Douglas Preston - White Fire

“The tombstones are over there,” said Chief Morris. He pointed to a far wall, against which was arrayed a motley collection of tombstones — a few fancy ones in slate or marble, but mostly boulders or slabs with lettering carved into them. They, too, had been cataloged and carded.

“We’ve got about a hundred and thirty human remains,” said the chief. “And close to a hundred tombstones. The rest…we don’t know who they are. They may have had wooden markers, or perhaps some tombstones were lost or stolen.”

“Did any identify bear victims?”

“None. They’re traditional — names, dates, and sometimes a phrase from the Bible or a standard religious epitaph. The cause of death isn’t normally put on tombstones. And being eaten by a grizzly would not be something you’d want memorialized.”

Corrie nodded. It didn’t really matter — she had already put together a list of the victims from researching old local newspaper reports.

“Would it be possible to open one of these lids?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not.” The chief grasped a handle on the nearest box.

“Wait, I’ve got a list.” Corrie fumbled in her briefcase and withdrew the folder. “Let’s look for one of the victims.”

“Fine.”

They spent a few minutes wandering among the coffins, until Corrie found one that matched a name on her list: Emmett Bowdree. “This one, please,” she said.

Morris grabbed the handle and eased the lid off.

Inside were the remains of a rotten pine coffin that held a skeleton. The lid had disintegrated and was lying in pieces around and on top of the skeleton. Corrie stared at it eagerly. The bones of both arms and a leg lay to one side; the skull was crushed; the rib cage had been ripped open; and both femurs had been broken into pieces, crunched up by powerful jaws to obtain the marrow, no doubt. In her studies at John Jay, Corrie had examined many skeletons displaying perimortem violence, but nothing— nothing —quite like this.

“Jesus, the bear really did a number on him,” murmured Morris.

“You’re not kidding.”

As she examined the bones, Corrie noticed something: some faint marks on the broken rib cage. She knelt, looking closer, trying to make them out. Christ, what she needed was a magnifying glass. Her eyes darted about, and — on the crushed femur — she noticed another, similar mark. She reached out to pick up the bone.

“Whoa, there, no touching!”

“I need to just examine this a little closer.”

“No,” said the chief. “Really, that’s enough.”

“Just give me a moment,” Corrie pleaded.

“Sorry.” He slid the lid back on. “You’ll have plenty of time later.”

Corrie rose, perplexed, not at all sure about what she’d seen. It might have been her imagination. Anyway, the marks surely must be antemortem: no mystery there. Roaring Fork was a rough place back in those days. Maybe the fellow had survived a knife fight. She shook her head.

“We’d better get going,” the chief said.

They emerged into the brilliant light, the blaze off the glittering blanket of snow almost blinding. But try as she might, Corrie couldn’t quite rid herself of the strangest feeling of disquiet.

The call came the following morning. Corrie was seated in the Roaring Fork Library, reading up on the history of the town. It was an excellent library, housed in a modern building designed in an updated Victorian style. The interior was gorgeous, with acres of polished oak, arched windows, thick carpeting, and an indirect lighting system that bathed everything in a warm glow.

The library’s historical section was state of the art. The section librarian, Ted Roman, had been very helpful. He turned out to be a cute guy in his midtwenties, lithe and fit, who had recently graduated from the University of Utah and was taking a couple of years off to be a ski bum. She had told him about her research project and her meeting with Chief Morris. Ted had listened attentively, asked intelligent questions, and showed her how to use the history archives. To top it off, he had asked her out for a beer tomorrow night. And she’d accepted.

The library’s albums of old newspapers, broadsheets, and public notices from the silver boom days had been beautifully digitized in searchable PDF form. She’d been able, in a matter of hours, to pull up dozens of articles on the history of Roaring Fork and on the grizzly killings, obituary notices, and all kinds of related memorabilia — far more than she’d obtained in New York.

The town had a fascinating history. In the summer of 1873, a doughty band of prospectors from Leadville braved the threat of Ute Indians and crossed the Continental Divide, penetrating unexplored territory westward. There, they and others who followed made one of the biggest silver strikes in U.S. history. A silver rush ensued, with hordes of prospectors staking claims all through the mountains lining the Roaring Fork River. A town sprang up, along with stamp mills for crushing ore and a hastily built smelter for separating silver and gold from ore. Soon the hills were crawling with prospectors, dotted with mines and remote camps, while the town itself teemed with mining engineers, assayists, charcoal burners, sawmill workers, blacksmiths, saloonkeepers, merchants, teamsters, whores, laborers, piano players, faro dealers, con men, and thieves.

The first killing took place in the spring of 1876. At a remote claim high on Smuggler Mountain, a lone miner was killed and eaten. It took weeks for the man to be missed, and as a consequence his body wasn’t discovered immediately, but the high mountain air kept it fresh enough to tell the gruesome tale. The body had been ripped open, obviously by a bear, then gutted, the limbs torn off. It appeared the bear had returned over the course of a week to continue feasting, with most of the bones stripped of their flesh, the tongue and liver eaten, the entrails and organs spread about and more or less consumed.

It was a pattern that would be repeated ten more times over the course of the summer.

From the beginning, Roaring Fork — and indeed much of Colorado Territory — had been plagued by aggressive grizzlies who were being driven to higher altitudes by settlements in the lower valleys. The grizzly bear — it was noted with relish in almost every newspaper report — was one of the few animals known to hunt and kill a human being for food.

During the course of that long summer, eleven miners and prospectors were killed and eaten by the rogue grizzly at a variety of remote claims. The animal had a large territory that, unfortunately, encompassed much of the upper range of the silver district. The killings caused widespread panic. But federal law required miners to “work a claim” in order to maintain rights to it, so even at the height of the terror most miners refused to abandon their sites.

Hunting posses were formed several times to chase the grizzly, but it was hard to track the animal in the absence of snow, amid the rocky upper reaches of the mountains above the tree line. Still, the real problem, it seemed to Corrie, was that the hunting posses were none too eager to find the bear. They seemed to spend more time organizing in the saloons and making speeches than actually out in the field tracking the bear.

The killings stopped in the fall of 1876, just before the first snow. Over time, people began to think the bear had moved on, died, or perhaps gone into hibernation. There was some apprehension the following spring, but when the killings did not resume…

Corrie felt her phone vibrate, plucked it out of her handbag, and saw it was a call from the police station. Glancing around and noting the library was empty — save for the ski bum librarian, sitting at his desk reading Jack Kerouac — she figured it was okay to answer.