Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

"I guess there is more than one creature I'd like to sanitize the park of," she teased, "but I have no cure for the one, only the other."

"Nobody's got a cure for that buffalo disease. But what do you mean, two creatures you'd like to clear outta the park?"

"I'm hunting for the worst kind of animal in the woods, Mr. Rideout."

"A man? You… you're on a manhunt?"

"I'm with the FBI, not the U.S. Interior or the Department of Parks and Recreation."

"A manhunt. Wow, I'm part of a manhunt. Wait'll I tell Eleanor and the kids about this one. They won't believe it."

After this, Rideout burned with curiosity about her, her reason for traveling alone into Yellowstone after this killer he'd read about in the morning papers concerning him greatly. He'd worked up to what he wanted to say, and he finally said it. ''Just the same, even if you are trained in such matters as detection and apprehension, Dr. Coran, someone enters a wilderness area like Yellowstone every day without the least preparation for its special dangers. I mean Yellowstone down there is more than just forty thousand elk, four thousand bison, ten thousand hot springs, and two hundred lakes. It's also full of grizzly bears that run around as freely as you or me."

"I'm tracking a more dangerous animal than grizzlies," she replied.

"Yeah, so you told me, but once you're down there in this.. this resource, remember, it's not a zoo or an amusement park. Danger is a part of the resource."

"I know the drill, Mr. Rideout."

"You do?"

"Wilderness is impersonal."

He was mildly impressed by this, smiling. ''Nature demands we pay attention, doesn't it? Whether we're putting out to sea or an overland trek."

"I know that there's good reason for why the rangers in such areas as Yellowstone preach rules."

"Good," he replied with little conviction, as if he didn't believe her just because she said so.

"Mr. Rideout, I know it's fool's play to walk amid standing burned trees from a forest fire, even one that ended years before… that such dead trees routinely fall on people because they come down without a sound. I know that hiking alone is deadly and again foolish. I know that wearing any sort of perfume can lure a bear faster than it can a man, and the aroma alone can turn you into his next meal, and that the bear wouldn't let a tent or a campfire stand in his way, that in fact nothing stands in the way of the most consummate eating machine nature's ever devised."

"Good, very good," he replied, conviction taking hold now.

She added for Rideout's benefit, "Wilderness doesn't care whether you live or die, and it does not care how much you love it."

"Spoken like someone who's been there."

"I have. I've hunted in some of the greatest wilderness areas left us. But this is the first time I've hunted a human in one."

This was met with an appreciative silence.

The pilot had finally gotten it, Jessica thought. Rideout couldn't tell Jessica Coran anything she didn't already know about this vast wilderness below them. She knew that there were disappearances in the national parks all the time, every day, and there were accidents involving the beasts and natural formations, and the natural flora when some fool ingested a poisonous plant in any given park, and that most of these deaths might have been avoided if and only if what rangers called "natural curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity" in the national parks could be stopped, but everyone knew that as the impossibility of all impossibilities. Still, of late, along with fire-related deaths in and around the parks, there had been a rash of deaths this year like nothing the major parks had ever faced before. No doubt Sam Fronval had already chalked it up to the turn-of-the-century blues, that people carried their phobias and eccentricities with them into the park, and there was no way for him to get them to check their deadly peculiarities at the gate.

Congress wanted more legislation to protect people in the national parks, while the people who lived, worked, and understood the parks tried to explain-once they stopped laughing at Congress-that you couldn't put a fence around the Yellowstone gorge, the hot springs, or such wonders as the Grand Canyon. There wasn't that much fence in the world, for one; for another, any fence or sign in the wilds detracted from the very nature of nature. To develop a national park was tantamount to not having one.

Still, some people, usually people who thought of a park as something akin to Central Park in New York City, wanted the immense parks of the West to be wild as long as they weren't too wild, so wild that it might harm them personally. These people, often the first to sue a park, required a park's wilderness, yet they denied its right to exercise its wilderness character upon them.

She recalled something Fronval had said to her on the subject once. He'd often been quoted as saying the same in articles she'd seen in National Parks, the magazine mouthpiece for the NPCA: "Unfortunately, when people visit the national parks, they don't always leave their suicidal, masochistic, or sadistic tendencies at the park borders."

The quote certainly fit in with the manhunt she was about to propose to Fronval.

Jessica thought the argument, even the fact there was an argument of this kind, a commentary on where society was heading, that so much of society hadn't the least idea of what the wild outdoors meant, that somehow wild buffalo, bears, and cougars had been confused with movie-friendly beasts seen in Disney versions of the great outdoors. This led visitors to Yellowstone to believe they could not only feed the bears but also pet them, and that a snapshot of Junior on the back of an elk or a mountain goat was as natural an idea as a snapshot of Junior on the back of a statue. People ascribed cartoonlike, friendly characteristics to the wildest of beasts that roamed free here, but this in effect negated the very meaning of free.

She had given thought to when the outdoors was natural and when indoors in the American wilderness was unnatural. History, time, and the march of progress had turned reality inside out, and people with it.

While she and her friend Melissa Gilmore had been staying at the lodge during her first and only other visit to Yellowstone, they'd heard of an incident in which a young man, in an attempt to rescue his dog from a hot spring, had lost his life to the searing, boiling cauldron he'd dove into. Dogs in Yellowstone caused great concern to the rangers. There was good reason for the signs posted everywhere that read: do not take your dog on trails in Yellowstone. Dogs were never allowed off-leash in the park, and never to be taken on trails, especially trails through thermal areas. Hot springs amounted to only one reason for the ban on dogs here. Other reasons involved the fact that dogs were predatory on small animals; they chased and harassed larger animals such as moose and elk and buffalo. Dogs also attracted bears-indeed these two animal breeds hated one another. Finally, dog excrement introduced exotic plants into an ecosystem.

Disregarding all of this, the young man allowed his dog to escape his car, and the dog, panting from the heat, leaped into a hot spring of 192 degrees Fahrenheit. The young man dove in to save the yelping, helpless animal, somehow thinking himself less vulnerable to the scalding than his pet. Both man and dog died of their injuries and massive dehydration.

Another like story involved a little boy who thought the spring inviting when he purportedly shouted, "I wonder just how warm the water is'' and promptly stepped off the wooden-planked path to tumble in. The boy's skeletal remains were recovered days afterward when the hot spring spat them back up, finished with the child.

Devastated, the parents sued the park in a wrongful-death action.