C. Box - Savage Run

Marybeth shook her head, stunned.

“He wants to meet me Saturday,” she said. “I wrote down the directions.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Joe said, as much to himself as anyone. “I saw where he died.”

Marybeth smiled cryptically. “Joe, Stewie said that he did blow up. But that he was reborn. ”

“He actually said that?”

She nodded, and started across the room toward Joe.

That evening, in the library, Marybeth saw the handicapped-accessible Vee Bar U van cruise through the parking lot. The sight of the van froze her to her spot behind the counter, her fingers poised and still over the keyboard of the computer. She slowly swung her head toward the front doors, anticipating the arrival of Ginger Finotta and Buster. But Ginger didn’t enter and the van was no longer in sight.

Instead, in the side office behind the counter, Marybeth heard the metallic clunk of returned books being dropped into the drive-up return. The sound, familiar as it was, startled her.

She waited for the van to pull away from the building and didn’t move until the sound of the motor had vanished.

She quickly finished her entry, then went into the side office. On top of the pile of returns was the single, aged, dog-eared copy of The Life and Times of Tom Horn, Stock Detective.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

July 5

It was dusk when the Old Man realized he had truly become evil.

The setting had nothing to do with it. The heavy evening sun had painted a wide bronze swath through the tall buffalo grass of the clearing below them and had fused through the lodgepole pines that circled the clearing like a spindly corral. Breezes so gentle they could barely be felt rippled across the top of the grass and looked like gentle ringlets on water. The air was sweet with pine and sage but there was an occasional whiff of sulfur from seeping, newly punctured pockets in a swampy hot spring flat where they had ridden the horses a few minutes before. And there was another smell, too. It was the smell of slightly rancid pork.

Earlier that day they had located Tod Marchand, attorney at law, near his tent on the bank of Nez Perce Creek. Marchand had been remarkably easy to find. He had checked in at the ranger station the day before at the South Entrance of the park and noted where he intended to camp. Tibbs had found the entry while the Old Man chatted with the female ranger and filled out the forms that permitted them to transport their newly acquired horse trailer and horses through the park.

They had ridden up on Tod Marchand just after noon, while Marchand was scrubbing his lunch plate clean with biodegradable soap. Marchand had looked back over his shoulder when he heard the horses approach, and stood up and turned around just in time for the butt of Charlie Tibbs’s rifle to crack down hard on the top of his head.

“Counsel, approach the bench,” Charlie Tibbs had said, without explanation, as Tod Marchand crumpled to the grass.

They had gagged and hog-tied Marchand and thrown him across the back of the Old Man’s saddle. They took the horses up into the trees far away from the trail and the creek-away from the places other hikers or trekkers might be.

Yellowstone was remarkably big and wild beyond the tourist traffic that coursed along the figure-eight road system in the park. As they rode up into the timber and over a rise, the sounds of the distant traffic receded, replaced by a light warm breeze wafting through the treetops. The chance of anyone seeing them, or of the two men stumbling upon another person, were remote.

Still, to the Old Man, Yellowstone Park was a disquieting place to do business. Despite unreasonable demands by environmentalists and mismanagement by the federal government, Yellowstone was a special place, in his opinion. It was somehow sacrosanct. It had just felt wrong to be riding through the lodgepole pine with a bound and gagged lawyer on his horse.

They had ridden down the slope to where the trees cleared and the creek wound through a draw with very high eroded banks. They let their horses droop their heads to drink. It was then that they heard a splash upstream, somewhere over the high bank and out of view. The instant they heard the sound, Charlie Tibbs slid his big.308 Remington Model 700 rifle out of his saddle scabbard. The Old Man fumbled for his pistol.

Within two minutes, the water on the stream was covered with floating feathers within a swirl of a dark oily substance. They watched the feathers float by in front of them. It was as if a duck had exploded on the water less than 100 yards away.

Both horses had begun to snort and act up. When the Old Man’s horse reared and turned back the way they had come, he muscled the horse around to face the water. The Old Man knew well enough that even experienced horses might be uncontrollable this close to bears.

They had quickly retreated back into the trees, tied off the horses, and tried to calm them. Marchand had been thrown to the ground when the Old Man’s horse spooked, but as Charlie said, he probably couldn’t feel it anyhow. Armed, they walked back down to the stream and cautiously climbed the bank. They heard muffled grunting and woofing even before they actually saw the bears-grizzlies, a sow and her two cubs. The sow was a shimmering light brown color with a pronounced hump on her back. Her snout was buried in the rotting bark of a downed tree, feeding on larvae. The cubs, already over a hundred pounds each, were further down on the tree trunk taking off shards of bark with lazy swipes of their paws. Apparently, the duck hadn’t been much of a meal.

Tod Marchand was propped against a tree trunk when he regained consciousness. The Old Man and Charlie had carried Marchand across the stream through a swampy meadow and into the timber on the other side of the slope. The bears had remained across the river. The first thing Marchand did when he awoke was pitch over sideways into the grass and throw up. When he was through, the Old Man helped him sit up again with his back against the tree. It took a while for Marchand to seem lucid.

The Old Man studied Marchand, while he waited for him to fully regain his senses. Marchand was, by all accounts, a good-looking man, the Old Man decided: tall, with thick blond hair cut into an expensive, sculpted, swept-back haircut. He was tanned and fit and he looked much younger than his fifty-three years.

The Old Man had, of course, seen his photograph in the newspapers and had watched him several times on television news shows. Tod Marchand was the most successful environmental lawyer in America when it came to winning court decisions. Marchand had been the lead attorney in the five-year case that forced the National Park Service to dismantle several recreational vehicle campgrounds because the area the campgrounds were located in was thought to be prime grizzly bear habitat. The RV campgrounds had, in fact, been within ten miles of where Marchand was camped.

The Old Man distinctly remembered a shot of Marchand standing outside the federal courthouse in Denver talking to reporters after successfully arguing for a halt to a multimillion-dollar gold mine about to be started up in southern Wyoming.

“Gold is a matter of perception,” Marchand had told reporters. “Gold for many of us is wildlife running free in untrammeled wilderness.”

Marchand had paused for effect and looked straight into a major network’s camera (he was so experienced at this sort of thing that he knew by sight which were the network’s cameras and which belonged to local stations), Our gold won, Marchand had said, which had since become a rallying cry.

Tod Marchand looked much different now, the Old Man thought. The lump on his head from Tibbs’s rifle butt was hidden under tinted layers of hair, but a single dark red track of blood from his scalp had dried along the side of Marchand’s sharp nose.