Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (18 page)

“Oh sure.
I get better at it all the time because we’re always
learnin
more about animals and how to deal with them. When I first started, things were pretty crude, I was basically just a hog hunter, a pig exterminator, but we’ve learned a lot about wildlife management since those days. Now I get to spend more time
workin
with animals and
helpin
em
. I especially like
workin
with the bears and elk. But still, this is no
pettin
zoo.

“What
kinda
stuff do you do with the bears?”

“Besides
startin
riots, you mean?” He sighed, “The bears are no problem. It’s the tourists who are the problem. They create dangerous situations by
feedin
an animal just one time for fun, or so they can get a blurry photo to take home with
em
. But when they do that, they leave behind a large wild animal that’s no longer afraid to have contact with human beings and who thinks of people as food dispensers, so I’ll end up having to euthanize the bear because of what people have trained him to do. That’s no fun.

“But mostly I’m
doin
the only thing I ever wanted to do.
And
gettin
paid for it.”

“Tell me what you’ve found out about the owner of the backpack.”

“It’s a young woman, a graduate student at U.T., and her name is Ivy Iverson. I talked to her professor, her ex-boyfriend, and a new male friend.
Didn’t find out much except lately she’s gotten real interested in
somethin
in the woods.
Nobody seems to know exactly what it is though.

“Of course, I’m still not sure she’s actually
missin
. It looks like she is, but all I know for sure is she’s not
answerin
her phone. She could be
campin
without a permit somewhere without cell phone service. Her cell phone could be lost or broken or have a dead battery.
It’s
prob’ly
nothin
, but I
wanna
keep
lookin
.”

“What do you
think’s
goin
on?” asked Phoebe.

“I’ve got a
feelin
the backpack we found was intentionally put there by somebody,” Henry said. “It was in a strange place. It makes no sense that a backpacker would have left it in the middle of a field in Cades Cove. And Miss Iverson didn’t go to the Cove much. It would be easy to carry it away from wherever she left it and drop it off where we’d be sure to find it.”

“Why would somebody do that?” Phoebe asked, with a feeling of dread.

“Because they wanted to cover
somethin
up, like where that girl was when they took it from her.”

“Why would you need to cover it up that way? Why not get rid of the pack where no one would ever find it?”

“Maybe whoever moved
it,
thought they had. Maybe they’re not smart, or not as smart as they think they are. Or maybe they did
somethin
to her and were
tryin
to make it look like a bear got her.”

“You think she might’ve been
killed
?”

“I don’t know, but if she was, I don’t think it was done by somebody who’s from around here.”

“Why?” asked Phoebe.

“Because we know a bear attack on a human in this park would look mighty suspicious. Our bears aren’t predatory.
Yet.
And people from around here know how to cover their tracks better than whoever moved that pack.”

***

The closer they got to
Cataloochee
, the
more narrow
, steep, and rough the roads got. Finally, when they crested the last rise, Henry stopped the Explorer and said, “There it is.”

Phoebe looked down into the valley. The late afternoon sun was slanting in at a low angle, washing everything with a deep golden yellow light. The place didn’t look real. It was an unspoiled paradise that made Phoebe
think
of Brigadoon or Shangri-La. Being from the
Tennessee
side of the mountains, she hadn’t realized there were any mountaintop views left in the park where you couldn’t catch at least a glimpse of vast
clearcuts
crammed with rental cabins. “Wow,” she said.

“Yep,” Henry agreed as he put the truck in drive and headed down into the valley.

***

 “First, I need to check a bear trap,” said Henry.

Phoebe cringed inwardly thinking he meant the horrible metal traps with jagged teeth, but was relieved to see it was a eight-foot length of three-foot diameter corrugated steel culvert pipe. It had an ingenious humane design. There were plenty of air holes big enough to provide good ventilation, but small enough to keep paws and teeth inside the trap. It was on wheels and had a built-in trailer hitch so it could be towed with or without an occupant.

“We set these out anywhere bears are
causin
a problem. We use
em
mostly in the spring near where the elk have their calves so we can catch any bears in the area and move
em
, to keep
em
from
botherin
the newborn elk calves.”

He got out and looked at the trap, then said, “I’m going to have to
rebait
this one. Sorry.”

“I don’t mind
waitin
,” said Phoebe.

“I wasn’t
apologizin
for the
delay,
I was
apologizin
for the smell. I use sardines for bait.”

“Oh.”

“By the time I get this trap rigged again, I’ll have the smell all over me.” He grabbed a can of sardines out of the back seat and disappeared into the length of culvert on his hands and knees.

He was right. When he got back in the truck, he smelled strongly of fish. The stink was enough to put Phoebe off the rest of her
Cheetos
.

***

Henry and Phoebe weren’t the only people doing reconnaissance. Ivy’s attacker was also on the prowl.

In the
Hesler
Biology
Building
at the
University
of
Tennessee
each graduate student was assigned a lab space for examining and storing specimens. In Ivy’s area there was a pile of brown paper lunch bags used for collecting
myxomycetes
in the field and several rows of neatly labeled voucher boxes used for storing them in the lab. A dozen oversize Petri dishes were stacked near the window so the cultures could get some light.

Paraphernalia littered the countertop – tweezers, buck knife, 20X hand lens, glue, fanny pack, pens,
filter
paper. Ivy’s attacker turned and took a quick look at the island in the center of the room. The students had communal access to a dissecting microscope for initial examinations and a compound microscope for closer work. In the corner was a tank of sterile water buffered to pH7.

He turned back to peruse the labels on the boxes in Ivy’s area. Each stated the location where the specimen was collected, some with
GPS
coordinates,
a description of the specimen, identified to species if possible, and what it was collected from.

Several larger boxes addressed to the U.S. National Fungal Herbarium in
Maryland
were worrisome. The boxes were empty, but that didn’t mean that others with something in them hadn’t been mailed to the repository already. Damn.

That could ruin everything. If she’d sent specimens to the National Fungus Collections, he could only hope they’d be as good as lost among the millions of other boxes. The place was run by the federal government after all.

This meant he might need a bit more luck, but he didn’t worry. He was used to getting it. The study of slime was often more a matter of luck than skill. It was well known that most people, even the experts, made many of their best finds immediately after falling down. The deep leaf litter in the
Smokies
was slippery and the hillsides were steep, so walking was hazardous.

But precarious mountainside walking conditions were not all bad news for anyone hunting
Myxomycetes
because one of the best ways to find them was in the leaf litter right after falling down a leafy slope. The researcher would sit up and
voilà
, the
myxos
would be right next to them.

You had to know where to look, of course. Some of the best places were under leaves or near logs in conditions that were just right – moist, but not wet.

But Ivy wasn’t an experienced collector. Most of her specimens, especially the recent ones, were labeled as being found far above ground, up in the tops of trees. The altitudes were recorded, not just for the ground level, but also for the height in the tree canopy, 4,809’ + 75’, 3,987’ + 134’.

He gathered up a stack of boxes and all the likely-looking notes, and took them with him.

***

“We’re
lookin
for elk No. 32,” Henry explained. “I don’t know where he is, but he’s likely to be
hangin
out with the rest of the herd. The elk generally come down
outta
the woods into these open fields at dusk. No. 32 got his
trackin
collar damaged during the rut season in a fight with another bull elk. I might as well change it out completely. He needs fresh batteries anyway.”

Henry drove the park SUV slowly down the road that ran through the center of
Cataloochee
Valley
. Elk were grazing on both sides of the road, each of them sporting large yellow ear tags with numbers on them and a clunky necklace with a plastic box on it. Henry called out the tag numbers he could see on his side, so Phoebe did the same for the ones she could read on her side.

“That necklace thing sure is ugly,” said Phoebe.
“And the earrings.
Not an attractive look.”

“Yeah, but it keeps
em
alive. The necklace is their
GPS
collar. Those things are $5,000 apiece. They record location data every few hours for two years. That way we can track the elk for their own safety and use the data for research purposes.”

“Do you monitor where each of
em
goes?” Phoebe asked.

“Yeah and we even monitor whether the collar is moving or not. If it stays in one place for too long an alarm signal’s sent to the monitoring station and we go check on
em
. Elk were extinct in this area until
recently,
hunters had killed every one of
em
. But we got some reintroduction stock sent here in 2001 to try to start over. A few of
em
are still
tryin
to get back home. If they wander too close to the Interstate, we go get
em
and bring
em
back to
Cataloochee
.”

Phoebe laughed, thinking he was joking.

“I’m not
kiddin
,” Henry said. “Number 7 got all the way across I-40, over two stone retaining walls, the median, everything, and when we tried to catch him he ran back across in the opposite direction. You should’ve seen him.”

“Is he okay?”