Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (9 page)

The tourists were horrified. As far as they knew, Henry had just killed Yogi in front of two little Boo Boos as their own kids looked on. They were not happy campers.

Henry headed back toward his vehicle with the intention of bringing it close to the mother bear. But he was intercepted by the crowd.

 “You didn’t have to kill her,” a woman shouted. “She wasn’t hurting anything!” Little children were wailing as their parents dragged them back toward their cars.

“I didn’t kill the bear,” Henry said, “I just immobilized her so I could recover the backpack she was
chewin
on.”

“What about those two precious little babies you just orphaned!” a woman called. “You
gonna
leave them to starve now?”

The heckling and catcalls quickly turned to mild jostling as Henry tried to make his way through the crowd.

Many of the spectators were using cell phones or
iPads
to take photos and video. Others were attempting to text, tweet, or phone their friends.

It took only a couple of minutes for the mob to realize they weren’t able to get a cell phone connection.
Some of the people, furious at being thwarted by the lack of cell phone service, started pushing and shoving.

“Hey, one more push out of anyone and your vacation is going to end up in an arrest!” Henry barked, shielding the remaining dart with his body. The medicine in the dart would sedate a bear, but it would kill a human.

Although there was no cell phone service, the rangers’ radios worked inside the cove, unless the repeater happened to be down for maintenance. Lucky for Henry, the radio tower was working fine today.

He made a beeline for his SUV and with his threat of arrest still hanging in the air the crowds grudgingly parted before him. Bill and Phoebe met him in front of the truck.

“I’ve
gotta
call a wildlife tech and law enforcement rangers over here,” Henry said to both of them as he grabbed for the radio in the truck.

“You’re bleeding!” Phoebe said incredulously.

“That happens sometimes,” Henry said

“You get attacked by
tourists
?”

“Ill-behaved tourists are the alpha predators in this park. They’re way more aggressive than any of the animals. Animals will generally leave you alone.”

“Have you got a first aid kit?” Phoebe asked.

Henry nodded and pointed as he made contact on the radio and requested help.           

“Sit down for a moment please,” Phoebe said, gently guiding him to sit on the edge of the cargo area. It was the second time today she’d made the same gesture.
First Leon and now Henry.
It was bizarre; she was spending the day burying one friend and triaging two others.

“I need to go get that bear quick, before she wakes up,” protested Henry.

“I’m surprised you got out of that alive,” Bill said, only half-joking. “I wouldn’t go back over there until the others get here.”

“I can’t believe some of those people,” Phoebe said, as she dabbed at cuts and scratches on Henry’s forearms. “That was uncalled for.”

He looked at her and grimaced. “I’m embarrassed you saw that.”

“Henry, this
mornin
I had to leave a house call through the bathroom window. I was
runnin
from a woman who wanted her doughnuts back. And I thought I had it rough.”

He winced as she cleaned a scratch on his face with peroxide.

Two more National Park Service vehicles pulled up, followed by a couple of volunteers in a low emission vehicle sporting a huge pair of elk antlers mounted over the windshield. Henry quickly made his way over to them with Phoebe and Bill in tow and briefed everyone on the situation.

“We need to take the bears to the wildlife building and hold
em
til
we can figure out what’s happened,” he said. “If nobody’s been hurt, we can bring
em
back and release
em
to go about their business.

“But first, we need to get that crowd dispersed, and second, we need to get that backpack.”

***

Dispersing the crowd and tranquilizing the cubs with a dart pistol didn’t take long. When Henry was able to examine the remnants of the mangled backpack he agreed with Bill that it had what appeared to be dried blood on it, which was not a good sign.

“I’m so sorry to have gotten you into this,” Henry said, looking back at Phoebe. “I hope you’ll give me another chance on that trip to
Cataloochee
.”

“It’s no problem,” said Phoebe, “I’ve seen more than enough for one day.”

“Where’s your car?” Bill asked her.

“At the parking lot for the old McBride graveyard,” Phoebe said. “Do you know how to get there? I’m so turned around I have no idea where it is from here.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Thanks Bill,” Henry said, “and Phoebe, I’ll be
seein
you later.”

“Okay Henry. Be careful.”

Bill and Phoebe began picking their way across the trampled trash-filled grass. “What a mess,” Bill said. He leaned down to pick up a partially-eaten biscuit and put it in the bear proof dumpster. “The people who did this were upset about how the bears were being treated, but now the Park Service is
gonna
have to send rangers to clean up all this right away or more
bears’ll
be
comin
down here to eat the garbage they left.”

“I’ve seen people like this before,” Phoebe said. “I used to work in
Washington
.”

“You did?” Bill said, looking at her with surprise. “You sound local.”

“I
am
local,” Phoebe said, smiling. “I left here after college,
chasin
a dream I got from
watchin
too much television. Took me a long time, but one day I woke up and realized I wanted to come back home. Anyway, you meet a lot of activists in
Washington
. They’re usually angry people. When you fix one issue, they immediately switch to another. It’s endless. No satisfaction can ever be had. They’re chronically enraged and looking for a place to vent it.”

“Psychologists call that
projection
I believe,” said Bill. “How do you know Henry?”

“We grew up together,” Phoebe said. “Hadn’t seen each other in thirty years
til
we ran into each other
a
coupla
hours
ago. When we figured out who each other was, he was kind enough to offer to let me ride around with him for the rest of the day.”

“He’s a good man,” said Bill. “Those people have no idea that the man they’re throwing things at is the very last person in the world they should be mad at. Ignorance is not pretty. The guy’s a legend around here.

“He’s a martyr to the wildlife in the
Smokies
. The Park Service forces rangers to rotate to different parks so they don’t get attached to any particular place, but Henry refused to do it.

“He loves it here too much to leave. Unfortunately the NPS is run like a military organization and Henry’s too strong-minded to follow rules that don’t make sense. So he doesn’t get along very well with the Park Superintendent. His refusal to knuckle under means he’s always on the verge of getting court-martialed. So he’s been kept in a subsistence-level job for most of his career.

“There’s not much money allocated to wildlife management, but everybody knows Henry so they’ll call him and he’ll go out all hours of the day and night if an animal’s in trouble or causing problems anywhere in the park. He’ll go find it and take it to the vet hospital or move it to a safer area. He’s been living like that for most of his life. Not many women would put up with that, which is probably why he’s never gotten married. He’s married to his job.”

Ivy’s attacker moved her car,
then
he backtracked a few miles and recovered his own vehicle. Next on his
to-do
list was searching her apartment. He mused about what an unexpectedly action-packed and exhausting day it was turning out to be.

Ivy lived in a low-rise building in Sequoyah Hills. The place was popular with students, and there were sufficient comings and goings to render one person more or less unremarkable, he hoped. He carried a crowbar tucked up into the sleeve of his jacket, and a pair of gloves in his pockets.

He got in quickly without being seen, but the manner of his entry meant the latch wouldn’t work anymore. Once he was inside he had to prop a book against the door to hold it closed while he searched the place.

Ivy wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but even in the messy state she’d left the apartment, it was obvious after a few minutes that what he was looking for wasn’t there.

That was unwelcome news, but not totally unanticipated. Fortunately there was another place to look.

***

It was mid-afternoon when Bill dropped Phoebe off at her car, but she still wasn’t ready to go home, so she went back to
Hamilton
’s to sit with her friend Jill. She knew at this time of day Jill would be sewing.

Jill made wearable art for women in a spare room she’d converted into a studio. Over the past few years, she’d built up a clientele on Etsy.com and now sewing was her primary source of income. Her sweater coats were highly sought-after, particularly by middle-aged women. The reconstructed clothes were metaphors for their lives. Jill took clothes other people had thrown away, cut out the worn and damaged places, salvaged the best parts, and reconfigured the leftovers into something practical and pretty.

Her designs were a modern retooling of an Appalachian icon, like Joseph’s coat of many colors or Dolly
Parton’s
homemade coat made famous in a country song. What had been an embarrassing necessity for the very poor, making recycled clothes out of
scraps,
was now the province of fiber art collectors and had been renamed
upcycling
or
eco-couture
.

Jill’s intention was that her creations be unique and cheerful talismans for women going through menopause, divorce, illness, or any other life situation when resurrection by bootstraps was required.

Phoebe knocked on the doorjamb and said, “Can I come in?”

“Sure, you can help me sort these pieces. I’m trying to coordinate the colors and group them into bundles.”

“These are t-shirts!” said Phoebe, delighted.

“Yeah, I don’t have enough business from Australia and New Zealand yet to keep me busy during our summer, so I’m expanding into a new lightweight line,” Jill said. “They’re
gonna
be longer than regular t-shirts, more like tunics or dresses, and have lettuce-edges and asymmetrical hems.”

She pointed to one of her dress forms where she had a t-shirt tunic pieced together with pins, “
Whaddya
think?”

Phoebe went over to get a closer look. “I love it,” she said. “How fun, and what a flattering alternative to a boring old t-shirt.”

She pulled a fall-colored cardigan off a shelf and held it against herself. “This one would probably sell better in
LaLa
Land
, though.”

“That’s
Sumac
,” said Jill. “And the other one’s
Wild Turkey
.” Her designs relied on color palettes inspired by
Smoky
Mountain
flora and fauna.