Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

"She's not going to Jackson Hole," he said to himself where he sat at the useless telephone at a nurse's station outside Bishop's room. "Damn," he swore. "She's gone after him alone." But where? Where had she gone? Where would the showdown occur?

He rushed from the hospital to Jessica's room at the hotel.

Once at her hotel, J. T., flashing his credentials and claiming it an emergency, stepped into the room so recently vacated by Jessica Coran. She'd left the room in immaculate condition, as typical of her, but J. T. prayed for any clue as to her whereabouts. On a notepad beside the phone he found a notation she'd made, and it had a chilling effect on J. T. as he stared down at the message, which read:

#6 is #4-Avaricious amp; Prodigal

"Damn it," he muttered, knowing what the message must mean. "He's killed again. Somewhere between here and Jackson Hole."

"Sir?" asked the bellman who'd unlocked the door for him.

"Nothing, never mind." J. T. then saw the discarded map in the wastepaper basket. He lifted out the map and unfolded it, spreading it across the bureau, instantly recognizing it for the answer he'd come in search of. "Yellowstone. She's gone to Yellowstone."

Another glance at the map and he saw the fine-pen circle mark around Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin, with the names of the various hot springs. One in particular caught his attention and his imagination, recalling to mind what Jess had said about the one phone call from the killer in which he mentioned Hellsmouth and the Devil's Well.

J. T. raced out with the map in hand. He had to get to the airport, and fast.

The helicopter pilot taking Jessica to Yellowstone had at first balked at taking her, a lone woman, into Yellowstone's wilderness area. She'd shown him her badge, explained to him that she worked for the FBI, and that she must get to Old Faithful Lodge at the greatest possible speed. He then wanted to take the time to sketch out a flight plan for the tower, and she told him it would delay them too much. It was then that she offered him twice his normal rate for a ferry to Yellowstone.

He agreed, and they began their journey together. Still, he remained skeptical of her purposes, the familiar paranoia about government types filtering in, she believed. With the rhythmic scream of the rotor blades overhead, the flume of whirring sound and vibration rocking the carriage of the chopper, they spoke to one another through the headphones.

"You got business in the park, huh? With the rangers, huh?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"Fronval know you're coming?"

"You know Fronval?" she asked, surprised.

"Doesn't everybody? Man's something of a legend in these parts. So, does he know you're coming?"

"Not yet, but when we're in range, I'd like to call Sam on the radio. Do you know Sam personally?"

"Sure, everybody whose ever rangered knows Sam," the pilot, who'd introduced himself as Corey Rideout, said, more curious about her now than ever.

"Oh, so you've been a ranger?"

"A lot of people in these parts go into the service. It's almost a rite of passage, you might say. But it gets tiresome after a time. It can be a lonely existence, 'specially in dead of winter at a ranger station. A man could go nuts, and some do." He looked at her again, studying her. Then he asked, "Where do you know Sam Fronval from?"

"Met him the last time I was at Yellowstone."

"Oh, so you've been to see Sam before? I get it. You're one of those Washington sanitizers, aren't you?"

"Sanitizer, me?"

"Sure, you want to sanitize the wilderness, as if it could be done! Make it safe for every little boy and girl whose parents cart them into the park in their trailers. You know it's impossible. When I was a park ranger, some years back, a tourist fella comes up to me and points at the thousand or so buffalo rooting around some hundred yards from a crowd of gawking onlookers. You know what this slicker asked me, lady? Doctor?"

"What's that, Mr. Rideout?"

"He says, 'Tell me, Ranger, these animals we're looking at, just rooting around out here… they couldn't be wild, right?' "

" 'They are that, sir,' I told him.

" 'No way,' he tells me. if they were wild, you couldn't just have them running around loose.' The man was an injury waiting to happen," Rideout finished.

Jessica laughed appreciatively.

"There're four thousand bison in the park, compared to seven hundred fifty bears, so visitors see a lot more buffalo than grizzly, but either way, many of them have only seen such animals through Disney or MGM studio releases, and they think they're as cute and mindless as, as say, Thumper and Bambi. Fools try to put their kids on the back of a buffalo to get a Kodak moment. The moment the two-thousand-pound, unpredictable, and belligerent animal erupts, they get more Kodak moments and home video funnies than they bargained for and someone dies, usually in great distress because the nearest hospital trauma center is in Bozeman. So they sue the park, and so Washington pencil-pushers hear about it's happened again, and a hue and cry goes up to make people safe from wilderness, to sanitize places like Yellowstone now that so many people visit annually."

"I'm not here to sanitize the park," she assured Rideout.

"Then what's the big rush to get there and see Fronval? Wait a minute: You're here about the brucellosis, sure, aren't you? Now, that figures. The government sends a government doctor to Yellowstone to stamp a USDA approval on the herd, right?"

"Herd?" she asked, confused. "What herd? Heard what?"

"The park bisons. You were sent to keep the cattlemen and ranchers thinking everything's being taken care of, right?"

"Oh, I see." Jessica had heard of the unfortunate outbreak of brucellosis among the buffalo, a disease ranchers and farmers across America had done battle with for more than sixty years, and they'd nearly eradicated the nasty livestock disease, one of the reasons why milk was pasteurized. The fight against brucellosis by American stockmen, ranchers, farmers, and the USDA was no less than a miracle victory. In the meantime, another great success story had also unfolded-the story of the century of conservation effort on behalf of the American bison that once numbered fifty million and had been hunted to extinction levels in the nineteenth century. Now the breed had been rescued from its extinction-level population of six hundred remaining in 1889, the largest herd at the time a mere twenty-one, who, coincidentally, grazed and lived in Yellowstone. Yellowstone's free-ranging buffalo herd now numbered some four thousand, and Yellowstone buffalo experts boasted it was the largest free-ranging buffalo herd in the country. It was also the only herd that, throughout its history, had remained free. Today the park was proud of its herd. But now it was estimated that half of the herd was infected by brucellosis, and there was no cure short of destroying the animals.

The ranchers and cattlemen had a strong argument. For sixty years they'd fought what was commonly called undulant fever, and now it was almost nonexistent in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Only forty-six livestock herds still carried the disease, as compared to 124,000 infected herds in 1957. In a couple of years, the USDA had an excellent chance of completely eradicating the disease in all fifty states.

Yellowstone, the nation's first national park, had a history of becoming ground zero for many a fight, and now it was ground zero for this puzzling debate in which park rangers believed the buffalo and its disease posed no threat to surrounding livestock, and ranchers felt their herds and profits threatened by the infected buffalo. The media, conservationists, and cattlemen were all asking the same perplexing question: How do you eradicate the last remnants of a disease, when it's carried by a species you want to save?