Grizzly (2 page)

Kelly nodded. "You're late, but we're just starting."

Tom Cooper, a young ranger, slipped down the line so he could stand next to Gail. She gave him a half smile, trying to keep the side of her lips that faced toward Kelly Gordon, immobile.

Kelly said, "We've got us a problem and a half today. This is the biggest post-season mob we've ever had. If we're not careful, they can get out of hand."

Tom Cooper said, maybe a bit too loudly, "Kelly's worried that we've got more back-packers up there in the high country than raccoons."

Gail winced. Tom was too obviously trying to draw attention to himself while poking fun, not too subtly, at his supervisor. She had warned him more than once about this. But he didn't seem to be able to control his mouth.

Kelly ignored the remark. "So I'm sending patrols out to Area Four," he went on. "No way of knowing what might happen. The long-range weather's good, but we could get a freak storm, or a fire or anything."

Gail, to keep Tom from mouthing off again, said, "There's no way to wet-nurse all those back-packers. There's too many of them scattered too far."

"I know," said Kelly. "But we'll still do the best we can." He looked down the line of rangers. "Okay, you've all got your jobs. Go do them."

The casual line broke up. The teams of rangers moved off toward their vehicles or the stable.

Kelly waited, as Gail Nelson came toward him. He wanted to smile at her anxiety, at her fresh young face and ripe figure bulging through her underestimated uniform. He had made up his mind to mention its tightness to her if she didn't do something by next season; there was so little time to go this year, it wasn't worth the hassle. Privately, he believed that she wouldn't need prompting. She had a good head.

At thirty-eight, Kelly looked five years younger. His dark blue eyes and sleek brown hair gave him the appearance of an actor. In fact, once while in New York, he had been offered the starring role in a shaving cream commercial. He had turned it down when he learned he was expected to wear makeup. Often, Kelly had wondered what might have happened to his life if he had taken the job.

Kelly was born in Montana, and grew up in the snow country. His friends often said (out of his hearing) that Kelly was suckled by a bear and raised by a bobcat. Actually, his parents were normal folks in Helena, but there was a great deal of emphasis on hunting and fishing, and Kelly excelled at both of them.

He brought down his first twelve-point deer before his fifteenth birthday, and for several years after that, kept the Gordon freezer filled with game.

Then, one day, he had seen his best friend shot down by a city hunter who made a sound shot into the brush with a high-powered thirty-ought-six rifle. The slug was an expanding soft-point, and after it tore through the unlucky young man, there was never a chance of saving his life. Kelly had shoved handfuls of his shirt into the wound, and never even slowed the bleeding.

Since that day, he had never shot at a living thing.

When he was drafted for the Vietnam war, he did not refuse to go. Instead, he explained his feelings to the officials, and volunteered for the most dangerous medic duty available. Several times, he'd flown with Don Stober, four years his junior. But he trusted Don, and when Stober had shown up after the war, looking for a job, Kelly had interceded for him and helped him get the flying ranger post.

Kelly liked Gail Nelson. She wasn't the first female ranger who had served at this park. But she was the most popular one. She had a serious dedication to the work, and a real love of the wilderness and its animals.

She told him, "I'm sorry. My apologies."

"Accepted," he said, with his best Charlton Heston grimness. It fooled nobody.

Tom said, apparently to Kelly, but actually to Gail, "Well, I'm on my way up to R-Four."

She said, "That's pretty crowded. Maybe the two of us should go?"

And this was as much to Kelly as to Tom.

The idea of Gail joining him appealed to Tom Cooper. To Kelly, eagerly, he said, "R-Four is loaded, Kell. And a lot of those back-packers up there are green as grass."

Kelly looked at the work sheet on his clip board and shook his head.

"Gail, I need you down here today. Thompson phoned in sick, so the home base is all yours."

She nodded, flashing a smile that she hoped would hide her disappointment. "Good," she said. "Maybe I can get my paperwork up to date."

Tom shrugged. Moving toward his jeep, one of the last of the old American vehicles left in the park, he told Gail, in a low voice that Kelly couldn't hear, "Well, we tried. Listen, I'll catch you later for dinner."

She nodded, warming up the smile especially for him. Tom raised his voice and said, confident that Kelly would overhear, "See you later."

Automatically, Gail replied, "Alligator."

"Hey," Kelly called. "You can't get up to R-Four in that four-wheeler."

Caught in mid-stride, Tom halted, grinned. "How true," he said. "I don't know what I was thinking of."

Gail looked away. She concealed the laugh that tried to burst forth. Tom Cooper's activities in the back of a jeep were the talk of the younger rangers. And one
could
reach R-Four by jeep, if the driver was willing to risk a bashed-in oil pan while climbing a steep, rockfilled grade near the regular trail.

"Take Tex," Gail said. "He needs the exercise."

"Thanks," Tom said. He sauntered off toward the stable.

Two other rangers, giving their Toyota imitation Land Rover a walk-around check, had observed the brief scene.

"Tom's pissed," said one.

"Naw," said the other. "He knows Kelly's got eyes for that chick with all the cameras. Gail's as safe down here as she'd be back in Cleveland."

Dryly, the other ranger said, "And exactly how safe is that?"

The beast did not like this side of the mountain. It was quiet enough, but the scent of the two-legged enemy was everywhere.

The pain in his jaw was unrelenting. It throbbed with every movement, and as he breathed, the cold air seared the exposed nerve ends with an agony that was almost unbearable. It was this more than hunger and thirst that forced him down toward the valley, where the air was warmer and the pain less intense.

Almost as intense was his hunger. The pain from the fractured tooth seemed to affect his sight, and more importantly, his keen sense of smell. Twice now, he had come up on edible game and lost that first, unexpected, move because of his diminished senses. Both animals—one a small deer, the other a scraggly goat—got away with frightened leaps.

Although the beast could run faster than a man, and almost as fast as a horse, he stumbled on the icy slopes, and watched, in pain-shattered anger, as his food-to-be escaped down the mountain.

High country back-pack area R-Four was located just below the timber line, where tail pines and spruces suddenly leaped from the steep incline. No lumberjack's axe had ever touched so much as a twig of these trees, and some of them were older than the nation whose banner flew from the ranger station's flagpole. Pine cones as large as a baby's head scattered over the forest floor, and when the conditions of sun and moisture and soil were right, another tree would germinate and begin to grow.

But in the forest interior there is never much sunlight. At noon, perhaps, a single ray will penetrate the thick trees and touch the dark pine-needle-strewn earth for a few moments, then move on, racing up the sides of the mountain as if trying to paint it all golden before the onset of night.

To some, the interior of the forest is cathedral-like. It is an obvious comparison. The shafts of golden light, beaming down through majestic giants whose growth rings traced time back to the time of Christ.

A skilled woodsman will see one thing as he moves through the forest; an amateur, however well-read in forest lore, will see another. To him will come a sense of apprehension, of disassociation. It is very easy to become foolishly lost in the forest, and when the beginner does so, panic is his neighbor. This feeling of tingly near-fear is one of the attractions that brings so many to the woods today. True danger is never really present, but it
might
be, and that is its allure.

The woodsman has learned not to laugh at the tenderfoot. Because at least the beginner is trying to learn. Too many today cannot be bothered, too many see the wilderness as a resource to be harvested.

Careful harvesting is not only possible, it is desirable, for the wilderness can go mad in its prolific growth, just as the population explosion has jammed the globe with too many breathing, eating, polluting humans. Thinning out is necessary. But it must be done with care, and with love. Neither commodity is ever present when human greed directs the work.

But this forest was protected. Against everything except its own mavericks.

June Hamilton and Margaret Rogers were almost twins, in birth dates at least. June was born on August 11th, and Margaret on the 12th. Both had attended Penn State, although only June was from Pennsylvania—Lancaster, where the Pennsylvania Dutch still plod along the highways in their horse-drawn black carriages. Margaret was from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and had gone to Penn on a scholarship.

Both girls had been trapped in a liberal arts program, but in their last year had tried to remedy that disastrous choice by electing a new major, Ecology Management. With the growth of environmental protection, whole new industries had sprung up to provide the air scrubbers for smoke stacks, the filters and processors for waste dispersal, the test equipment to detect violations in air and water pollution. So rapidly did the new industry grow that it, in itself, became guilty of the very violations it had formed to correct.

New ideas were needed. So young people in college moved toward this latest frontier.

It had been Margaret's idea to come out here to the park and camp for a week. She argued, "We're city people. We've been trained to restore the environment back to its natural state. But what, actually, do we know about it? Only what we've read in the Sierra Club books."

They'd spent most of the summer planning the trip and buying the equipment and gear needed.

Now, the vacation—or "field trip," as Margaret preferred to call it, was almost over.

The girls had been exploring one side of the mountain. They had awakened at dawn, as always. It's hard to sleep late in the woods. Too much life begins to move around you.

No photograph or motion picture can ever capture the incredible shocking beauty of mountain peaks, looming over the visitor to the high country.

Their summits, tipped with silver, seem to hang in the sky. It is as if they are falling at you through the crisp clear air.

And the silence is immense. A bird can be heard a mile away. The distant tinkle of water falling down the mountainside is as melodic as the gentle swirl of a Chopin piano sonata.

The girls, who had climbed almost to the nine-thousand-foot level, paused. They watched the clouds painting wispy shadows over the mountains for a while.

June said, then, "Hey, we're not mountain climbers. Besides, this is our last day. We've got to get organized."

"What's to organize?" asked Margaret, tossing her short blonde hair. "We'll just throw everything in the packs and hike on down the mountain."

"
With
our garbage," June reminded. "Remember? No more burning the tin cans and burying them. Those days are over. That ranger made a big point of our not turning this place into a land fill."

"Relax," said her friend. "I've even been washing out the cans so they won't smell."

Now, near their camp, they moved carefully through the darkly shadowed forest, and felt that sense of cool distance from civilization that always comes when one is surrounded by trees without a single sign of human existence in sight.

They had chosen, as their camp site, one of the few clearings that enjoyed more than an hour of sunlight a day. June had demanded it, once they discovered the clearing. She said, "Do you know how long it would take to dry out a pair of undies under those pines?" and Margaret, sensibly, agreed—although she would have preferred to pitch camp further up the mountain.

Puffing as she climbed a rock fracture, June said, "Hey, Maggie, what do we have to eat?"

"I put the rest of the stew in the Dutch oven," said Margaret. "I left it in the embers."

"Embers?"

"I know you're not supposed to, but we've got rocks all around the fire, and it's right out in the middle of the clearing. What could happen?"

June's hair, longer than Maggie's, and a dark red, caught in the pitch-choked branch of one of the young pines. She yanked it free with a very unlady-like swear-word.

A moment later, they stepped into their clearing, and Maggie let out a little yip of fright.

Tom Cooper, astride Tex, looked down at the girls with a half-smile.

"Is this your camp?" he asked.

"Yes," said June, hesitantly. "You gave us a shock."

"Sorry. Hi there."

June said, "Hi."

Maggie, not as friendly, said, "Thanks for scaring us."

"I said I was sorry. But you were bad girls. You left a fire smouldering."

"We were cooking," Maggie said defensively.

"No excuse. Not when there's nobody present. Do you know how fast a fire could go through these trees?"

June said, chagrined, "We know. It was stupid."

"I guess you've got a camping permit?"

Still hostile, Maggie said, "Do you want to see it?"

Tom shook his head. "No, I believe you. But do me a favor?"

June said, "What?"

"Watch yourselves up here. Stay out of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

He shrugged. "Nothing special. Just don't take unnecessary risks. This high country is treacherous. You could take a fall, sprain an ankle. Anything. And it's easy to get turned around, lose your bearings."

Maggie said, "Believe me, Ranger, we aren't about to get ourselves lost."

"Okay," he said. "When are you coming down?"

June said, "This afternoon. After we eat, and clean up the area."