He pulled an absurdly thick Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and pried out one of the incomprehensible bits of curved metal and brandished it. “And I eat em cold.”
“That’s just … sad,” she said, getting in the passenger seat and tearing open the wrapper on an Almond Joy.
It was a long drive to Cataloochee, so they had plenty of time to fill in some of the gaps created by the last thirty years.
“What’re you doin back here?” Henry asked. “It’s gotta be a big change.”
“It is a big change,” said Phoebe. “But it’s a good one. I’ve missed everybody and I missed the mountains. And the whole reason I went into nursin in the first place was cause I wanted to take care of sick people. But every time I got promoted, I got farther and farther away from patients. Finally I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I was spendin all day on a computer!
“So I came home and I’m real happy with what I’m doin now. I get to be on my own, out runnin the roads around White Oak. I get to see the countryside and all sorts of people and medical issues. There couldn’t be a better job for me anywhere in the world.”
Henry smiled at her.
“Do you like your job?” Phoebe asked.
“Oh sure. I get better at it all the time because we’re always learnin more about animals and how to deal with them. When I first started, things were pretty crude, I was basically just a hog hunter, a pig exterminator, but we’ve learned a lot about wildlife management since those days. Now I get to spend more time workin with animals and helpin em. I especially like workin with the bears and elk. But still, this is no pettin zoo.
“What kinda stuff do you do with the bears?”
“Besides startin riots, you mean?” He sighed, “The bears are no problem. It’s the tourists who are the problem. They create dangerous situations by feedin an animal just one time for fun, or so they can get a blurry photo to take home with em. But when they do that, they leave behind a large wild animal that’s no longer afraid to have contact with human beings and who thinks of people as food dispensers, so I’ll end up having to euthanize the bear because of what people have trained him to do. That’s no fun.
“But mostly I’m doin the only thing I ever wanted to do. And gettin paid for it.”
“Tell me what you’ve found out about the owner of the backpack.”
“It’s a young woman, a graduate student at U.T., and her name is Ivy Iverson. I talked to her professor, her ex-boyfriend, and a new male friend. Didn’t find out much except lately she’s gotten real interested in somethin in the woods. Nobody seems to know exactly what it is though.
“Of course, I’m still not sure she’s actually missin. It looks like she is, but all I know for sure is she’s not answerin her phone. She could be campin without a permit somewhere without cell phone service. Her cell phone could be lost or broken or have a dead battery. It’s prob’ly nothin, but I wanna keep lookin.”
“What do you think’s goin on?” asked Phoebe.
“I’ve got a feelin the backpack we found was intentionally put there by somebody,” Henry said. “It was in a strange place. It makes no sense that a backpacker would have left it in the middle of a field in Cades Cove. And Miss Iverson didn’t go to the Cove much. It would be easy to carry it away from wherever she left it and drop it off where we’d be sure to find it.”
“Why would somebody do that?” Phoebe asked, with a feeling of dread.
“Because they wanted to cover somethin up, like where that girl was when they took it from her.”
“Why would you need to cover it up that way? Why not get rid of the pack where no one would ever find it?”
“Maybe whoever moved it, thought they had. Maybe they’re not smart, or not as smart as they think they are. Or maybe they did somethin to her and were tryin to make it look like a bear got her.”
“You think she might’ve been killed?”
“I don’t know, but if she was, I don’t think it was done by somebody who’s from around here.”
“Why?” asked Phoebe.
“Because we know a bear attack on a human in this park would look mighty suspicious. Our bears aren’t predatory. Yet. And people from around here know how to cover their tracks better than whoever moved that pack.”
***
The closer they got to Cataloochee, the more narrow, steep, and rough the roads got. Finally, when they crested the last rise, Henry stopped the Explorer and said, “There it is.”
Phoebe looked down into the valley. The late afternoon sun was slanting in at a low angle, washing everything with a deep golden yellow light. The place didn’t look real. It was an unspoiled paradise that made Phoebe think of Brigadoon or Shangri-La. Being from the Tennessee side of the mountains, she hadn’t realized there were any mountaintop views left in the park where you couldn’t catch at least a glimpse of vast clearcuts crammed with rental cabins. “Wow,” she said.
“Yep,” Henry agreed as he put the truck in drive and headed down into the valley.
***
“First, I need to check a bear trap,” said Henry.
Phoebe cringed inwardly thinking he meant the horrible metal traps with jagged teeth, but was relieved to see it was a eight-foot length of three-foot diameter corrugated steel culvert pipe. It had an ingenious humane design. There were plenty of air holes big enough to provide good ventilation, but small enough to keep paws and teeth inside the trap. It was on wheels and had a built-in trailer hitch so it could be towed with or without an occupant.
“We set these out anywhere bears are causin a problem. We use em mostly in the spring near where the elk have their calves so we can catch any bears in the area and move em, to keep em from botherin the newborn elk calves.”
He got out and looked at the trap, then said, “I’m going to have to rebait this one. Sorry.”
“I don’t mind waitin,” said Phoebe.
“I wasn’t apologizin for the delay, I was apologizin for the smell. I use sardines for bait.”
“Oh.”
“By the time I get this trap rigged again, I’ll have the smell all over me.” He grabbed a can of sardines out of the back seat and disappeared into the length of culvert on his hands and knees.
He was right. When he got back in the truck, he smelled strongly of fish. The stink was enough to put Phoebe off the rest of her Cheetos.
***
Henry and Phoebe weren’t the only people doing reconnaissance. Ivy’s attacker was also on the prowl.
In the Hesler Biology Building at the University of Tennessee each graduate student was assigned a lab space for examining and storing specimens. In Ivy’s area there was a pile of brown paper lunch bags used for collecting myxomycetes in the field and several rows of neatly labeled voucher boxes used for storing them in the lab. A dozen oversize Petri dishes were stacked near the window so the cultures could get some light.
Paraphernalia littered the countertop – tweezers, buck knife, 20X hand lens, glue, fanny pack, pens, filter paper. Ivy’s attacker turned and took a quick look at the island in the center of the room. The students had communal access to a dissecting microscope for initial examinations and a compound microscope for closer work. In the corner was a tank of sterile water buffered to pH7.
He turned back to peruse the labels on the boxes in Ivy’s area. Each stated the location where the specimen was collected, some with GPS coordinates, a description of the specimen, identified to species if possible, and what it was collected from.
Several larger boxes addressed to the U.S. National Fungal Herbarium in Maryland were worrisome. The boxes were empty, but that didn’t mean that others with something in them hadn’t been mailed to the repository already. Damn.
That could ruin everything. If she’d sent specimens to the National Fungus Collections, he could only hope they’d be as good as lost among the millions of other boxes. The place was run by the federal government after all.
This meant he might need a bit more luck, but he didn’
t worry. He was used to getting it. The study of slime was often more a matter of luck than skill. It was well known that most people, even the experts, made many of their best finds immediately after falling down. The deep leaf litter in the Smokies was slippery and the hillsides were steep, so walking was hazardous.
But precarious mountainside walking conditions were not all bad news for anyone hunting Myxomycetes because one of the best ways to find them was in the leaf litter right after falling down a leafy slope. The researcher would sit up and voilà, the myxos would be right next to them.
You had to know where to look, of course. Some of the best places were under leaves or near logs in conditions that were just right – moist, but not wet.
But Ivy wasn’t an experienced collector. Most of her specimens, especially the recent ones, were labeled as being found far above ground, up in the tops of trees. The altitudes were recorded, not just for the ground level, but also for the height in the tree canopy, 4,809’ + 75’, 3,987’ + 134’.
He gathered up a stack of boxes and all the likely-looking notes, and took them with him.
***
“We’re lookin for elk No. 32,” Henry explained. “I don’t know where he is, but he’s likely to be hangin out with the rest of the herd. The elk generally come down outta the woods into these open fields at dusk. No. 32 got his trackin collar damaged during the rut season in a fight with another bull elk. I might as well change it out completely. He needs fresh batteries anyway.”
Henry drove the park SUV slowly down the road that ran through the center of Cataloochee Valley. Elk were grazing on both sides of the road, each of them sporting large yellow ear tags with numbers on them and a clunky necklace with a plastic box on it. Henry called out the tag numbers he could see on his side, so Phoebe did the same for the ones she could read on her side.
“That necklace thing sure is ugly,” said Phoebe. “And the earrings. Not an attractive look.”
“Yeah, but it keeps em alive. The necklace is their GPS collar. Those things are $5,000 apiece. They record location data every few hours for two years. That way we can track the elk for their own safety and use the data for research purposes.”
“Do you monitor where each of em goes?” Phoebe asked.
“Yeah and we even monitor whether the collar is moving or not. If it stays in one place for too long an alarm signal’s sent to the monitoring station and we go check on em. Elk were extinct in this area until recently, hunters had killed every one of em. But we got some reintroduction stock sent here in 2001 to try to start over. A few of em are still tryin to get back home. If they wander too close to the Interstate, we go get em and bring em back to Cataloochee.”
Phoebe laughed, thinking he was joking.
“I’m not kiddin,” Henry said. “Number 7 got all the way across I-40, over two stone retaining walls, the median, everything, and when we tried to catch him he ran back across in the opposite direction. You should’ve seen him.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. Prob’ly plottin another breakout as we speak.”
“Each of the collars broadcasts on a slightly different frequency, so we know which elk each signal is comin from. The University uses somethin similar on bears. Last winter one of the graduate students was sent to the park to check on a bear that was in hibernation.
“The kid hiked in to where the bear’s territory was historically known to be. Then he turned on the trackin device that monitors the bears’ collars and tuned it to the frequency of the bear he was lookin for.
“He got a real strong signal. When that happens, it’s a big relief because it means you’re close to the place you’re lookin for. He walked around, tryin to spot a den, but he couldn’t see it. He thrashed around in the woods for hours, gettin more and more frustrated and worn out, basically goin round and round in circles, but he never could find the bear.
“Finally he gave up and drove back to Knoxville. He called his professor and told him what’d happened. The professor asked the kid to take a look in his backpack at the extra collar he’d been carryin in case he’d needed to change out the one on the bear. He told him to see if the backup collar had somehow gotten switched on.
“It had. The student checked the central log book and discovered that the spare collar he’d been carryin broadcasted on a frequency close to that of the collar he’d been tryin to locate.
“So, he’d spent the better part of a day of crashin around in the wilderness, followin his own backpack.”
Phoebe burst out laughing and Henry joined in.
“Taking care of critters is harder than people think,” he said.
Taking care of people is even harder, he thought, but didn’t say. He was thinking about the temperature at high altitudes of the park, the wind and the damp, and worrying that if the girl was out there somewhere she might die from exposure. Especially if she was hurt. But he didn’t say anything because Phoebe had enough sadness in her life.
Chapter 27
It was twilight by the time Henry finally spotted the rascally elk No. 32. He needed to be able to catch the animal, so he loaded up a special cocktail of drugs into a dart. He was quick, cool, and efficient. Thank goodness there was no crowd to worry about this time.
“What’re you usin?” Phoebe asked.
“Carfentanil, it’s something like 10,000 times more potent than morphine.” Henry carefully inserted the sharp end of a long needle into in the hole in the sharp end of the needle on the dart. It looked like the two needles were trying to stab each other to death. Phoebe’d never seen anyone do that before. It made refueling a jet in mid-air look crude by comparison.
“Why are you doin that?” she asked.
“This drug can be lethal to humans if it’s not used properly,” Henry said. “I don’t want any of it splashin onto a mucous membrane.”
Phoebe took a step back.
The next few minutes was so similar to countless scenes in documentary films it didn’t seem real until Henry asked her to hold the elk’s head up while he worked on it. As she stood holding the big fellow, Phoebe touched his antlers and was surprised at how warm they were, and velvety. “His antlers are hot!” she said.
“Yeah, when they’re growin out they’re like that they have a good blood supply. Their rate of growth is a real biological phenomenon, one of the fastest growin things on earth. Later they harden and the velvet gets scraped off. They’re cold then, and then finally, they shed them. Phoebe had a belated thought and quickly checked her hands in the dwindling light to make sure she’d wiped them clean before handling the elk. Thank goodness she had. She thought, embarrassed, you might be a redneck if you petted a wild elk and left Cheeto stripes on its fur.
Henry examined the elk, gave it an injection of antibiotics, and took some measurements. Then he changed out its collar. By then it was full dark. Really dark, like only a wilderness on a cloudy night can be. Phoebe hadn’t moved, so she knew she had to be standing within a few feet of where Henry and the elk were, but she couldn’t see either of them. She had no idea what was going on. Then she heard a strange grunt in the gloom.
Phoebe had grown up on a farm and knew better than to talk when a person was working closely with a skittish animal, but she couldn’t help herself. “Henry, is that you makin that noise?” she whispered.
“No!” he sputtered, sounding exasperated.
A few minutes later he said in a warning tone, “I’m injectin the reversal drug now.”
Phoebe barely understood what he’d said, but at his tone of voice she bolted, stumbling clumsily across the murky field, a flurry of guttural noises and harsh breathing exploding out of the darkness at her back.
When she was safely behind the hood of the Explorer, Phoebe turned toward the meadow and waited, virtually blind. It was several minutes filled with more grunting before a human-sized shadow stepped calmly up onto the road beside her.
“You okay?” Phoebe asked the indistinct shape. “Uh huh,” Henry sa
id, out of breath.
“What was all that scufflin and racket?” she asked.
“Can’t let go of em too quick,” he said. “You wanna make sure they’re good and awake before you let em loose. I wouldn’t want him be walkin around groggy this close to a river. He might fall in and drown.”
Ah, like the angel who’d wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbok ford. But mercifully, in this battle neither participant had been lamed. The worst that happened was the elk got a brand new funny-looking necklace.
Phoebe began to realize that as a routine part of his job Henry had to wrestle bears, elk, and pretty much anything with fangs, tusks, claws, or horns. She mentally compared fighting large wild animals with fighting Wanda over a box of doughnuts.
Henry had a huge advantage though, Phoebe wasn’t allowed to use a dart gun on her patients no matter how hard they were to handle. She made a mental note to mention this to Waneeta. A dart gun would be perfect for dealing with Wanda.
Henry was a professional critter wrangler, and had been one for thirty years. That was how he’d earned his living. She wasn’t sure why, but somehow, his having physical courage at night, in total darkness, seemed even more impressive than being brave during the day. Phoebe often felt brave first thing in the morning, but in the dark she was a big chicken.
“How many wildlife rangers are there?” Phoebe asked.
“Five,” said Henry, “but two are part-time.”
“Five?”
Phoebe marveled that a handful of people were responsible for the wildlife in the Smokies, all the animals in the 800 square mile, 520,000 acre park. Five guys, two of them part-time, were supposed to oversee all the animals in the park.
“When do you sleep?”
“In the winter when the bears do,” Henry said. “In the last four months I’ve put in five weeks worth of overtime.”
It had never occurred to Phoebe that rangers would have to work day and night. This night shift work out in the sticks, handling wild animals, was something she’d never thought about before. She wondered if it was any less scary for Henry to do his job if he couldn’t see what he was doing?
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