Yellowstone Standoff. Scott Graham
launched herself at the mustachioed man with her arms outstretched, her hands aimed at his throat.
Those are some fiery scientists you’ve got working for you.” Chuck sat across from Lex at one of the long tables in the bustling staff cafeteria. The segment of sky visible through the front window was a glowing rectangle of pre-dawn magenta. Janelle and the girls were still in bed, but the cavernous room was filled with uniformed rangers getting ready for their shifts, and with many of the researchers who’d attended last night’s meeting.
Lex held up his white paper napkin like a bullfighter’s cape, fending off Chuck’s comment. “Just one, really. And there are extenuating circumstances involved. Besides, the scientists don’t work for me. If they work for anybody, they work for Martha—or, more specifically, for themselves. You saw as much last night. They’re focused on their personal research projects, as they should be, and on how the park’s decisions will affect their studies and dissertations. They’re a pretty hard-charging bunch of kids. All of them have been studying their butts off since kindergarten, making perfect grades every semester, getting their papers published in the most prestigious journals, attending the best grad schools. They’re top-notch young scientists, and, what you witnessed last night between Sarah and Toby notwithstanding, they get along well together. They support one another, go out of their way to help each other out.”
“They definitely were unified in their dislike of sharing a camp this summer.”
Lex wiped his mouth and set his napkin next to his plate of bacon and eggs. “Like I told them, they’re lucky to be going into the backcountry at all this summer.”
“It has been two years, though.”
“One year and eight months, to be exact.”
“A long time—” Chuck hesitated “—even as bad as it was.”
Lex pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Do tell.”
“I saw the video last night,” Chuck admitted. “Martha forwarded it to one of the Grizzly Initiative rookies. He showed it to me on his phone.”
“Then you know there’s lots of room for debate about what happened.”
“It looked fairly straightforward to me. The grizzly acted like a grizzly would be expected to act when the wolfies didn’t announce their approach.”
“What do you mean? The two of them were talking and laughing. They were making their presence known.”
“They weren’t yelling out to let anything and everything know of their presence, even though they knew they were approaching a kill site. Everything I read over the winter told me grizzlies have to be shown who’s boss. The wolf researchers didn’t do that. They were thinking gray wolves when they should have been thinking brown bears, and they paid the ultimate price for their mistake.”
“You’re really suggesting the attack was their fault?”
“We both know I wouldn’t be headed into the backcountry with my wife and kids if I thought otherwise, nor would you be letting me take them. I’ve come to the same conclusion I suspect you and all your grizzly experts have. What happened to the Territory Team was avoidable, preventable. Seeing the video last night reinforced that conclusion in my mind.”
“What that bear did was not normal behavior,” Lex said, his voice flat. “It went out of its way to attack.”
“It was sleeping,” Chuck countered. “It woke up startled. It went with its first and most basic instinct.”
Lex bent forward, dropping his chin so the fluorescent ceiling lights shadowed his face. “Surprise leading to attack is instinctive grizzly behavior, yes,” he said. He lowered his voice. “But the attack of the Territory Team had elements that weren’t so common. Quite uncommon, in fact.”
Chuck leaned forward. “Such as?”
“There isn’t anything that can be put in writing. But there is enough circumstantial evidence to raise doubts. The distance to the attack, for one thing. You watched the video; you saw how far the bear ran when it charged—all the way across the meadow. Generally, grizzly attacks involve bears that have been surprised in close quarters, in deep brush or dense forest. They lash out defensively, then retreat. In the case of the Territory Team, the logical assumption is that the grizzly was defending its food source—the carcass it had commandeered from the wolves. That much fits. But the distance it charged was entirely out of the ordinary.”
Lex rested his forearms on the edge of the table. “Then there’s the fact that the bear somehow overcame the team members’ pepper spray. Was the grizzly immune to it? That’s a scary thought. But without video evidence, all we have is conjecture.”
He let a beat pass. “The attack resulted in multiple fatalities, lending even more weight to the theory that it was a predatory attack as opposed to defensive. That, again, is highly unusual, and raises any number of questions about the bear itself, as well as how park scientists should conduct themselves in the backcountry until those questions are answered.” Lex’s face hardened. “All of that explains why we kept the science teams out of the backcountry last year, and why this year, still with no answers, they’re lucky to be going into the backcountry at all. The universities and foundations that fund research in the park have been all over me, wanting me to let their people head off into the woods on their own again. Even so, the decision to allow the teams to head to Turret Cabin as a group is a significant compromise.”
Chuck gripped the edge of the table with both hands. Lex’s response several months ago to his request to have Janelle and the girls join him at Turret Cabin had been unreservedly affirmative. “Yet you are sending a group of scientists into the backcountry this summer. And you okayed my family going in with me, too.”
“The key word is ‘group.’ Essentially, we’re forming a small city at Turret. Everyone will go out from there to conduct their research in teams of three or more, just as we recommend to anyone headed away from populated areas of the park. The idea is that they’ll be just as safe as if they were based here at Canyon for the summer, or at Lake or Old Faithful.”
“Just as safe,” Chuck repeated warily.
“Look,” Lex said, turning his palms up. “I know you’ve worked contracts over the years at lots of national parks across the West. But I also know this is the first time you’ve ever worked at Yellowstone. You have to understand, Yellowstone National Park is different from every other park in the country—in the world, for that matter—in the way it mixes huge numbers of people with predatory animals. That’s something we deal with every single day. Yellowstone is like the Serengeti: predators prowl here. They hunt, they kill, they eat. It’s the real deal.”
Chuck inclined his head in agreement. “Sure. Along with the geysers, that’s what draws the crowds.”
“But unlike the Serengeti,” Lex continued, “Yellowstone’s predators do what they do in the midst of more than three million human visitors each summer, with those numbers steadily increasing year after year.” He shrugged. “We can’t exactly lock the people—the public—out of their national park. They own it, after all. But the fact is, we’re seeing mounting evidence that some of Yellowstone’s animals are changing their behavior based on the growing number of human visitors to the park. There’s the steady rise of bison attacks from too many people posing next to them for selfies. Plus, there’s the escalating habituation of elk, which are growing increasingly comfortable even in the busiest places in Yellowstone—wandering across parking lots at Old Faithful, giving birth outside the front door of the Mammoth Hot Springs Post Office, tearing up the flower beds in the Lake Yellowstone Hotel courtyard.”
“Those are grazing animals you’re talking about.”
“Not entirely. There’s the behavior of gray wolves to consider, too. Before their extermination in the early