by Judy Young
“You broke my arm!” he yelled. Rek looked like an angry bear ready to attack, but as Buck grabbed the bear spray, Toni held up the case.
“Sit down,” she ordered, “or I’ll hit you again.”
Swearing, Rek sat down, cradling his arm.
“Shut up, Reko,” Buck said, aiming the bear spray at him.
It was suddenly very quiet. Too quiet.
“Where are the Rails?” Buck asked. He quickly glanced out the window. “You probably wish you hadn’t done that, Reko, old boy,” Buck said sarcastically. “They might have come to your rescue and you’d be driving away with your money instead of sitting here with a broken arm.”
Toni looked out the window too. Romana and Gerald sat on the garage floor near the crates. Their wrists and ankles were wrapped together with duct tape, and tape was across their mouths, too.
Toni picked up the duct tape and tore off a long piece. Staying out of Rek’s reach, she stuck the end of it on the edge of the bed.
“Wrap that around your ankles,” she said. When Rek didn’t move, Toni lifted the black case threateningly. “Now!”
Rek scooted over until he could reach the tape. Using one hand, he clumsily wrapped his ankles together. As Buck stood guard over Rek, Toni cranked up the satellite dish.
Soon she was on the phone, giving the police directions to the garage.
TAKE 18:
“DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE WAS ORIGINALLY ESTABLISHED TO PROTECT DALL SHEEP, BUT MOST PEOPLE COME HOPING TO SEE GRIZZLIES AND THE GREAT ONE.”
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17
Saturday morning broke bright and clear. Buck and Toni had sat around the campsite all day Friday, answering questions from both the rangers and the police. The cubs had been taken to a vet to be checked out. Now Shoop sat in the front seat of the truck with Craig. Dad, Buck, and Toni were in back. Out across the tundra, a huge blond grizzly grazed on blueberries. She didn’t even look up at the truck. Shoop pulled out the camera. Toni held the shotgun mic out the window.
“I can hear the chopper coming,” she said. Buck looked toward the sky but saw nothing.
Craig and Buck got out of the truck. Craig opened the tailgate and pulled out some cones with AREA CLOSED—BEAR DANGER signs on them. Buck helped set them along the side of the road. Then he stood beside one of the cones, looking at the distant grizzly.
Craig went back to the truck and pulled out a black case. Opening it, he took out his rifle, put a tranquilizer dart in it, and returned to stand by the cone next to Buck. As Shoop aimed the camera, Craig took off the safety, aimed, and shot. The grizzly stiffened, stood up, looked at Buck, and growled. It dropped back to its feet, took a few wobbly steps, stumbled over some alder bushes, and collapsed onto the ground.
Buck turned to look at the camera. Its red light was still on. “It will take about five minutes before she’s fully out,” he said. The light went off, and they waited.
When they heard the noise of a chopper’s blades, the camera light went back on. Soon a helicopter flew over the mountain. Two crates swung from a cable below the chopper. It hovered above the tranquilized grizzly and then slowly came down until the crates touched the ground beside her.
“Come on,” Craig said to Buck. “And you too, Toni. You both need to help me.” Toni climbed out of the truck, and the three of them hurried over to the crates. Shoop and Dad followed with the camera and mic.
They unhooked the crates from the cable. Then, with the cable dangling, the chopper flew higher in the air until its blades no longer stirred up the dust around them.
“The vet said they were fine, just a little dehydrated,” Craig said as he opened the crates. “The cubs and their mother will all wake up about the same time and won’t even remember what’s happened to them. They’ll just go back to eating blueberries, getting ready for winter.”
Craig and Buck pulled the golden cub out of the first crate. Toni helped Craig pull out the darker cub. Then the helicopter came back down. Craig hooked the empty crates up to the cable, and they all watched as the helicopter flew away.
“We need to leave now so the bears can wake up undisturbed,” Craig said. They silently walked back across the tundra as the morning’s first green bus drove past the cones, slowing down but not stopping.
Leaving the cones along the road, they piled into Craig’s truck and drove up and over the hill, past the Stony Dome overlook, and down the hairpin turns. Then Craig pulled to the side of the road and parked beside another ranger truck. K’eyush was waiting inside.
Buck climbed into Craig’s truck bed. When he jumped out, he was holding the Dall sheep horn. He showed it to K’eyush, then put it into a backpack and hoisted it to his shoulders.
“I shouldn’t have told anybody about the horn,” Toni said as they started walking across the valley toward the creek.
“It’s my fault too. I led Romana and Gerald straight to it,” said Buck.
“No,” Craig said. “It’s Rek’s, Romana’s, and Gerald’s fault. Rek wanted money and didn’t care how he got it. Romana and Gerald wanted things that were not theirs.”
“This horn and those bears belong here,” K’eyush added in her quiet rhythmic voice. “We are only their fosters and protectors, not their owners.”
The six continued walking through the valley toward the knobby mountains that looked like knuckles on a fist. They followed the creek, and when the walls closed in like a canyon, they climbed the embankment. They went higher, where the alders gave way to the short spongy tundra, and still higher, until they reached a point where the mountain dropped all the way around them. They continued on, around a rock pile, over a rise, and down a steep slope to a flat with two parallel lines in the tundra. Then they climbed halfway up another slope before skirting the side of the mountain. When they got to the rockslide, Shoop turned on the camera. Everybody stayed back, waiting for Buck to pull the sheep horn from his backpack and carry it to the rockslide. But Buck didn’t do that. With a grin on his face, he reached into his backpack, but he pulled something else out and tossed it to Toni. Toni caught an official Wild World of Buck Bray shirt and gave Buck a puzzled look.
“You have to look official,” Buck said. Toni smiled and slipped on the shirt, but she hung back.
“Come on. We’re doing this together,” Buck said. “We’re a team, aren’t we?”
As the red light glowed on Shoop’s camera, Buck and Toni carried the Dall sheep horn to the edge of the rockslide. And, as they placed the gracefully curved horn on the rocks, Denali, the Great One, watched.
GLOSSARY
BENCH: A long, narrow strip of level land that is surrounded by steeper slopes both above and below it.
BOAR: A male grizzly bear.
BRAIDED RIVER: A river with small, relatively shallow channels of water that divide and then recombine many times, making the water channels look like the strands of a braid woven with the gravel bars and islands that separate them.
CACHE (PRONOUNCED “CASH”): A hiding place to store things for a short while. Animals will make a food cache to hide food to eat at a later time.
CAIRN: Rocks purposely mounded to mark a specific place or show the direction of a trail.
CALF: A young caribou or young moose.
CARCASS: The remains of a dead animal.
CLIFF FACE: The vertical (or up and down) side of a cliff.
COW: A female caribou or female moose.
DRAW: The low land of a V that is formed when two hillsides come together.
GRAVEL BAR: Rocks (as well as mud, sand, and other sediments) that have been forced by the actions of the water to form long ridges of “solid ground.” Sometimes gravel bars are along the banks of rivers, sometimes they are surrounded by water, like islands.
KNIFE-EDGE: The long but extremely narrow ridge that is formed at the top of where two very steep mountain slopes meet.
KNOLL: Small rounded hill.
LICHEN: A plantlike living organism made of both algae and fungus tha
t help each other to live. The algae produces food and the fungus gathers water. Lichen look like crusty blotches on the surface of rocks and trees and may be orange, red, yellow, green, or brown.
MUDFLAT: Flat, exposed areas of mud left uncovered when the water usually covering it has drained away.
RACK: Another name for antlers.
RAVINE: A deep, narrow, steep-sided valley or gorge that is usually created by running water. It is similar to a canyon but smaller.
RUT: The fall breeding season for moose and caribou. Often these animals display unpredictable behavior and are more dangerous during this time.
SHALE: A kind of soft rock made of hardened clay that breaks easily into thin flat pieces.
SOAPBERRIES: A type of edible but very bitter red berry that grows on small shrubs in the Alaskan wilderness.
SOW: A female grizzly bear.
THICKET: A thick group of small shrubs or trees that grow closely together.
TUNDRA: Treeless Arctic lands where the ground below the topsoil is frozen year-round. It is covered with low-lying plant life such as grasses, small bushes, mosses, and lichen. Sometimes the tundra plant-life is referred to as “tundra.” Also, mountain areas above timberline are often referred to as mountain tundra.
JUDY YOUNG
Judy Young is the award-winning author of more than twenty children’s books, including the middle-grade novel Promise and the picture book A Pet for Miss Wright, which was read by LeVar Burton in a Reading Rainbow Story Time Video for National Reading Month. An avid outdoors person, Judy spent four months camping, hiking, and fishing in northwestern Canada and Alaska while doing research for The Missing Grizzly Cubs. Staying ten days in Denali National Park and Preserve, she encountered moose, caribou, Dall sheep, and grizzlies. Judy resides with her husband, Ross, in the mountains near Mink Creek, Idaho, where any day she may see deer, elk, moose, black bears, and mountain lions. For a behind-the-story adventure, see Buck Bray’s Wild World Scrapbook on Judy’s website, www.judyyoungpoetry.com.
