Off the Grid

by C. J. Box

  Marybeth had told Joe they were going to meet Colter Allen when he visited Saddlestring the next week. She wanted to try and get his endorsement for the library tax and Allen’s people had sent a request through Joe’s director that Colter looked forward to meeting him. Joe, as usual, didn’t want to go to a political event of any kind, but he felt obligated to show up and support his wife. It was up to Colter Allen, Joe thought, to prove himself. The state had such a small population that all politics were personal and conducted one-on-one. Democrats often sneaked through, like Rulon had, because the governor had a way of connecting with people. He remembered names, and he didn’t govern as a partisan. Joe had no doubt that if the state constitution allowed three terms, Rulon would win again in a landslide in a state that was seventy percent Republican.

  Allen would be Joe’s third governor since he had become the game warden for his 5,000-square-mile district. He’d arrested the first governor, Bill Budd, for fishing without a license, and he’d worked directly for Rulon. He wondered how many more governors he had left in him.

  • • •

  THE LARGE-CARNIVORE research team had set up on the edge of a mountain meadow less than a half mile from Crazy Woman Creek. They had two vehicles, an SUV with state plates and a panel van topped with a satellite dish and antennae and filled with electronics equipment. The team consisted of team leader Jessica Nicol White, state biologist Marcia Mead, and technician Tyler Frink. Joe had seen and talked with them several times that week while he was on patrol, and they’d filled him in on their objectives.

  Because of the marked increase in human and grizzly bear “interactions” in the past few years, the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming had all agreed to conduct studies in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to try to determine what was going on. In that year alone, Joe knew, a fisherman in Yellowstone Park and a hiker in Grand Teton National Park had been attacked and killed by separate grizzlies. There had been three deaths in Montana and two others in Idaho. With the exception of a photographer who foolishly got too close to a grizzly sow and her cubs in Idaho, the remaining six deaths all appeared unprovoked.

  Hunting season brought a whole new set of problems because the mountains were flooded with human beings actively encroaching on grizzly bear country—which was growing in size by the year. That many humans meant that many more potential encounters, and that many more bloody deaths. The three states and the federal wildlife agency hoped that the simultaneous studies of the bears would provide new insight into grizzly bear behavior.

  Some of the early findings, Jessica White told Joe, had startled the researchers. Because collars with GPS technology had replaced simple but reliable radio transmitters, researchers were able to track the movement of collared grizzlies as never before. Instead of tracking bears in close proximity to them, the researchers could use satellite technology to track the bears from any computer and location. They’d learned, for example, that one female bear named Ethyl had covered 2,800 miles over three years—a distance and range never before imagined by bear researchers. Ethyl had traveled throughout Montana and Idaho, over mountain ranges, across rivers, and through the sleeping downtowns of small villages. Ethyl had raided dumpsters behind motels and grocery stores, and had holed up in the brush next to a rural grade-school playground for two nights and had not been detected by locals.

  Other findings were even more ominous, she said, and they involved hunters. The research teams asked men to volunteer in the study by carrying GPS devices of their own. That way, the biologists could track both grizzlies and humans at the same time and chart their movements. What they found in some instances was that grizzlies stalked hunters without ever being seen as the men moved through the trees. In some cases, the bears got within fifty yards of unsuspecting hunters. In other cases, it appeared the bears were scouting the humans the way they’d stalk other prey.

  The new findings created a good deal of debate and the controversy was getting bigger. Factions were lining up on different sides: animal rights advocates, outdoor groups, biologists, environmentalists, anti- and pro-hunting groups, guides and outfitters, sportsmen’s clubs. A recent article about the findings in the New York Times had stirred nationwide media interest and questions Joe couldn’t begin to answer:

  Had grizzly bears always behaved this way or was it something new?

  If the behavior was new, what had triggered it?

  Had something evolved in the genetics of bears that caused them to think of humans as a food source?

  Had studying the bears itself led to breaking down the natural wall between humans and the large carnivores?

  Should people just stay out of the forests altogether to lessen the chances of bear-human encounters?

  • • •

  JESSICA NICOL WHITE and Marcia Mead were obviously distraught when Joe arrived at their camp in the meadow. Both worked for the department out of the Jackson Hole office, and they looked it, Joe thought. There was a veneer of resort town chic in their dress and manner.

  White was in her late twenties and wore a fleece vest, heavy jeans, and glasses designed to make her look smart. She had her brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Mead was a cowgirl in boots, an untucked shirt with snap buttons, and a King Ropes cap that held her hair out of her eyes. Both women were smart, schooled, and professional. They were also a little naive, Joe thought. He’d strongly suggested that, in addition to the bear spray they both had within easy reach, they should have a large-caliber gun in their camp in case one of their study subjects got too close. They didn’t like that idea.

  Although it had warmed to the low fifties during the day, it was cooling fast as the sun chinned the western peaks. The aroma of pine and sage hung in the air. It was not yet deep enough into the fall that the grass crunched under his boot soles.

  White motioned to him from the open van door as Joe pulled up and parked between the tree line and the meadow.

  “You have to come look at this,” she said.

  Mead stood off to the side of the van, her face blank. She looked to be in shock.

  As Joe approached and clamped on his hat, he saw Tyler Frink, the tech guy, roll back in his chair inside the van so that Joe could get his shoulders in.

  “Did you call Sheriff Reed?” Joe asked.

  “Yes. He says he can’t get up here for at least an hour.” White sounded annoyed.

  “It’s thirty-five miles. It takes an hour to get here from town,” Joe said. “That’s actually pretty quick.”

  “It’ll be almost dark by then,” she said, her voice rising in pitch.

  “Yup,” Joe said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  He leaned inside and Frink pointed at a computer monitor on a small inset desk. Tyler Frink had mussed hair, an oversized flannel shirt, and hipster glasses that looked as out of place in the Bighorns as the panel van itself. When Joe had first met him, Frink had said he liked to be called “T-Frink.” Joe said, “Okay, Tyler.”

  On the background of the screen was a high-altitude satellite view of the Crazy Woman Creek drainage with two lines going through it.

  “The red line is GB-53,” Frink said, pressing his fingertip against the screen. “You can see him moving through the heavy timber from west to east.”

  “How often does the collar transmit?” Joe asked.

  “We’ve got it set to transmit every twenty minutes.”

  “Isn’t that a lot?” Joe asked skeptically. He knew that one of the big issues with the new GPS tracking collars was battery power. The more the collar transmitted, the faster the charge was depleted. Joe knew it because he’d heard researchers over the radio complaining about “lost” bears.

  “It is a lot,” White said defensively over Joe’s shoulder. “But we increase the transmissions if we think there’s a greater likelihood of a human encounter.”

  “Got it,” Joe said.

/>   “The blue line is our hunter,” Frink said, clicking to another screen and moving his finger.

  “Does he have a name?” Joe asked.

  “Bub-something,” Frink said. “Really: Bub.” He had a slight smirk.

  “Bub Beeman,” Joe said. “I know him. Good guy.”

  Bub Beeman was actually a no-account roofer from Winchester who was in and out of the county jail on possession charges. On September 1, Joe had cited him for killing too many mourning doves. He really wasn’t known around the county as a model citizen, but Joe wanted to impress upon the researchers that Bub wasn’t just a test subject—he was an actual human being. Joe’s experience with biologists was that they sometimes saw the world through the point of view of the creatures they were studying and they discounted the citizens who paid their salaries.

  Frink exchanged looks with Jessica White. They were thinking that over.

  “Go on,” Joe prompted.

  “So Bub is moving from west to east as well, kind of following this drainage as it curves around. What we’re looking at here is about ten this morning.”

  “Where’s your bear?” Joe asked.

  “Way up here,” he said, widening the scope.

  “How far apart are they at this point?”

  “A mile and a half, I think. There’s a high ridge and lots of trees between them. Now watch this,” Frink said, and clicked to the next image. “This is about ten-forty.”

  Joe narrowed his eyes. The red line had turned sharply toward the blue line.

  “Now the bear is about a quarter of a mile away from Bub.”

  “Could a grizzly smell a man from a mile and a half away?” Joe asked.

  “It’s unlikely but possible,” White said from behind Joe. “Their sense of smell is amazing. We’ve watched a grizzly make a beeline toward a dying moose from three miles away and all we can guess is that he was using his olfactory assets.”

  “His nose,” Joe said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” Joe said, “did you hear any shots around then?”

  White turned to Marcia Mead. “Remember when you said you heard a couple of gunshots? When was that?”

  “Around ten-thirty,” Mead said. “I didn’t look at my watch.”

  Joe said, “Don’t these grizzlies like to feed on gut piles?”

  A gut pile was made up of organs and viscera after a big-game animal was dressed in the field. Birds circling around gut piles was the way he found where most hunters had made their kills.

  “They do,” White said.

  “So a couple of shots might be just like a dinner bell to your grizzly.”

  “It’s possible,” White said. “I hope that’s not the case.”

  “Anyway,” Joe said, turning back to Frink, “if it was Bub who took a couple of shots, he must have missed. He wouldn’t leave a dead animal, and it doesn’t look like he’s tracking one he hit. It looks like he just moved on after he shot.”

  “That works,” Frink said. “I’ll advance the screenshots hour by hour.”

  Joe felt his stomach clench as he watched. At eleven, the bear was less than a hundred yards from Bub. Bub apparently couldn’t see it, though, because he stopped at a single location from noon to two. Joe guessed Bub stopped at a vantage point where he could see out into the creek drainage below him. Bub probably looked for elk and ate some lunch. Maybe he even took a nap. The whole time Bub was there, GB-53 had stopped as well. Keeping close to Bub.

  At three, Bub moved again. The grizzly tracked him, and on the screen the lines were a quarter inch apart. On the ground, Frink said, it was probably seventy to eighty yards. Joe knew the timber was thick where Bub hunted, and he probably couldn’t have seen the bear even if he’d known it was there and was looking for it.

  “Is this when you tried to call him?” Joe asked.

  “Yes,” White said. “We couldn’t get any response.”

  “And what happened to the handheld you forgot to give him?” Joe asked.

  “We didn’t forget,” White said. “But somebody forgot to put it on the charger overnight.” She looked accusingly at Frink.

  “Dude, since when is that my job?” he asked back heatedly. “I man the tracking equipment and download the data. Where in my job description does it say I have to keep your radios charged up at all times, too? Are you going to pay me overtime for that when I’m off the clock?”

  “It’s implied,” White said.

  “Implied,” Frink repeated under his breath, as if it were the most outlandish thing he had ever heard. “Look, we didn’t cause this to happen. We’re not liable for any of this. We didn’t know GB-53 would go after Bub. How could we?”

  Joe wanted to smack him.

  “We can talk about this later, T-Frink,” White said.

  “Okay,” Frink said after a deep sigh. He looked over at Joe and gestured to the monitor. “Here’s where things went bad.”

  The lines merged sometime between three-ten and three-thirty. The tracking devices continued to send out signals every twenty minutes, but they didn’t move.

  “How far is that from here?” Joe asked.

  “Three miles,” White said.

  Joe leaned out of the van and scanned the terrain to the west where Bub had stopped moving. Across the open meadow was a wall of trees that continued as far as he could see.

  “There’s no way to drive there,” Joe said. “But if we take my horse, we can get there in less than an hour, if we go now.”

  Frink quickly sat back in his chair with his hands up in a Not me gesture.

  “I don’t want you along anyway,” Joe said. To Jessica White and Marcia Mead, he said, “One of you should stay here to direct the sheriff. The other one can come with Rojo and me.”

  “I’ll go,” White said, instinctively reaching back for the can of bear spray on her belt to make sure it was there.

  “Bet you wish you had that gun now,” Joe said, grim.

  “We’re here to save bears, not to kill them,” White said.

  “Best not let Bub’s family hear you say that.”

  7

  “GB-53 is on the move,” Jessica White reported to Joe, even though he’d just clearly heard Marcia Mead say exactly that on the handheld radio White had looped around her neck.

  “Which way?” Joe asked, which White repeated.

  “South,” Mead said.

  “South,” White said, looking up.

  “Away from us,” Joe said. “That makes me feel a little more secure.”

  “Me too,” White said.

  They were on foot in the black timber. Joe was leading Rojo with a loose rope as they shinnied through closely spaced trees and stepped over downed logs. He’d thought about trying to ride double with Jessica White, but because Rojo was worn out from the day and the close timber was all around them, he’d decided against it. Too many low-hanging branches to navigate with two riders. The reason for walking Rojo in was in case Joe had to transport a body out.

  Much to Daisy’s dismay, Joe had closed her in the cab of his truck with the windows cracked. He didn’t want to risk losing his Labrador.

  • • •

  IT WAS NOT YET DUSK above the crown of the trees, but inside the forest it was already twilight and muted. The only sounds were from unseen squirrels, announcing their encroachment up the line to other squirrels, and the heavy footfalls of Rojo in the pine needle mulch.

  Jessica White had a battery-powered GPS tracking device hanging from around her neck, as well as the radio. She’d said she preferred to be in contact with Marcia Mead and Tyler Frink back in the van rather than use the unit. Their electronics had better capability than the portable unit, she’d told Joe.

  He thought it an odd decision at first until he realized that she was scared and she needed to maintain constant contac
t with her colleagues. She was used to doing research by staring at computer monitors and analyzing what she saw, not taking off across mountains as the sun slipped behind the western peaks. Otherwise, he thought, what they were doing and what they might encounter would seem too real.

  • • •

  BEFORE THEY’D LEFT, she’d asked T-Frink to increase the rapidity of the transmission rate on GB-53’s collar to fifteen-second pulses. She’d said, “Too much can happen if we can only track him in twenty-minute increments.” At the time, Joe saw the sense in that, even though he knew it meant it would draw down further on the battery capability of the collar.

  In addition to his .40 Glock semiauto, Joe carried his Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge shotgun. He’d replaced the buckshot shells with slugs for close-in lethality. An M14 carbine chambered in .308 Winchester was in the saddle scabbard on Rojo. A fresh canister of bear spray was clipped to his belt.

  “I’ve done this before, you know,” he said to White. “We had a rogue grizzly bear about ten years ago in the Bighorns. I saw him attack a man from behind. I still can’t get that image out of my mind—how fast and how powerful that bear was.”

  “Did you kill it?” she asked, sure of his answer.

  “I was too slow,” he said, surprising her. “It ran off.”

  “Did you ever see it again?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good for both of you, I guess,” she said. “What are you going to do if we walk into GB-53?”

  Joe hesitated a moment and said, “Whatever I have to.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said.

  • • •

  GB-53 WAS YOUNGER and bigger than the grizzly Joe had encountered ten years before. At that time, a terrific drought had caused some bears in Yellowstone to wander out of the park in search of food. The reintroduction of gray wolves into the park by the federal government had skewed the balance, and there was terrific competition for carrion and other staples. The rogue bear was four hundred pounds of desperation.