear spray canister back on her belt.

  “Maybe,” Joe replied, turning and squinting to the north. “I wonder where my horse went.”

  • • •

  BUB BEEMAN’S MUTILATED BODY was under the mulch and branches. Joe could smell blood and viscera as he got close to the mound, and he photographed the crime scene with his phone before he disturbed it. To be sure that Beeman wasn’t still somehow alive, Joe leaned down and reached into a gap in the cover to see if he could find the hunter’s throat to check for a pulse. Jessica White stayed on the trail as if it somehow provided a safe haven. She obviously had no desire to see up close what a grizzly bear could do to a man.

  “Can you track it?” she asked Mead over her radio with a panic-tight voice. “Is it coming back?”

  “No, it’s still going south. What happened?”

  “GB-53 was right in front of us . . . I could literally look into his eyes . . .”

  Joe overheard from her radio conversation with Mead that Sheriff Reed and his search-and-rescue team had arrived. So had Rojo, who had come running from the forest with empty stirrups flapping against his sides. One of Reed’s deputies who had horses of his own caught Rojo and led the sweat-soaked gelding into Joe’s horse trailer.

  • • •

  “WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM,” White said after a muted but intense conversation with either Mead or Frink.

  “Another one?” Joe said, still feeling around inside the pile. His fingers were sticky with warm blood. He’d located one of Beeman’s wrists, but he couldn’t detect a pulse. Now he was working his way up the body toward the head. He tried to step outside himself and not think about what he was doing.

  “GB-53’s GPS unit is about to run out of power,” she said. “We had it set on high output so we could follow it in real time, but it’s getting so we can hardly detect a signal.”

  Joe half heard what she was saying. His fingertips had found the sharp ridge of Beeman’s collarbone.

  “The power supply is so low we can’t choke it back remotely. It will keep sending out that high-frequency signal until it just . . . stops. We’ve got to find that bear fast and replace the batteries,” she said with alarm. “If the collar goes dead, we won’t have any idea where he is.”

  Joe closed his eyes and tuned her out completely in order to concentrate. He thought he’d felt something faint, a kind of rhythmic flutter, in Beeman’s neck.

  And there it was again.

  He said, “Forget all that right now. Tell Sheriff Reed that Bub’s alive—barely. He needs to get his team here so we can get Bub to the clinic before we lose all of our light.”

  “But—”

  Joe spoke sharply. “Forget about your bear for now. No one’s going to tranquilize that bear so you can put new batteries in the collar. If they find it, they’ll kill it. Right now, we need to try and save a man’s life.”

  8

  Joe returned to his small house on Bighorn Road after midnight. He was exhausted and it took another fifteen minutes after parking his pickup and trailer in the front to unload and unsaddle Rojo and lead him to the corral out back, where he threw him some hay. The only occupant of the house still awake, it seemed, was their Corgi/Lab mix, Tube, who rushed from window to window to watch Joe’s progress. The mixed-breed dog could barely lift his snout over the windowsill.

  When Joe got to the front door, he let Daisy in ahead of him and the two dogs bumped noses. Daisy was exhausted as well and collapsed in a heap a few feet out of the mudroom, where Joe left his boots and jacket.

  The house was quiet except for the murmur of the television in the living room. He hadn’t expected anyone to wait up for him that late, but he still felt a mixture of both guilt and loneliness when he crossed through the room toward the kitchen in his stocking feet. He’d been thinking about a double bourbon for hours and, by God, he was going to have one.

  Marybeth sat up on the couch with a start and her sudden movement made him jump. He hadn’t seen her there.

  “Finally,” she said, brushing blond hair out of her eyes. She was attractive without makeup, Joe thought, but her eyes were wild for a moment until she seemed to realize where she was.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. She usually woke up slowly.

  “Bad dream is all,” she said. “What time is it?”

  Joe looked at his watch. “One.”

  “One,” she echoed. Then, with disappointed finality: “Your birthday is over.”

  “Yup.”

  She started to speak, but something caught her eye and made her stop short. “Joe, is that blood on your clothes?”

  He looked down. His red sleeves were stained black and his Wranglers were crusty and stiff with it. “I guess it is.”

  She was used to him coming home in clothes covered with mud, grease, and sometimes animal blood, fat, and hair. But this was human blood. Bub Beeman’s blood.

  “Take all that off in the mudroom,” she said. “I’ll bring you a robe.”

  He turned on his heel as instructed while she peeled off the blanket she’d slept under and headed up the stairs to their bedroom.

  • • •

  THEY SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, Joe with his bourbon and Marybeth with a glass of wine.

  “Good birthday pie,” he said. “Thanks for baking it. Peach is my favorite.”

  “It’s also a little weird, but the girls liked it.”

  “Maybe we can start a new tradition.”

  “Maybe.” She smiled.

  April, nineteen years old, had come home for the night for Joe’s birthday party that never happened. She’d stayed over and was asleep in her old bed. She now shared an apartment in Saddlestring with another girl her age and was saving up money to attend community college starting the spring semester. She had gotten her old job back at Welton’s Western Wear after fully recovering from injuries she’d received the previous spring. Both Joe and Marybeth were cautiously thrilled to observe that she was once again on track. The good April was back.

  Lucy, seventeen, was a junior in high school and had just been voted homecoming queen, although she seemed strangely ambivalent about it. Lucy was hardwired to be sunny and caring and blond. She was a social butterfly and not very concerned about college or what would come next, which frustrated Marybeth. The challenge of paying for more daughters in college concerned her.

  Sheridan, twenty-two, was a senior at the University of Wyoming and she’d decided to change her major to criminal justice. Because of that change, she’d need to attend a fifth year to nail down all the right credit hours. She couldn’t make it home for Joe’s birthday, which was just
as well, he thought, since he hadn’t, either. He’d been meaning to pin her down and ask her what her plans were post-college, since she was always very vague about them. Her offhand comments to Marybeth about “taking a year off to travel or really get into falconry” had not been enthusiastically received.

  Joe hadn’t yet wrapped his mind around what it would be like in a year not to have daughters in the house during school. He was pretty sure Marybeth couldn’t quite imagine it either, although she’d surely thought about it more than he had. It had been years, Joe thought, since he’d actually been able to use the downstairs bathroom, because it seemed there was always a daughter or two in it.

  • • •

  “SO THE GRIZZLY BEAR is where?” Marybeth asked. Joe had kept her informed of what he was doing throughout the evening and night.

  He shrugged. “No one knows. They lost his signal.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “It isn’t. We have to wait to see if someone reports him.”

  “How could a battery just run out like that?”

  Joe explained the situation and the circumstances.

  He told her he’d overheard a couple of members of the sheriff’s search-and-rescue team opining that he should have killed the grizzly instead of hitting it with the bear spray.

  “Did you explain yourself to them?” Marybeth asked.

  “Nope. They’re young and gung ho. They don’t realize I’ve had a few go-rounds with grizzly bears that don’t die easy. They have no idea what kind of havoc a wounded griz can create.”

  She sighed with frustration. He knew it annoyed her when he didn’t explain his actions well to others.

  “Is there more pie?” he asked.

  • • •

  “AND BUB BEEMAN?”

  Joe sat back and sighed. “He died on the way to the clinic. I honestly don’t know how he even survived the attack. His wounds were awful,” he said, involuntarily shivering when he recalled them. “People don’t realize what kind of damage those claws and teeth can do.”