Yellowstone Standoff (12 page)

21

C
huck turned to Kaifong and Randall and pointed at the drone, riding high on Randall's back. “What do you guys think?”

Randall looked at Kaifong. “It's almost dark, chickadee,” he said.

“I think we still have time, if we move fast.”

Randall studied the sky, his hand resting on the control console at his waist. “Okay,” he said. “I'm with you, babe.”

Kaifong removed the drone from its frame and stood at the center of the meadow with the copter held out before her. The tiny video camera hung between her hands, attached to the bracket at the bottom of the drone.

Randall faced Kaifong at the edge of the trees, working the control console. The drone's four rotors spun to life, a low-pitched whir climbing to an ear-splitting whine as they sped up. The drone lifted from Kaifong's hands and hovered ten feet in the air. She pulled a tablet computer from a nylon pouch affixed below the frame on Randall's back. After tapping at the tablet, she held it in front of Randall. He glanced from the drone to the glowing computer screen as he adjusted the console's controls. The drone climbed straight up until it was a dark blob against the evening sky, then darted northward above the treetops and out of sight, the scream of its rotor blades diminishing as it departed.

“I didn't notice how loud your drone was when you herded the dog with it,” Lex said.

Kaifong propped the computer screen with both hands, acting as a stand for the tablet. “Hovercrafts require lots of force to stay airborne,” she said.

Randall bent toward the screen, fingers working the console.

“A lot of times,” Kaifong continued, “the noise works in our favor. Like with Chance. The sound is new to animals. They're not sure what to make of it. Often, they'll stop to check it out.”

“It's wild,” Randall added, his eyes on the screen. “They'll even come out of the trees into the open sometimes, just to see what's making all the racket.”

The members of the search team gathered behind him, looking over his shoulder as he controlled the drone. A live-streaming view from the drone's video camera showed treetops sweeping by beneath the speeding aircraft.

“Right toggle—throttle,” he explained to his onlookers.

He thumbed the toggle to the side. On the tablet screen, the view of the trees beneath the drone shifted as the copter rose higher into the air. He moved the toggle the other direction. The treetops neared as the craft descended.

“Left toggle—direction,” he said.

He pressed the lefthand toggle to the side with his thumb. The view of the forest canopy on the computer tablet spun as the drone turned 360 degrees.

As he watched, Chuck felt his stomach spin, too. “Whoa,” he said. He tilted sideways, nearly stumbling.

Randall chuckled. “Happens all the time. Especially to gray-hairs.”

“Thanks,” Chuck said.

“There,” Randall said, his eyes on the screen. “See? Next meadow. Bigger.”

On the video feed, grass replaced the treetops.

Kaifong shifted the tablet to hold it in her left hand. The fingers of her right hand hovered over a row of glowing buttons at the bottom of the screen. “I'm in charge of the camera,”
she explained. “It's attached to a motorized swivel.” She asked Randall, “Okay if I do some panning?”

Randall nodded. He said to Chuck out of the side of his mouth, “Get out your barf bag.”

Chuck watched through squinted eyes as Kaifong tapped the buttons lined below the video feed. The scene through the drone's camera turned to one side, then the other, taking in the pine trees lining the meadow but revealing no sign of wolves or grizzlies or any other creatures lurking in the deepening shadows.

“I'm going to lift the view a little,” Kaifong said to Randall, “so we can look ahead.”

“Just make sure I've got the bottom axis at all times.”

Kaifong tapped at the buttons along the base of the tablet screen. The scene shifted as the camera angle rose and the drone climbed above the meadow. A small, red light appeared in the upper corner of the computer screen.

Kaifong's voice grew tense. “We've got movement.”

The red light went dark.

“Think it was legit?” Randall asked.

“It's not in this meadow, that's for sure.” She pointed at the top of the screen. “We could have picked up something in the next one.”

“Okay,” Randall said through compressed lips. “Let's go there.”

The drone sped above the treetops.

“That's something we just added,” Kaifong explained. “Randall programmed the camera to pick up animal movement, like a motion detector in an alarm system.”

The red light reappeared on the tablet.

“One,” Kaifong said. “No. Correct that.
Two
.”

Toby gasped. “They're still together?”

“They're heading for the trees,” Kaifong told Randall. “Go, go, go.”

“Speed's maxed,” he replied. “Still at least half a mile. I don't think we'll make it.”

“I'm getting a sense of size,” Kaifong said. Her fingers tapped at the base of the computer screen. The camera zoomed in, focusing on a clearing in the forest still well ahead of the speeding drone. Two specks appeared on the screen against the lighter color of the grass in the opening. The specks moved toward a dark wall of trees.

“That's them,” Kaifong declared. “It's gotta be.”

She tapped the lit buttons on the screen below the video feed. The camera zoomed in and the moving objects disappeared.

“Too much,” Randall hissed. “We're flat-out, remember? I've lost gyro. Zoom out! What's our elevation?”

“One-twenty,” Kaifong reported, her eyes on a changing set of numbers in the lower left corner of the screen. “No. One-ten.” Her voice shook. “You're dropping. Bring us up.
Bring us up
.”

“I'm trying!” Randall cried. “Zoom out, zoom out! I can't see anything. I told you, I've lost my bottom axis!”

His thumbs moved the toggles as Kaifong tapped at the buttons. The camera pulled back, showing the approaching edge of the meadow and a particularly tall tree, its top rising several feet above the rest of the forest canopy, directly ahead of the speeding drone.

Randall cursed as the drone flew straight into the top of the towering tree. The copter spun crazily. Chuck's stomach spun along with the drone as sky, trees, light, and shadow flashed across the computer screen.

Then the video feed went dark.

22

A
nd...we're...down,” Randall said. He lifted his thumbs from the toggles.

“I was trying to see ahead,” Kaifong said. “I thought we were elevationally stable.”

“We were,” Randall told her. “Until we weren't.” He turned to the others. “Usually, Kaifong can zoom in all she wants. But things can get janky pretty fast at top speed.”

“That tree came out of nowhere,” Kaifong said.

“Tell me about it,” Randall agreed.

Chuck said, “You guys don't sound too upset.”

“Drone plunge,” said Randall.

“That's what it's called,” Kaifong explained. “It's a fairly common occurrence, unfortunately. Which is why all drones are designed to withstand hard landings, and why we brought lots of spare parts with us this summer. You know when Randall asked me about the bottom axis? That's what we lost when I zoomed in so much.”

“Always have to be ready to abort,” Randall added.

“We had them, though,” Kaifong said. “
We had them
.”

Lex asked her, “Think the footage will show us anything?”

“Nothing too specific. We were still too far away.”

Randall returned the control console to the webbed sling at his waist. “Guess we'd better go pick up the pieces.”

Lex looked to the west, where a thin streak of purple lined the horizon. “I still can't believe the wolf and grizzly stayed together all the way here. We have to figure out what's brought them together, what's going on between them. But it's too dark
to do anything more now. Let's come back tomorrow. We'll retrieve the drone then.”

“No can do,” Kaifong said. “Ground squirrels love gnawing on the plastic parts. Something to do with the chemical smell. There won't be much left to retrieve if we wait till morning.”

“You just said you have lots of extra parts.”

“Not a complete warehouse. If something gets munched that we can't replace, we're finished.”

“We'd have Chance as a backup,” Keith said. At his side, Chance's head rose.

Lex asked, “Think your dog can track the smell of plastic?”

Kaifong lifted her arm and pointed at an oversized watch that dwarfed her delicate wrist. “The drone has a GPS tag. My watch is GPS-enabled. It'll get us within a hundred yards.”

“Okay if we keep tracking?” Keith asked Lex. “It'll be good practice for Chance.”

At Lex's nod, Keith allowed the dog, ranging at the end of its leash, to lead everyone across the opening and back into the trees. No blowdowns or pools of water slowed their passage through the next stretch of forest. They broke into the next meadow. The clearing glowed a dim rose color, tranquil in the waning light.

Chance strained at the leash, nose to the fresh grass sprouting in the opening. “We're still on a dual trail—both animals,” Keith told the group.

Chance and Keith crossed the meadow. Lex fell in behind, with the others. Chuck brought up the rear. They entered the deepening gloom of the forest, moving in silence through a section of old-growth lodgepole pines. The trees grew tall and thick, the north sides of their trunks covered in moss. Pools of water stood in low points on the forest floor, forcing everyone to wend their way around them.

“There!” Keith shouted when he and Chance reached the far side of one of the pools. He pointed at a pair of indentations in bare mud at the edge of the water.

Lex studied the indentations. He turned to Toby. “I'll be honest. I didn't fully believe what you said you'd seen until now.”

The others crowded forward. Sarah pulled a headlamp from her pocket and aimed its beam at the ground. Over her shoulder, Chuck could see imprinted in the black mud the unmistakable paw print of a wolf, and beside it the track of a bear, big as an omelet pan and so fresh the wrinkles in the sole of the bear's paw cobwebbed the wet soil.

“
Dude
,” Randall breathed.

Lex set his hands on the shoulders of Toby and Sarah. “Looks like your two teams are going to need to work together—and the two of you, as well.”

Toby rested his fingers on Sarah's arm. “What do you think?”

Sarah shook off his touch. “You've gotta be kidding me.”

Toby rolled his eyes. “Can we get this over with?” he asked Lex.

Chance and Keith headed deeper into the shadowed forest, Toby close behind.

“You need to get your act together,” Lex said to Sarah.

“He just harassed me.”

“He offered you an olive branch.”

“He touched me. I could file suit if I wanted.”

“I've about had it with you, Sarah,” Lex said. “Whatever's going on between you and Toby, it's time for it to end. Right now.”

She looked at the ground.

“You have to understand,” he continued, his voice softening, “the success of the Wolf Initiative helps the Grizzly Initiative, too.”

“True that, man,” Randall said. “The grizzlies and wolves together in Yellowstone are showing the importance of the predator-prey relationship in, like, a balanced ecosystem.”

Lex nodded, one of his bushy eyebrows cocked in response to Randall's bro-speak. “If grizzlies and wolves really are, like, starting to team up in the park,” he told Sarah, “you and Toby are going to have to learn to team up again, too.”

Sarah's body quivered. “This thing with the grizzly and wolf is a one-time deal,” she said. “It has to be. One of them made a kill, the other was drawn to it. Then, while both of them were in the same area, they were attracted by the smell of the meat lying in the grass in front of the cabin, and they just happened to step out of the woods to check things out at the same time.”

“Then why are they still traveling together this far from camp?” Chuck asked.

Sarah turned to him. “They're on their way back to the kill. That has to be it. Anything else would...would...”

“Anything else,” Lex said, “would go against everything Yellowstone researchers have come to know and understand about the park's top two predators. If what we have here is more than just a grizzly and wolf posturing over a kill, it could change everything—
everything
. And you and Toby would be the lead scientists on the case.”

Sarah looked after Toby as he departed through the trees. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I'll be a team player.” Her eyes narrowed. “But if he tries to shoot another move on me, I'll kick his balls into his throat.”

“I'll be sure to warn him.”

A low fog sifted along the forest floor with the coming of full dark. Chuck stuck his hands in his jacket pockets against the deepening chill and followed the others through the trees until
he caught up with Keith and Chance. They doubled back time after time, skirting low areas of swamp and mud.

On several occasions, Chuck stumbled and almost fell, failing to spot depressions and downed branches in the gloom. Like Lex, just ahead, Chuck walked with his shoulders bowed and his eyes down, focused on the stretch of forest floor directly in front of him, while the other scientists strode through the forest with their heads up, looking forward, their bare hands swinging at their sides.

He worked his lower lip between his teeth. The benefits of youth. Not so long ago, he, too, would not have noticed the growing chill, and his youthful eyes would have registered all manner of definition on the shadowed forest floor at his feet.

He stopped and swung his daypack around to his chest. The others snaked away from him through the trees, leaving him on his own as he dug his headlamp from his pack, settled it on his forehead, and clicked it on. Its beam bathed the patch of ground in front of him with a welcome cone of blue-white LED light even as the rest of the forest around him plunged into contrastingly deeper shadow.

He resettled his pack on his shoulders. The others were out of sight in the forest ahead. He turned his head, the lamp sending shadows flitting through the trees.

A growl rumbled directly behind him. He stood in place, not daring to breathe.

The growl had the same low pitch as the grizzly in the willows in Hayden Valley yesterday morning, and the audio of Notch on Justin's phone the evening before that.

Another snarl froze him. Without moving his head, he glanced sideways, scanning the shapeless darkness. The second snarl, also behind him, was higher pitched and canine-like—wolf-like.

He spun and directed his headlamp the way he'd come. The beam lit tree trunks and skittered across the black surface of a pool of standing water. Two spots glowed yellow on the other side of the pool. No—four spots.