For God’s sake, stop!” Lex yelled at Keith.
When Keith kept running, Chuck plunged off the trail and down the slope. Clarence followed.
“Keith! Stop!” Kaifong’s high-pitched cry sounded from the trail. Then she admonished, “Hold still, Randall.”
Chuck glanced back to see her wrestling with the straps that secured the drone in its frame on Randall’s back.
Keith slid to a stop at the foot of the hill and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Chance,” he bellowed. “Chance. Here, boy. Come!”
“Doggie!” Rosie screeched from above. “You come back here right now!”
The dog, sprinting across the thermal crust, paid no heed. Chuck and Clarence slid to a halt on either side of Keith.
“Chance!” Keith cried again. The dog kept running. Keith leaned forward.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Chuck told him between heavy breaths. “You can’t go out there. You’ll kill yourself.”
Keith’s gaze remained fixed on his dog. He stepped from the solid earth of the hillside onto the crust. Chuck and Clarence grabbed him from either side and the three fell forward together to their knees, fracturing the crust beneath them. Ooze, mucky and lukewarm at the edge of the basin, rose around their legs.
Chuck and Clarence struggled to their feet and dragged Keith back to the base of the hill. Chance had made it halfway across the thermal area. Keith stood at the edge of the basin, arms locked at his sides, gaze fixed on his racing dog. Chuck slumped down on a hummock of grass, his hands on his mud-coated knees.
“What were you thinking, letting go of the leash like that?” Clarence demanded of Keith.
“He caught me by surprise, yanked it right out of my hand,” Keith responded. “I’ve worked with him every day for the last three years. He does what he’s told, only what he’s told.”
“Looks like you’ve got more work to do.”
Keith watched as Chance galloped across a narrow isthmus between two large pools of water. “Chance!” he cried. “Chance!”
The dog didn’t slow.
Chuck used one of Keith’s mud-caked pant legs to pull himself to a standing position. A loud whirring noise, like a room fan at maximum speed, came from behind him. Kaifong stood in the middle of the trail holding the drone out from her body, the copter’s spinning rotors a blur in front of her.
Randall pulled the plastic, batwing-shaped control console from his waist holster. He thumbed one of the console’s toggle sticks forward. The whir became a high-pitched whine as the speed of the drone’s rotors increased.
Randall nodded at Kaifong. She opened her fingers. The drone lifted off her palms and climbed into the air. Randall cradled the console in both hands, working its controls with his thumbs and forefingers. The drone flew down the hill, tracking the angle of the slope. It zoomed past Chuck, Clarence, and Keith, and shot across the thermal basin, ten feet above the crust.
Far out on the basin, Chance stopped and turned to face the noisy, oncoming drone. The racing copter neared Chance in seconds. The dog crouched with its belly to the crust. The miniature helicopter flew straight over Chance and stopped beyond the animal, hovering in midair.
The whine of the machine’s rotors increased as the drone shot straight at Chance, angling toward the ground. The dog leapt away and ran ahead of the trailing copter with its tail tucked between its legs. Randall flew the drone a few feet above and behind the animal, using the aircraft to herd the dog back across the basin.
“Here, Chance,” Keith called as the dog neared the base of the hill. “Here, boy.”
Chance ran to Keith and pressed, quivering, against his muddy legs while the drone flew up the hill and returned to a gentle landing on Kaifong’s outstretched hands.
Keith grabbed the leash reel from where it dangled between Chance’s legs and, holding tight to the lead, climbed with the dog back up the hillside.
Lex awaited him on the trail. “What were you thinking, letting go like that?” he growled.
“He’s never done that in all the time we’ve been together,” Keith said. Chance panted at his side.
Lex aimed a finger at the tether. “From now on, hold tight.”
Keith gave the nylon line a tug. “Got it.”
Chuck and Clarence arrived back at the trail. Lex eyed the sulfurous ooze dripping from their legs. “You guys stink,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“Pumpkin Hot Spring is somewhere around here, isn’t it?” Chuck asked.
“You know about that?”
“I had all winter to research this area.”
“It’s not in the guidebooks.”
“But it’s all over the internet.”
“Is nothing sacred anymore?” Lex sighed. “By the way, good job keeping Keith from killing himself.”
Chuck pointed at the Drone Team members—Kaifong, reattaching the copter to the frame on Randall’s back while Randall strapped the control console back into the webbed holster at his waist. “They’re the ones to thank.”
With the console secured, Randall flicked a switch on its face. A green diode light in one corner died out as the console turned off.
“Thank you,” Keith said to Randall and Kaifong, “from both me and my doofus dog here.” He scratched Chance’s ears. “That was some pretty sick flying.”
Randall shrugged. “It’s what we do, man.”
Lex returned to the front of the line and led the hikers past the thermal basin and into a stand of pines. The sulfurous odor of the basin died away as they continued up the creek drainage. The cool breeze flowing down the valley from the divide pressed Chuck’s muddy pants against his legs. The smell of sulfur picked up again half a mile farther on, riding the breeze where the forest grew sparse near tree line.
The hiking group climbed out of the last of the low, bent trees toward a grassy bench. To the south, the divide cut the skyline below hulking Trident massif and its high point, Trident Peak. The three parallel finger ridges that gave the massif its name dropped east to west from near the top of the snow-covered summit into the upper Thorofare Creek drainage. Snowfields fronted the north faces of the three finger ridges, and shadows filled the two deep canyons between them.
As the hikers topped the grass-covered bench, they saw steam rising from the surface of Pumpkin Hot Spring, fifty feet off the trail. In the 1950s, horsemen frequenting the trail had channeled hot water flowing from a steaming vent in a nearby hillside to a galvanized steel stock tank pieced together on site and dug into the ground. A chalky, orange-tinged coating of travertine around the rim of the ten-foot-diameter tank gave the manmade soaking pool its name. Freshly trampled grass surrounded the sunken pool.
“Somebody beat us to it,” Chuck noted.
“The wranglers,” Lex said. “Can’t blame them. They hit it pretty hard the last two weeks.” He turned to the group. “Everyone but Chuck, Clarence, and Keith, keep moving. We’ll wait ahead while they get cleaned up.”
Janelle walked with the girls and the others up the trail and out of sight over a rocky lip.
Lex stood at the edge of the pool. “We keep threatening to shut this thing down,” he said, “but people really like it.”
“Especially the rangers assigned to Turret Cabin each summer, I’ll bet,” Chuck said.
“Especially them,” Lex agreed. “Can’t beat the view, that’s for sure.” He turned a slow circle, taking in the surrounding ridges and peaks, the broad Thorofare Creek drainage, the even broader river valley below Turret Cabin, and the southeast arm and rippled, open lake in the distance.
Chuck shucked his daypack, stepped out of his nylon hiking pants, and dunked the pants’ dirty lower legs in the narrow stream of warm water flowing out of the pool. Next to him, Clarence and Keith pulled off their muddy pants, too.
“Be careful if you decide to get in. Wouldn’t want you to scald yourself,” Lex said. “Thermal temps across the park have been fluctuating quite a bit lately.”
Chuck looked up from where he knelt at the edge of the pool. “I hadn’t heard about that.”
“We’ve kept it quiet so far—and offline, too, I guess, if you haven’t caught wind of it. We’re still trying to get a handle on what’s going on.” Lex squatted and dipped his hand into the pool. “Still perfect here.” He rose and turned to the trail. “Join us when you’re done.”
Chuck, Clarence, and Keith finished rinsing their pants and laid them on the grass. Chuck stripped and slid into the spring.
“Can’t resist,” he said. “Just for a minute while our pants dry a bit.”
He rested his head against the pool’s travertine rim, up to his neck in the warm water.
“Ahh.” He closed his eyes, his arms floating at his sides. “I wish the lake had been this temperature yesterday.”
Keith set his pack on the ground and secured Chance’s leash to it. He and Clarence disrobed and slipped into the pool with Chuck.
“I’m not sure I deserve this,” Keith said, sinking to his chin, “but it sure feels—”
A yell came from out of sight beyond the rock rib. “Bear!” Sarah’s voice cried out. “Grizzly!”