Later that day, I stood on the side of the road in Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park, watching a herd of bison. I had come with my parents, the McCrackens, and Jasmine to witness the return of the young bison that Jericho had stolen.
I had feared the drive there would be awkward because of the whole situation with the necklace, but Jasmine had quickly thanked the McCrackens for doing the right thing, and that had defused any tension. The trip had turned out to be very pleasant, with Jasmine pointing out lots of scenic points and wildlife. Thanks to her keen eyes, we saw three herds of elk, a moose, and a mother grizzly with two cubs on our way to the release site.
It had taken the police in West Yellowstone an hour to capture the young bull that morning. They hadn’t wanted to tranquilize him, because knocking an animal out is always risky, but wrangling him wasn’t easy. Ultimately, they had to wake one of the best cattle ropers from the rodeo. In the meantime, the young bull had eaten most of the flowers in the town park and appeared in over two thousand selfies.
“Jericho used to be a champion roper, back when he was younger,” Jasmine explained. “You need the skill to lasso your target, and the strength to overpower it. Jericho had both. Not many people could wrangle a year-old bison into an RV on their own. But if anyone could, it was him.”
It turned out, I had made a mistake in my deductions about the bison thefts. Jericho had been acting on his own. The Spooners were innocent.
After finally wrangling the stolen bison, the police had taken our advice and gone to interview Ike and Taffy, who had been shocked by the accusation that they had stolen any bison. They said that they had only asked Jericho to purchase more bison for them. Jericho had told them that he could get better deals if he offered local ranchers cash, and the Spooners had agreed. But instead of buying bison, Jericho had been stealing them, then pocketing the thousands of dollars the Spooners paid him for each one.
He had started off by targeting the local ranches, hitting not just the Krautheimers, but also two other neighbors, before ultimately realizing that it was easier to get the bison in the national park. In Yellowstone, he didn’t have to take fences down or worry about the bison being tagged—and there were a lot more bison to choose from. The RV was his own, although it had already been in bad shape when he had the idea of using it to commit his crimes. He had been driving around in the park at night, targeting young bison that were close to the road, roping them, and then dragging them into the RV. All in all, he had stolen eleven bison over the past month, ranging in age from six months to a year.
Thus, it wasn’t Taffy Spooner who had opened the chute and released Grievous Bodily Harm at the rodeo. It was Jericho. He had noticed me eavesdropping on Ike Spooner’s conversation and wanted to create a distraction. (At the time, he had been wearing an older one of Taffy’s signature baby blue cowboy hats as part of his rodeo clown outfit, but had lost it in the commotion.) Jericho hadn’t meant to put my life at risk, which was why he’d intervened when the bull nearly flattened me—although I was now less thankful to him for saving me, given that he was the one who’d put me in jeopardy in the first place.
The Spooners had been mortified to learn that they had supported a rash of thefts and quickly volunteered to return all the bison to where they had been stolen.
However, the first to be released was the one that Jericho had stolen that very morning.
Before us was a great swath of grassland, on which over five hundred bison were gathered. There was plenty for them to eat, so they were widely spread out. Calves gamboled about. Young males butted heads. The occasional adult wallowed in the dirt, playfully rolling about like a puppy that weighed half a ton.
Ranger Oh was relatively sure that the young male had been stolen from this herd, although she couldn’t guarantee it. “There are almost always bison in this section of the park,” she had told us. “And there’s a road that goes right through the middle of it. So if anyone wanted to steal a yearling, this would be the best place to come.”
Unfortunately, returning a bison to a herd isn’t always easy. A few years earlier, a family of tourists had mistakenly thought a bison calf had been separated from its mother and made a well-meaning but ill-conceived attempt to rescue it. They had put it in the back of their minivan and driven it to the ranger station. Afterward, the rangers had tried to reunite it with its mother but found the mother wouldn’t take it back. The young bison we had rescued that day was much older and no longer nursing, but there was still a chance that he might be ostracized from the herd. Or traumatized by his removal.
As it was the middle of the afternoon, there were dozens of cars and RVs parked along the roadside. Tourists were lined up along the shoulder, taking photos and selfies. On the road, traffic was jammed, as tourists too lazy to even get out of their cars simply slowed to a crawl to let their families take photos out the window.
Ranger Oh was walking up and down the shoulder, warning tourists to stay by their cars and not approach the bison.
Now a park service truck pulled off the road, towing a cattle trailer with the young bull in the back. A faint dirt track led into the grassland, and the truck followed that for a short distance, getting away from the main road.
“Hey!” a tourist near us shouted. “How come they can drive off-road and we can’t?”
“Those are park service employees,” Ranger Oh explained. “They are participating in an important bison rehabilitation project today.…” She then turned and shouted, “PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO TOUCH THE BISON! THIS IS NOT A PETTING ZOO!”
A few yards away, a father who had been walking directly toward a young calf returned to his family, giving Ranger Oh a dirty look. “You don’t need to have such an attitude!” he yelled.
“You don’t need to be such an idiot,” Ranger Oh muttered under her breath. She stopped next to us to watch the truck.
“How’s this going to work?” Mom asked.
“Hopefully, it will be nice and simple. They open the gates and the bison comes right out. We’ll see.… DO NOT TRY TO FEED THE BISON! THEY ARE PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF FEEDING THEMSELVES! AND WHEN YOU PICK PLANTS, YOU KILL THEM!”
A family who had gathered handfuls of grass to feed to the bison sheepishly returned to the roadside.
Ranger Oh looked to me. “Whether or not this works, the park service is very thankful for your help in figuring out who stole our bison. We can’t give you a cash reward or anything like that, but if you’d like a personal tour of any of our attractions, let me know and we can work it out.”
“Maybe you could give Teddy VIP seating at Old Faithful?” Summer asked. “He didn’t get to see it erupt when we were there the other day.”
Ranger Oh grinned. “I’m sure we could arrange that. Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
Down the road from us, a father was carrying his toddler toward an adult bison in a moronic attempt to sit her on its back for a photo.
Ranger Oh left us to intervene. “A BISON IS NOT A SHOW PONY!” she shouted. “PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO POSE YOUR CHILDREN ON THEM!”
“Speaking of rewards,” J.J. said to me, “I still owe you for recovering my necklace.”
“But I didn’t recover it,” I reminded him.
J.J. shrugged. “You still figured out what happened to it. Which was the mystery I asked you to solve.”
“And besides,” Kandace said, “things worked out better this way. We made them right.”
Arturo Creek had called as we were driving into Yellowstone. He reported that Daisy’s nephew was thrilled to have his sapphire returned to him. Now Cade was trying to figure out what to do with it. Arturo suggested that it would be nice if Kandace could make good on her offer to help Cade sell the sapphire at a fair price, so that Cade and the Creeks could establish a fund to provide much-needed health care and school repairs to the reservation.
Out in the midst of the grassland, two park rangers got out of the truck and walked back to the cattle trailer.
“As I recall,” J.J. said to me, “you asked for a percentage of the value of the sapphire as payment. But as far as my finances are concerned, I’m actually out five hundred bucks for that thing.”
“Daddy!” Summer chided. “That’s not cool!”
“In fact,” J.J. said teasingly, “this has been an extremely expensive vacation. Not only did I lose that sapphire, but I’m also out a big chunk of change for the Oy Vey Corral.”
Despite everything that had happened, J.J. had decided to buy the Krautheimers’ property. Although, I assumed that had probably been a done deal all along. J.J. obviously loved the place, and even though Pete Thwacker had been miserable there, he was sure he could sell the idea of a FunJungle-branded American safari—as long as they could keep grizzlies from getting into the lodges.
To that end, there had been no sign of Sasquatch since the night he broke in. Evan suspected the bear was still around, but without bait to lure him, there was a good chance we wouldn’t see him again. “Even a bear that big can stay hidden if it wants to,” Evan had said.
Out in Hayden Valley, the rangers opened the rear gate on the cattle trailer, then quickly stepped away to give the young bull some space.
The bull stepped out tentatively, sniffing the air.
“Anyhow, Teddy,” J.J. said, “I was thinking that maybe I could put off paying you for a few years. Like, until it’s time for you to go to college.”
My parents were so surprised, they turned away from the bison to face J.J.
“Are you saying you’ll cover my tuition?” I asked.
“Seems like a good investment,” J.J. said. “That brain of yours is a national treasure. With the right support, you’ll probably cure cancer someday. Or invent some kind of new green energy to stop global warming.”
“Or open the world’s greatest detective agency,” Kandace added.
“J.J.,” Mom said, “we can’t accept that—”
“Like heck we can’t!” Dad interrupted. “Do you have any idea how much college costs these days?”
The young bison suddenly bolted away from the trailer. He ran to where a few other young males were gathered and fell in with them. The males responded with some jostling and head-butting, but it wasn’t really aggressive. It looked more like practice: teenagers readying themselves for the day when they would be adults. They circled around one another and kicked up a cloud of dust.
The tourists who were actually facing the bison, rather than trying to take selfies, oohed and aahed.
“So it’s settled, then?” J.J. asked me. “Is that a fair payment?”
“Sure,” I said. “If it’s okay with my parents.”
“Ooh!” Summer exclaimed. “Maybe we’ll go to the same college, Teddy!”
I could no longer tell which of the young bison was the bull we had brought back and which were the ones that had been there all along.
Jasmine said, “Looks like that return went as well as we could have hoped for.”
Kandace asked me, “Teddy, have you given any thought to what you’d like to study for a career?”
I took in the great grassy field filled with bison. In the distance, a few pronghorn grazed as well, while in the air high above, a bald eagle glided on a thermal. It was as beautiful a sight as I had ever seen in my life.
“Zoology,” I said. “What else?”