And...we’re...down,” Randall said. He lifted his thumbs from the toggles.
“I was trying to see ahead,” Kaifong said. “I thought we were elevationally stable.”
“We were,” Randall told her. “Until we weren’t.” He turned to the others. “Usually, Kaifong can zoom in all she wants. But things can get janky pretty fast at top speed.”
“That tree came out of nowhere,” Kaifong said.
“Tell me about it,” Randall agreed.
Chuck said, “You guys don’t sound too upset.”
“Drone plunge,” said Randall.
“That’s what it’s called,” Kaifong explained. “It’s a fairly common occurrence, unfortunately. Which is why all drones are designed to withstand hard landings, and why we brought lots of spare parts with us this summer. You know when Randall asked me about the bottom axis? That’s what we lost when I zoomed in so much.”
“Always have to be ready to abort,” Randall added.
“We had them, though,” Kaifong said. “We had them.”
Lex asked her, “Think the footage will show us anything?”
“Nothing too specific. We were still too far away.”
Randall returned the control console to the webbed sling at his waist. “Guess we’d better go pick up the pieces.”
Lex looked to the west, where a thin streak of purple lined the horizon. “I still can’t believe the wolf and grizzly stayed together all the way here. We have to figure out what’s brought them together, what’s going on between them. But it’s too dark to do anything more now. Let’s come back tomorrow. We’ll retrieve the drone then.”
“No can do,” Kaifong said. “Ground squirrels love gnawing on the plastic parts. Something to do with the chemical smell. There won’t be much left to retrieve if we wait till morning.”
“You just said you have lots of extra parts.”
“Not a complete warehouse. If something gets munched that we can’t replace, we’re finished.”
“We’d have Chance as a backup,” Keith said. At his side, Chance’s head rose.
Lex asked, “Think your dog can track the smell of plastic?”
Kaifong lifted her arm and pointed at an oversized watch that dwarfed her delicate wrist. “The drone has a GPS tag. My watch is GPS-enabled. It’ll get us within a hundred yards.”
“Okay if we keep tracking?” Keith asked Lex. “It’ll be good practice for Chance.”
At Lex’s nod, Keith allowed the dog, ranging at the end of its leash, to lead everyone across the opening and back into the trees. No blowdowns or pools of water slowed their passage through the next stretch of forest. They broke into the next meadow. The clearing glowed a dim rose color, tranquil in the waning light.
Chance strained at the leash, nose to the fresh grass sprouting in the opening. “We’re still on a dual trail—both animals,” Keith told the group.
Chance and Keith crossed the meadow. Lex fell in behind, with the others. Chuck brought up the rear. They entered the deepening gloom of the forest, moving in silence through a section of old-growth lodgepole pines. The trees grew tall and thick, the north sides of their trunks covered in moss. Pools of water stood in low points on the forest floor, forcing everyone to wend their way around them.
“There!” Keith shouted when he and Chance reached the far side of one of the pools. He pointed at a pair of indentations in bare mud at the edge of the water.
Lex studied the indentations. He turned to Toby. “I’ll be honest. I didn’t fully believe what you said you’d seen until now.”
The others crowded forward. Sarah pulled a headlamp from her pocket and aimed its beam at the ground. Over her shoulder, Chuck could see imprinted in the black mud the unmistakable paw print of a wolf, and beside it the track of a bear, big as an omelet pan and so fresh the wrinkles in the sole of the bear’s paw cobwebbed the wet soil.
“Dude,” Randall breathed.
Lex set his hands on the shoulders of Toby and Sarah. “Looks like your two teams are going to need to work together—and the two of you, as well.”
Toby rested his fingers on Sarah’s arm. “What do you think?”
Sarah shook off his touch. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Toby rolled his eyes. “Can we get this over with?” he asked Lex.
Chance and Keith headed deeper into the shadowed forest, Toby close behind.
“You need to get your act together,” Lex said to Sarah.
“He just harassed me.”
“He offered you an olive branch.”
“He touched me. I could file suit if I wanted.”
“I’ve about had it with you, Sarah,” Lex said. “Whatever’s going on between you and Toby, it’s time for it to end. Right now.”
She looked at the ground.
“You have to understand,” he continued, his voice softening, “the success of the Wolf Initiative helps the Grizzly Initiative, too.”
“True that, man,” Randall said. “The grizzlies and wolves together in Yellowstone are showing the importance of the predator-prey relationship in, like, a balanced ecosystem.”
Lex nodded, one of his bushy eyebrows cocked in response to Randall’s bro-speak. “If grizzlies and wolves really are, like, starting to team up in the park,” he told Sarah, “you and Toby are going to have to learn to team up again, too.”
Sarah’s body quivered. “This thing with the grizzly and wolf is a one-time deal,” she said. “It has to be. One of them made a kill, the other was drawn to it. Then, while both of them were in the same area, they were attracted by the smell of the meat lying in the grass in front of the cabin, and they just happened to step out of the woods to check things out at the same time.”
“Then why are they still traveling together this far from camp?” Chuck asked.
Sarah turned to him. “They’re on their way back to the kill. That has to be it. Anything else would...would...”
“Anything else,” Lex said, “would go against everything Yellowstone researchers have come to know and understand about the park’s top two predators. If what we have here is more than just a grizzly and wolf posturing over a kill, it could change everything—everything. And you and Toby would be the lead scientists on the case.”
Sarah looked after Toby as he departed through the trees. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I’ll be a team player.” Her eyes narrowed. “But if he tries to shoot another move on me, I’ll kick his balls into his throat.”
“I’ll be sure to warn him.”
A low fog sifted along the forest floor with the coming of full dark. Chuck stuck his hands in his jacket pockets against the deepening chill and followed the others through the trees until he caught up with Keith and Chance. They doubled back time after time, skirting low areas of swamp and mud.
On several occasions, Chuck stumbled and almost fell, failing to spot depressions and downed branches in the gloom. Like Lex, just ahead, Chuck walked with his shoulders bowed and his eyes down, focused on the stretch of forest floor directly in front of him, while the other scientists strode through the forest with their heads up, looking forward, their bare hands swinging at their sides.
He worked his lower lip between his teeth. The benefits of youth. Not so long ago, he, too, would not have noticed the growing chill, and his youthful eyes would have registered all manner of definition on the shadowed forest floor at his feet.
He stopped and swung his daypack around to his chest. The others snaked away from him through the trees, leaving him on his own as he dug his headlamp from his pack, settled it on his forehead, and clicked it on. Its beam bathed the patch of ground in front of him with a welcome cone of blue-white LED light even as the rest of the forest around him plunged into contrastingly deeper shadow.
He resettled his pack on his shoulders. The others were out of sight in the forest ahead. He turned his head, the lamp sending shadows flitting through the trees.
A growl rumbled directly behind him. He stood in place, not daring to breathe.
The growl had the same low pitch as the grizzly in the willows in Hayden Valley yesterday morning, and the audio of Notch on Justin’s phone the evening before that.
Another snarl froze him. Without moving his head, he glanced sideways, scanning the shapeless darkness. The second snarl, also behind him, was higher pitched and canine-like—wolf-like.
He spun and directed his headlamp the way he’d come. The beam lit tree trunks and skittered across the black surface of a pool of standing water. Two spots glowed yellow on the other side of the pool. No—four spots.