Glacier National Park (11 page)

“Me too!” Dad said.

The Parkers huddled close in the slowly fading evening light. A few drops of water began plunking down. James looked up. “Hey, it’s raining!”

The scattered clouds spit out a few more drops.

“Maybe this will help the fires,” Morgan said.

“Maybe,” Mom replied. “But they’ll need a heck of a lot more than this.”

Dad looked up at the nearly dark sky. “Come on, rain!” he shouted.

The family stood up and slowly trudged back to camp. “Better get some rest,” Mom said while yawning. “We’ve got a long drive home to California tomorrow.”

It was a rainy late autumn day in the central
California coastal town of San Luis Obispo. Morgan and James were off from school for Thanksgiving break.

As James surfed the Internet, his thoughts drifted back to Glacier.

He left his computer and wandered over to Morgan’s room. Her door was open. “Can I borrow your CD of Glacier pictures?”

Morgan stood up. “Sure. Can I look at them with you?”

Morgan put their CD photo album into her computer. Together, she and James sifted through pictures of their summer vacation. “It makes me a little homesick for the park,” Morgan said.

After looking at a few more pictures, James walked back to his room. He sat at his desk and stared out the window at the rain dripping down.
Weather
, James thought.

James’s class had recently studied weather, and he knew some websites to check. James pulled one up on the Internet and clicked on the Glacier region. He scrolled down for a local forecast of the area.

One of the radar maps had a blue coloring over Glacier Park. “Yeah!” James called out.

A moment later, Morgan walked into James’s room. “What’s going on? I heard you yell.”

“It’s snowing in Glacier.”

James showed Morgan the precipitation map of Montana. “I wonder if the fires are all out now,” he said.

“Or if the snow is replenishing the glaciers?” Morgan said.

“I wonder what the bears and wolves are doing,” James said. “Are they hibernating?”

“Or if that moose will have another calf,” Morgan added.

Meanwhile, back in Glacier, a husky, brown furry animal scampered through a fresh layer of snow, leaving behind a winding trail of prints
.

The animal rushed along, her keen sense of smell alerting her she was near a source of food. The carnivore lowered her nose and sniffed
.

The pregnant wolverine voraciously started pawing away at the snow and shoveling it backwards in a spray of powdery ice. The fierce animal dug further until she had reached bare ground and the remnant bones of a moose calf
.

The wolverine bit into a bone, easily snapping it with her powerful jaws and sharp teeth. She held the bone in place with a paw and devoured the whole leg, including the nutritious marrow…