Whoops,” Randall said, turning on his headlamp. “Did you trip over my foot? Sorry about that, dude.” He stood ten feet away, holding Toby’s rifle at his waist. The rifle’s barrel was aimed at Chuck. “I figured you’d follow me.”
Randall released the rifle’s safety, a metallic click in the quiet forest. Only the bottom half of his face showed in the downward glow of his headlamp.
Chuck raised his hands. He pictured Sarah’s body in the cabin. She, too, had faced Randall. And she had lost.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?” Chuck asked, his goal to keep Randall talking long enough to...well, to do what, he didn’t yet know. What he did know now was that, wide grins and bro-speak aside, Randall was a murderer, and he had Toby’s rifle in his hands.
Chuck expected a reply thick with menace. Instead, Randall’s tone was light, almost playful. “I’m doing what I should have done two years ago, Chuckie.”
“The Territory Team?”
“I thought they’d get the message.”
“What message?”
“To stay the hell out!” He jerked the gun for emphasis before re-aiming it toward Chuck’s torso. “They shouldn’t have been there.”
Chuck lowered his hands, the movement gradual, careful. “They?” he asked. “You mean,” he continued, stalling, “the animals?”
“No!” Randall said. “Not the animals. You don’t belong here. I don’t belong here. Scientists don’t belong out here in the wilderness.”
“Is that why you killed Sarah?”
Randall froze. “She…”
“You murdered her, Randall.”
“You...you know what she’s like,” Randall said. He rubbed the side of his head with his hand.
“She’s dead.” Chuck bit off the word.
“I’m not a killer.” Randall exhaled, the air whistling out his nose. “I’m working for the predators. Don’t you see, man? These lands were preserved, set aside. They were to be left to nature, to the animals, forever.”
“Of course they were,” Chuck snapped. “Every bit of land in every direction for miles and miles around us is set aside.”
He recalled with a start that Randall had emphasized Yellowstone’s having been preserved by Congress “for the animals,” and had called Yellowstone National Park the grizzlies’ “pad,” likening park visitors to invaders.
Randall’s hands tightened around the rifle. “You know Yellowstone’s history—the animals wiped out by poachers. You think this place is preserved? Wrong. The way humans are allowed to swarm all over the place, the wolves and grizzlies and everything else might as well be specimens in a freakin’ zoo.”
Chuck’s eyes strayed toward the cabin. No lights approached through the trees. He was on his own. “They got a handle on the poachers decades ago,” he said. He had no choice but to ride the conversation, search for a way out. “The animals came back, even the wolves.”
“Sure, they brought the wolves back—to a place that had been totally developed while they were gone. Millions and millions of visitors every year and no end in sight. It’s just as bad outside the park, too, bulldozing new roads, drilling wells, pumping chemicals into the ground. You’ve felt the earthquakes, we all have. It’s a full-on assault. I saw it my first summer here. I tried to talk to the others about it, but no one would listen, no one wanted to hear.”
“So you took matters into your own hands.”
Randall’s headlamp moved up and down. “Nonviolent confrontation, that’s what I settled on.”
“You didn’t achieve it.”
“I tried. I really did.”
Chuck fought his nerves, seeking focus. The tiny, plastic computer chips, the ones implanted in the wolf and Chance, they matched up perfectly with Randall’s high-tech skills. “The chips. Those are yours, aren’t they?”
“Bing-go,” Randall said. “I use a crossbow and a projectile point made of beef cartilage. The cartilage dissolves and the projectile shaft falls out, leaving the chip in place.”
“I don’t see...”
“Of course you don’t. You’re an archaeologist, stuck in the past. This is about the future. About making things right in Yellowstone after all these years.”
“Making things right for who?”
“For the wolves, the grizzlies.”
“By scaring people out of the backcountry?”
“The concept is simple, really. Tiny electrical pulses applied where the spinal cord meets the brain. I can make the animals do what I want. My chips are based on the neurological biosensor chips developed for humans by Effiteon Technologies. The developers at Effiteon don’t understand the true potential of their work. My improvements are straightforward—circuitry upgrades, a transistor boost, paint-on battery power. My enhanced chips create what’s called cortextual suggestion in my animals, setting them on certain paths based on the strength and directional intensity of the pulses I deliver.” Randall lifted the control console in its holster at his waist. “At their base operational level, the pulses free the animals to follow their natural instincts, minus their fear of humans. From there, I can use the pulses to encourage the animals to do more. Much more.”
“But how…?”
“Standalone computer chip design and manufacture is simple these days. You don’t need a factory anymore. You can lay circuitry on individual chips now. And you don’t need a big lab to test chips prior to implantation, either.”
“But why Chance? Why the dog?”
Randall dropped the console back to his side and again gripped the gun with both hands. “I chipped it the first night, outside on its sleeping pad, while Keith was in his tent. It didn’t make a sound. Not even a yelp.” Randall’s teeth flashed white below his headlamp. “Did you see the way that thing took off across the thermal basin? Like a shot. Talk about natural inclination.”
“But Chance isn’t one of your predators.”
“No. But the dog’s tracking ability was going to be a problem.”
“So you tried to kill it.”
“I gave it its freedom, that’s all—though, I admit, I did wait until we reached the basin to do so.” He laughed.
“But you launched the drone to herd the dog back to safety.”
“That was Kai’s doing, not mine. I had to go along with her.”
Chuck worked backward in time. “The Territory Team—Kaifong wasn’t there to stop you, was she?”
“I chipped the grizzly when it was on a kill in Lamar Valley, right next to the road. The wolves were just as simple, and more grizzlies, too. It’s a sin, really, how comfortable all of them are around humans. It’s so easy to get close to them. Each chip is GPS-enabled. I know the location at all times of every single one of my test subjects.”
“So you knew the grizzly had taken over the wolves’ carcass.”
“I knew its locational coordinates, sure.”
“You gave Notch a pulse when the Territory Team was scheduled to arrive, didn’t you?”
Randall shrugged. “They’re the ones who chose to hike into the heart of grizzly country. They gave me the chance to test the chip in real-world conditions.”
“You killed two wolf researchers, two people, Rebecca and Joe.”
“I didn’t kill anyone. I simply freed the bear to do what its natural tendencies told it to do—defend its food source.”
“You’re insane.”
“On the contrary, I may be the only sane researcher in all of Yellowstone National Park. I was a kid when my parents first brought me here. The wolf reintroduction program was only a decade or two old at that point, but the good the wolves were doing for the park already was obvious. Even so, the wolves were under assault. Anytime one of them wandered outside the park boundaries, it was gunned down.”
“Everything was going well inside the boundaries, though—the elk population declining, beavers rebounding, the rivers coming back.”
“But they couldn’t leave well enough alone, could they? They couldn’t just look around and realize things were on the mend. No way, man. They had to do all their darting and collaring. They had to treat the park like one, big, human-run science project.” Randall took a deep breath. “Yellowstone’s predators are not zoo creatures. They’re not.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“It’s not what nature intended!” Randall said. “I watched it play out when I was in college. I visited the park, chatted up everybody, went on to grad school. I got the posting here with the Yale program three years ago. Finally, I was where I needed to be. I could set up my own protocol with my own subjects.”
“You decided to play God.”
“Wrong. All the other scientists were playing God. The goal of my study was, is, to restore equilibrium, to turn the grizzlies and wolves back into the free, kick-ass predators they were before the white man showed up here.”
“The white man?”
“Back in the day, the Indians who left the baskets you came here to study knew who was in charge. They came up to the central plateau a few weeks each summer, picked nuts and berries, harvested a little meat, and headed for lower ground.”
Despite the gun aimed at him, Chuck thought of the loamy contents of the Trident One baskets—contents that might well have been meat. “The ancient Indians who came up here may have done a lot more hunting—and killing—of your animals than you want to admit.”
“What are you saying?” Randall demanded.
“Your precious predators may not have been so kick-ass compared to the Indians, back in the day, as you’d like to think.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Randall jutted his jaw. “The bears and wolves did just fine until the Europeans showed up. They were the ones who screwed everything up. Instead of allowing nature to take care of itself, the white dudes destroyed the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. We knew it was time to fix things. So we set to work.”
“We?”
“Of course, we. I couldn’t do it alone. But it took me a while. Everyone at Yale, Harvard, Brown was too citified. They didn’t understand the first thing about the natural, animal world, and they didn’t care, either. They just wanted to do their science. They had no appreciation for what was really happening in Yellowstone. Finally, I met Kai at a conference. She was from Stanford, out here in the West. She’d seen the crowds at Yosemite and Sequoia; she knew what was at stake. We decided to team up. She understood—for a while.”
Chuck’s eyes widened. “When you slapped her on the shoulder and she fell into the lake,” he said, “that was no accident, was it?”
“I—” Randall’s voice caught in his throat. “I had the idea in mind, but I don’t think I knew if I would go through with it. It was so easy, though. I barely touched her shoulder.” He released the gun with one hand long enough to squeeze the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “She thought we were only studying wolves. She was convinced they wouldn’t attack humans. She believed grizzlies were too dangerous, too unpredictable.”
“She was right.”
“I’d say the data is still inconclusive.”
“You’ve been documenting all of this, haven’t you?”
“Of course. It’s a study. And, I must say, its design is flawless. The data we’ve collected over the last three years is fully suggestive that my primary theory is one hundred percent correct.”
“Your theory?”
“That given the freedom they deserve, the park’s top predators will assert their dominance over all other animals in the park, humans included. Once they’re chipped, all I have to do is give them the tiniest of jolts to set them off. Sometimes, not even the pepper spray stops them. It helps that firearms are outlawed on the research teams, of course. Or, it helped—until you came along with Toby’s gun.” Randall’s voice sharpened. “You killed two of my study subjects, Number 6, the wolf, and Number 1, Notch, my very first chip placement. There’s no excuse for what you did, Chuck. None whatsoever.”
He raised the rifle, aiming at Chuck’s face, his finger on the trigger.