K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

“I have to go.”

“Yes, of course.”

“But I don’t know where to go.”

Benjamin squinted and shook his head. “You must go to where your daughter is resting.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Liz sobbed.

“There is no alternative, woman.”

“I have to tell you, I’ve decided to go south.”

“South? What is in the south?”

“Yellowstone,” Liz whispered, almost inaudibly.

“Yellowstone?” White Elk rapped his crutch on frozen ground. “Why would you want to go where the earth has come to an end?” he said in a huff.

“I haven’t got the courage to go anywhere else.”

Scowling, White Elk scolded the woman at his side. “You must go to your daughter’s grave. There is no other place you have to be. None!”

“I will, Benjamin, when I think I can face up to it.”

“You must do so now. There is nothing for you at Yellowstone.” White Elk’s voice cut a swath across the prairie landscape.

Liz boxed her head with her hands and bared her teeth. “Yellowstone buried everything. I have to come to terms with that, as a geologist, as human being, as a mother. I can’t feel anything. I want to know why I can’t feel anything.”

“You must give yourself time. And time starts with your little one. You must go to her. There can be no other destination.”

Howling at the stark linear geometry of the plains, Liz ranted, “I want to know why the rocks took precedence over everything, over my daughter. I spent more time at Yellowstone last year than I spent with my Pelee, do you know that? I dropped her on my husband’s doorstep so I could work at the park. My career was everything to me. Yellowstone—I absolutely had to be there.

Liz kicked the snow at her feet, kicked at it as though trying to ward off a rabid fox.

“My daughter got in the way. Can you imagine that? I was grateful that she loved to stay with her father at the farm in Minnesota.”

White Elk turned his back to the woman, inching away to distance himself from her. He studied the behemoths on the horizon, listening to the grunting and lowing of their many voices as they bulldozed the snows to find forage.

“Sinopa and I have talked about the day when you could leave, Elizabeth. Sinopa needs supplies badly for the clinic. She has to go to Calgary, but she delayed her going because of you.”

White Elk frowned in disgust, waving a finger toward the heavens as if ordering the scudding clouds to move on. “You have made your decision. Where you go from here is your business. We will help you get to the airport. That will be the end of it.”

Liz shook her head and wiped tears away. “I’m sorry I am such a disappointment to you.”

“The Siksika, the Kainai and the North Piegan, they all have gone to great lengths to help us. We would do the same for them, the same for you. We would not leave one of our own alone to suffer.”

“Are you all this way, Benjamin?”

“I’ve told you, Elizabeth, this is the way of native peoples. The many help the few. The strong help the weak. As tribe members, this is what we do, what we have always done. We lost our Montana home to the ash, so our brothers and sisters here in Canada took us into their homes. They are helping us make a new life among the buffalo. We all grow stronger. You grow stronger, too. But now I am worried about you, Elizabeth. You are not making sense.”

“Why are you wasting your energy on one white woman? I can’t fathom it.”

“You must know, a buffalo calf alone on the prairie cannot survive even for one day. It must be among its kind. It needs protection; it must be taught, to learn. It needs help every day so it can grow to great size. You see them all out there? There are hundreds of them. The Blackfoot here, there are many. We can’t go through this life alone, any more than the buffalo calf I speak of.”

White Elk tilted forward on his crutch and waved an open palm at the scientist. “You, Elizabeth, you go to your daughter’s grave, and you will find peace in time. Your spirit will heal. But you go to Yellowstone and do you know what you will find there?”

“I don’t know, Benjamin.”

“I know. I will tell you. You will find your heart is empty and cold.”

Nothing came of the ultimatum from the National Guard. Through noon the next day and well into the late afternoon, there was little activity on the coop grounds below. Harland felt he had at least won round two of the fight, and there might be time to take a nap. He rolled out an arctic sleeping bag and settled down to see if he could snatch a few hours of rest.

Percy poked the farmer an hour later, the angry red light of a Yellowstone sunset flickering in the headhouse superstructure. The noise of equipment engines rumbled through the building.

“Harland, I think you should see this,” Percy said, motioning his friend toward the window.

In the parking area of the coop and along the tracks, the big earthmovers were scrapping the earth clean and piling up long windrows of volcanic ash eight and ten feet high. The machines were building banks on both sides of the railroad track. Harland realized immediately what was unfolding.

“They’re building a blind, a screen. Do you see that, Percy?”

Percy nodded.

“They must have taken me seriously, you know, about outflanking them.”

“What do you think they’ll do when they get that done?”

“I think they’re fixing to try to restore that rail.”

“It’s going to be dark in an hour. You think they’ll try the rail tonight?”

Harland stood pondering Percy’s question, but he was distracted. His mind was racing, trying to come up with a strategy that would keep the train frozen in its tracks. Rather than rely on the simple bluff that Harland had revealed to Jim Bottomly, he now felt the two of them needed to put some teeth into the ruse.

“I’ve got an idea, Percy.”

“What’s that?” said the older man, now sitting against the wall with a coat over his legs to keep warm.

“Can you stay here and cover me?”

“Cover you? Where are you going?”

“Once it gets dark, we won’t be able to see too good what’s going on down below. They’ll probably use the cover of darkness to work on the rail. Don’t you say?”

“Yeah, that’s a good bet.”

“I’m thinking, I’ll drop down and find a place where I’ve got a shot at the tracks. If you hear me fire a shot, you fire a shot. That will make them think that what I told Jim was the real thing, that there are hostiles in hiding around the coop.”

“You going to shoot somebody, Harland?” asked Percy with a look of alarm on his face.

“All we want to do is get them the hell out of here, go someplace else, that’s all. If we make it uncomfortable enough for them, maybe they’ll move out.”

Percy agreed to Harland’s Spartan plan and made preparations by the window for an all-night vigil. Harland shouldered his rifle and left the headhouse as darkness seeped into the structure.

Harland retreated into the bowels of the towers, slipping into the night and making the long trek to the far end of the silo cluster. He ran behind them and came out to the far corner by the tracks. Now the train was many hundreds of feet away and barely visible. Before him the rail line was clear but invisible beneath the ash.

Harland crouched down, inched across the railbed and climbed the crumbling slope of a great mound of ash. At the top, he stretched out, perched an elbow atop his pack and sighted down his rifle toward the train. He’d have a shot, if need be, although he could barely make out details in the dark.

The evening temperatures dropped quickly and fell well below freezing. Harland shivered but kept his watch. In the headhouse, Percy pulled on a heavily insulated snowmobile suit, a hat and gloves.