LITMIR.BIZ

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her hand from his and rested it on his shoulder. “Way better. It’s like I’ve been handed this gift—you, the mountains. It’s a chance to really live, not just survive, like the girls and I were doing before you came along.”

      “Survive? I guess that explains the courses you’ve been taking—EMT Basic, Backcountry Medicine, Wilderness First Responder.”

      “The girls are growing up. I’m about to turn thirty. You’ve got your archaeology, your thing. It’s time for me to find my thing, too.”

      “And you’ve decided medicine is it.”

      “You have to admit, it goes well with this outdoorsy life you’ve got us living.”

      They approached a slow-moving recreational vehicle on the narrow road. The lumbering vehicle blocked the lane ahead, leaning as it negotiated the curves.

      The dense forest through which they traveled was one of the three major features of the Central Yellowstone Plateau, along with Hayden Valley just ahead and Yellowstone Lake beyond. The sprawling grasslands of Hayden Valley served as home to vast herds of elk and the wolves and grizzlies that fed on them. Yellowstone Lake, the largest natural body of water above seven thousand feet in North America, occupied the plateau’s southeast corner.

      They’d left the canyon of the Yellowstone River and the river’s famous, thundering waterfalls behind. To the east, the river meandered northward from Yellowstone Lake across the central plateau before plunging over the falls at the north edge of the plateau and on to its junction with the Missouri River outside the park.

      The fifty-mile-wide Yellowstone caldera, the national park’s seething heart, bounded the plateau. The first reports of European fur traders who witnessed the caldera’s erupting geysers, steaming hot springs, and bubbling mud pots had been met with disbelief and derision in the East. Not until members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition explored and provided official reports on the region did Americans accept the truth about the land of fire and brimstone that had come into their possession as a result of the Louisiana Purchase.

      The road broke from the forest into the open. Prairie-like Hayden Valley stretched to the south and west, its grasslands interspersed with stands of lodgepole pines. The valley’s lush, early summer grasses glowed emerald green in the morning sun.

      “Wow,” Janelle said.

      Chuck goosed the truck, preparing to pass the camper on the open straightaway. He fell back when he spotted cars and RVs lining both sides of the road half a mile ahead, at a bridge over Elk Antler Creek, a tributary of the Hayden River.

      Chuck caught the girls’ eyes in the rearview mirror. “Bear jam,” he announced.

      Carmelita sat up, her sleepiness disappearing. “Really?”

      Rosie punched the air with her pudgy fist. “Yes!” she hollered.

      Janelle studied the line of vehicles. “You really think it might be a bear this time?”

      “They’re parked at a stream,” Chuck said. “Maybe it’s a moose.”

      Janelle’s mouth turned down. “Or more ducks.”

      They’d come upon three so-called bear jams—lines of cars and campers halted along the park’s roads—during their drive north through the park to Canyon Village the day before. Each time, they’d parked and joined the tourists thronged outside their vehicles, some peering through spotting scopes attached to tripods set up on the shoulders of the roads. The first group of tourists was fixated on a mallard duck and chicks nibbling shoreline grasses along the edge of a roadside stream. The second group ogled an osprey nest in a treetop several hundred yards from the road, with no ospreys in sight. The third admired a bison herd in a meadow nearly a mile away, the grazing bison little more than brown specks in the distance.

      The recreational vehicle pulled to the side of the road behind the last of the parked vehicles, a hundred feet shy of the bridge.

      Chuck parked behind the RV and turned to the girls. “Might be another mama duck and her chicks. That’d still be okay, wouldn’t it?”

      “Sure,” Carmelita said.

      “You betcha,” Rosie agreed.

      They made their way along the edge of the road past the line of cars. The vehicles’ occupants, more than two dozen in all, stood together where the bridge crossed the stream. They looked northward from the road’s raised shoulder. Children held the hands of their parents. Elderly couples in matching jackets stood close beside each other. A pair of heavyset, middle-aged men were positioned at the front of the group, their eyes to head-high spotting scopes.

      Chuck stopped at the edge of the gathered tourists. “What have we got?” he asked a woman in loose slacks and thick-soled walking shoes, her gray hair twisted into a bun.

      “I’m not sure.” She stood next to an elderly man in a navy overcoat. “We just got here.”

      One of the men in front turned from his scope and addressed the group. “Bear,” he said, pointing past his tripod at a thick stand of willows sprouting at the side of the stream thirty yards from the road.

      Carmelita pressed herself against Chuck’s side. He put an arm around her shoulders.

      “Are you sure?” the elderly man asked. He raised his hand to his brow, shielding the morning sun. “I don’t see anything.”

      “We were the first ones here,” the man at the spotting scope said. “It went into the willows when we pulled up.”

      The tall bushes filled a stream-side depression a hundred feet long and half again as wide.

      The second spotter spoke without taking his eye from his scope. “It won’t come back out,” he said. “Not as long as all of us are here.”

      “Black or brown?” Chuck asked.

      “Brown,” the first spotter said. “We got a good look at it. It’s a grizzly, all right.”

      “Black bears can be pretty light colored.”

      The man squinted at Chuck. “This is my nineteenth summer spotting in the park.”

      “Did you hear that, Daddy?” a boy’s voice asked from among the onlookers. “A grizzly! There’s a grizzly bear in the bushes!”

      “Yes, Henry. I heard,” replied a man in his late thirties, the nine- or ten-year-old boy jumping up and down in excitement at his side.

      The man wore an urbanite’s idea of a wilderness visitor’s outfit: khaki slacks and an oiled-cotton jacket featuring shoulder epaulets and shiny brass snaps at the wrists. “My son wants to see the bear,” the father said to the pair of men standing behind their spotting scopes.

      “Too bad,” the second spotter said, still without removing his eye from the scope.

      “It’s right there in the bushes?”

      “It’s waiting for everyone to leave.”

      “Well, then,” the man declared, “I’ll flush it out.”

      The father nudged the boy to the side of the woman standing next to him, then strode off the shoulder of the road and along the stream bank toward the willows.

      The second spotter removed his eye from the scope for the first time, watching the father’s progress. “Wouldn’t do that if I was you.”

       7

      I promised my boy we’d see a grizzly bear,” the man called over his shoulder as he walked away from the road. “That’s why we drove all this way.”

      Chuck gathered Carmelita and Rosie to him, his hands on their shoulders. “Idiot,” he muttered in Janelle’s ear.

      “Shouldn’t somebody stop him?” she asked.

      The

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