JOE PICKETT TRUDGED back down the mountain with Jennie Gordon and Bill Brodbeck to intercept the Mama Bears.
Brody Cress and Tom Hoaglin had stayed on the ridge to look for tracks and signs of the bear. Cress had already been on a satellite phone requesting flyovers by fixed-wing aircraft from the Game and Fish Department and the Wyoming Wing Civil Air Patrol.
Meanwhile, Hoaglin had climbed to the top of a large boulder and was sitting there, glassing the mountain meadows and openings in the timber for signs of the target. The two of them had agreed to stay put and in radio contact until Joe, Gordon, and Brodbeck could rejoin them.
Brodbeck had volunteered to return to the vehicles. Because the grizzly hadn’t been found in the first few hours, it would be necessary to set up trail cameras and snares with heavier-gauge wire to try and trap it during the night. Because Brodbeck was the youngest and fittest and newest to the team, everyone seemed fine with letting him shoulder the gear and equipment back up the slope.
“So tell me about the Mama Bears,” Joe said to Gordon as they worked their way down through the trees.
“Well, I’d say they’re well-meaning activists,” she said over her shoulder. “But we’ve got to try and persuade them to stay back and out of our way while we hunt for this grizzly. Of course, it’s for their safety as well.”
“The Mama Bears are a pain in our butts,” Brodbeck added from behind Joe. “They consider us the enemy because we’re out here trying to deal with these grizzlies—even when the bears are killers.”
“What can the Mama Bears do?” Joe asked.
“What they’ve done before,” Gordon said. “Try and save the bear from us evil, fanatical bear murderers. That’s the way they see it, anyway.”
“Where do they come from?” Joe asked.
“Jackson Hole.”
“I’m shocked,” Joe said.
Brodbeck chuckled.
Gordon said, “There are two of them. You’ve probably heard of that big ‘Save Our Bears’ fundraiser they do every year in Teton County. They bring in Hollywood celebrities and social media influencers and the national media covers it all. It makes a lot of money for their cause.”
“Even though they don’t need it,” Brodbeck interjected. “I’ve heard these two ladies are married to multimillionaires.”
“You have to be if you live in Jackson,” Joe said. “My mother-in-law lives there.”
Gordon said, “It’s amazing what happens when the Mama Bears show up on the scene. Our traps get sprung, and logs get pushed out in the road so we can’t drive where we need to go. People show up from all over the country to protest in front of our offices and block us from getting out. Signs go up saying we should be defunded. Posts appear on social media showing old photos of dead bears that were shot to death.
“We’ve never caught them in the act of messing up our snares or using air horns to chase the bears away,” she said. “But it’s not a coincidence that none of those things happen until the Mama Bears swoop in and start the outrage on social media.”
“Why do they do it?” Joe asked.
Gordon shrugged. “Like I said, they’re well-meaning, I think. But I’m a scientist and biologist, so that’s not the way I think. There are just some people who identify with bears in what I’d consider a very unhealthy way. You’ve heard of anthropomorphism? You know, attributing human characteristics to nonhuman species?”
“Yup,” Joe said, thinking that Marybeth and his daughters were somewhat guilty of it when it came to their horses and dogs. Of course, he probably was, too, when it came to Daisy …
“That’s what the Mama Bears do,” she said. “But to an extreme degree. They go out into Yellowstone to view bears and they think they understand them. They claim to know a few of the grizzlies personally, and even give them names.”
“How are you going to make them go away?” Joe asked.
“I might need your help with that,” she said to him.
“Glad to help.”
He thought about how much of his job, and apparently Gordon’s as well, was becoming less concerned with managing wildlife and more about dealing with people who fetishized animals. He blamed it partly on the disconnect between modern Americans and nature. Although it was beautiful and fascinating, Joe knew how rough it was out there in the wild. Brutal, bloody, and completely ruthless. The circle of life, he knew, was amoral at best.
*
AS THEY CROSSED the river, Joe looked back over his shoulder at the slope they’d traversed. He could see the silhouette of Cress on top, still on his phone. Hoaglin was out of view.
When they approached the exhumed cache, Joe felt another chill run through him. The proximity of the scene triggered a reprise of the raw fear he’d felt when he found Clay Junior’s body: real, bone-chilling fear. He unslung the .308 and carried it at his side as a cautionary measure.
“I’m going to get the gear gathered up,” Brodbeck said to Joe and Gordon. “I’ll leave the persuading to you two.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, not really meaning it.
*
LYNN FOWLER AND Jayce Calhoun stood with their hands on their hips as Joe and Gordon approached them. Both women were in their late fifties, Joe guessed. They were thin and fit and had expensive haircuts, and the skin on their faces looked stretched tight and wrinkle-free, which belied how much time they apparently spent outdoors tracking grizzly bears. Fowler had a mane of dark hair streaked with ginger, and Calhoun’s long wild tresses of pure white made her blue eyes and plumped lips stand out like a child’s drawing. Both wore matching anoraks with Patagonia embroidered on one breast and Mama Bears on the other.
Their new-model white Range Rover had County 22 plates, meaning Teton County.
“Jennie,” Fowler said to Gordon, “you know why we’re here. This just has to stop.”
“Meet Joe Pickett,” Gordon said. “He’s the local game warden.”
Joe nodded his hat brim to them, but neither responded in kind.
“We know this bear,” Calhoun said. “We know her and we know her tragic circumstances. You cannot kill this beautiful creature. We forbid it.”
Gordon leaned against the grille of her pickup, crossed her arms, and said, “Explain to me how you know the bear.”
Calhoun and Fowler exchanged glances, and Fowler addressed Joe instead of Gordon. Apparently, he guessed, he must look like the softer touch.
“We call her Tisiphone,” she said. She pronounced it “Tie-sif-o-nee.” “After the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution. This woman you’re with,” she said, pointing at Gordon, “calls her ‘Number 413.’”
Gordon rolled her eyes but didn’t interrupt Fowler, who continued. “Tisiphone is one of the most tragic stories you will ever hear, game warden. She is the embodiment of a mother whose entire world is destroyed by man. The incident was so horrible and violent that Tisiphone lost her mind, and she travels the earth exacting revenge against those who destroyed her family.”
Joe squinted, trying to understand. He looked at Gordon for support, but Gordon looked away.
“Are you a father?” Calhoun asked Joe.
“Yup. Three daughters.”
“Three,” Calhoun said, once again exchanging looks with Fowler. “How interesting. How connected you’ll be when you hear this story.
“Now imagine, Mr. Pickett, that you are on a hike with your three young daughters. Imagine that during that hike you cross a road, you leading and your three daughters following you one by one. Maybe you’re holding hands.”
She paused for effect, then said, “Now imagine that a careless driver just plowed into all three of your daughters at the same time, killing two instantly. Imagine turning around and seeing your third daughter still alive, but bleeding out in the road. How would you feel?”
“Not good,” Joe said.
“This actually happened last August,” Fowler took over for her colleague. “In Yellowstone Park, near the junction of West Thumb and the road to Old Faithful. A California man distracted by his phone slammed into three eight-month-old cubs following their mother and killed them all. Killed them all.
“You can imagine the manic rage Tisiphone felt. She went briefly insane for weeks afterward, roaring and crashing through trees in the forest.”
Joe winced.
“That’s what I would do,” Fowler said, placing her hands on her heart and leaning forward. “I would howl at God and I would curse him. I would blame the species that did it. I would want vengeance. I am Tisiphone.”
“I am Tisiphone,” Calhoun echoed.
“Is that story true?” Joe asked Gordon.
“Yes, it is, partly,” Gordon said. “A tourist hit and killed the three cubs of 413 last August. It was a tragedy.”
“It was more than a tragedy,” Fowler said while blowing a stray wisp of hair from her face. “It was triple infanticide. Of course Tisiphone has gone mad with grief and rage. What would your wife do, Mr. Pickett, if all three of your daughters were murdered in front of her eyes?”
Joe couldn’t even imagine the scenario.
“Time out,” Gordon said, putting her palms up as if to hold back the Mama Bears. “Just hold it. First, we have no evidence at all that the bear that caused our fatality is 413. Bear number 413 had a collar on her and we’ve picked up no signal here at all. Second, and with all due respect, Jayce and Lynn, what you’re contending here flies against all the behavioral science we’ve studied on female grizzly bears. No mother of any species wants to lose her offspring, but we’ve got no instances where the mother went insane and sought revenge.
“I hate to say it, but bear cubs get killed all the time. It isn’t rare and their mortality rate is high. In many instances, it’s the male grizzly that kills them. Sows have two or three cubs per litter and sometimes even four. When a little one dies, the mama bear just kind of goes on with life. It’s like raising puppies or kittens. The mother doesn’t go into mourning when they’re sold or given away to new owners. They don’t go crazy and they don’t seek vengeance.”
“So you say,” Fowler responded with anger. “You’d be happy if they were all dead.”
“You know that’s not true,” Gordon said. “I’d rather our bears thrived—as long as they don’t kill people.”
Fowler and Calhoun began to talk over each other and direct their vehemence at Gordon, who remained very calm. Joe held his ground but said nothing.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Brodbeck shoulder a heavy pack from the bed of the other truck. There was so much weight in it that when he swung it on his back he stumbled a few steps before slipping his other arm through the strap to regain his balance. Joe didn’t envy Brodbeck packing it all up the slope.
Despite the weight on his back, it was obvious that Brodbeck was eager to get going and not let himself be pulled into the dispute between the Mama Bears and Jennie Gordon. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and waved goodbye to Joe with a wry grin. Joe nodded back to him.
“Do either of you have any evidence this is 413?” Gordon asked when there was a break in the stream of accusations. “If so, I’d like to hear it.”
“When we last saw her two weeks ago, she was headed east,” Calhoun sniffed.
“East from Yellowstone?”
Calhoun indicated yes.
“Do you think she covered two hundred miles to get here?” Gordon asked. “Female grizzlies traditionally have smaller home ranges than males and rarely go out on excursions. Do you have any real reason to suspect that she decided to leave her stomping grounds and jet in a line to the east? All the way to the Big Horns, where she’s never been before?”
“We don’t know that she didn’t do that,” Fowler said. Then she pointed at Gordon and said, “Most of all, you don’t know that.”
“True,” Gordon conceded. “I don’t know it for a fact.”
“It’s Tisiphone,” Calhoun said with certainty. “We know her. We know what kind of pain she’s in.”
“Are you saying this killing was justified?” Gordon asked them.
Neither woman spoke for a moment.
“Do either of you even know the circumstances of the attack?”
“We don’t need to know,” Fowler said. Calhoun nodded her head in agreement.
“Joe, could you please show them the photos you took of Mr. Hutmacher on your phone?”
So that was why Gordon asked him to come along, Joe thought.
“They’re graphic,” Joe warned the Mama Bears.
“No, I don’t want to see them,” Calhoun said, recoiling toward her SUV.
“Maybe you should,” Gordon said. “That way you’d have a better idea of what a grizzly bear can do to a human being.”
“That’s sick,” Fowler said, stepping back to join her friend. “That’s disgusting.”
“You claim to know so much about bears,” Gordon said. “Maybe you should take a look at what one can do. Then maybe you’d understand why sometimes we have to euthanize the killer before the bear does it again.
“The victim was innocent,” she continued. “As far as we know, he did absolutely nothing to provoke the attack. He was as innocent as 413 was when her litter was killed. He wasn’t behind the wheel.”
“We’re not here to judge,” Calhoun said. “We’re here to save—”
From behind him and to the side, Joe heard a dry branch crack on the slope across the river. Then another. And then a distinctive muffled drumbeat of heavy footfalls increasing in volume.
He glanced from the figure of Brodbeck in the middle of the river to the distant silhouette of Cress on top of the ridge. Neither man had produced the sound.
Both Joe and Gordon turned away from the Mama Bears in time to witness a massive tan and brown form emerge from the timber on the slope they’d climbed before. The grizzly was a little over a hundred yards away. Its wedge-shaped body hit the surface of the river with tremendous force. Joe saw a flash of teeth from an open mouth and heard a heavy splash when the grizzly hit the water. It was headed straight for Brodbeck.
Bill Brodbeck turned, but the weight on his back made his movements ungainly as he tried to face the oncoming bear and unsling his rifle at the same time.
“Shit,” Gordon shouted. “It doubled back on us!”
Joe scrambled for his rifle, which he’d leaned against the grille of Gordon’s pickup. He shouldered it quickly and thumbed the safety off. By the time he leaned the red-dot scope to his eye, the bear had closed the distance with Brodbeck and the two forms had merged into one. It happened so quickly that Brodbeck couldn’t even pull the bear spray off his belt or get a shot off. There wasn’t even a hint of a bluff charge.
Joe heard the collision on the surface of the river and it sounded like a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker hitting a defenseless receiver in a helmet-to-helmet takedown.
On top of the ridge, Cress hollered and waved his arms.
The action was furious and hard to follow through Joe’s scope. His red dot flashed across the glistening hide of the grizzly to Brodbeck’s flailing hands to the terrifying moment when the bear’s jaws engulfed Brodbeck’s head and shook him like a puppy playing with a sock. The man’s arms flailed and his legs retracted into a fetal position.
Joe felt himself go steely. He had no clean shot at the bear without the possibility of hitting Brodbeck, who was still alive, but the mauling would continue for every half second he held off. Beside him, he heard Gordon curse again as she raised her own rifle. She obviously had the same problem.
He elevated the muzzle of the rifle above the fray and fired four rapid shots into the hillside, hoping the concussions would distract the grizzly. If the bear paused and separated from Brodbeck, he might get a shot.
Boom-boom-boom-boom. The shots echoed in cadence through the canyon.
But instead of letting go of its grip on Brodbeck’s limp body, the grizzly furiously backpedaled through the river, dragging the man along with it. Joe could sense no independent movement from Brodbeck. Not until the bear was onshore again and nearly hidden under brush cover did it unclamp its jaws from the man and leave him there in a wet heap.
Both Joe and Gordon fired repeatedly into the dense wall of willows and buckbrush where they’d last seen the grizzly. The heavy shots drowned out the screaming of the Mama Bears, who urged them to stop.
*
REMARKABLY, BILL BRODBECK was still alive when Joe and Gordon reached him on the far bank of the river. He wasn’t conscious, and Joe could see horrific puncture wounds from teeth in his scalp at the hairline. There were holes in his armored vest where it had been bitten through, and his head, face, and neck were covered in blood.
Gordon called for EMTs to come from Saddlestring as she shed her daypack and let it drop to the ground. Joe stood over Brodbeck’s body with his rifle at the ready, while Gordon dropped to her knees and ripped into a first-aid kit to attend to him. Joe glanced down to see bubbles appear in the blood streaming from the man’s mouth and nose.
Cress had left his position on top of the ridge and was crashing down through the timber toward the scene, followed by Hoaglin. Joe’s eyes raked the hillside for signs of the bear. His breath was shallow and total fear filled him once again.
This time, he could smell the dank, musky odor of the bear lingering around Brodbeck’s body. Pungent, viscous saliva from the bear’s mouth oozed down the man’s face and neck.
Joe glanced over his shoulder to see that the Mama Bears had left the scene and were tearing across the meadow in their SUV toward the road.
*
CRESS STOPPED ABOUT fifteen yards uphill and crouched for a moment, his fingers brushing the mat of loam and pine needles on the forest floor. When he raised his hand, Joe could see a smear of blood on his fingertips.
“One of you hit her,” he said. “I thought I heard a hit from up on the ridge.”
“We just started blasting,” Joe said. “I don’t think either one of us had a clear shot.”
“Is Bill still with us?”
“Barely,” Joe said. “He’s breathing.”
“Thank God for that. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life,” Cress said. “I’m still a little in shock.”
“I think we all are.”
“Did you call for help?”
“Jennie did.”
“I hope like hell they get here in time.”
Cress stood to full height and waited for Hoaglin to catch up to him. When Hoaglin did, the two men scoured the ground for more signs. Hoaglin pointed out a depression in the loam and said, “She went up the hill again toward the south this time.”
Joe followed their gaze up the timbered slope, downriver from the attack. About three hundred yards away and halfway up the canyon, he saw the top of a spindly aspen vanish from view as it was smashed down by force.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“Affirmative,” Hoaglin said, pointing out to Cress where the tree had been felled. “She’s moving fast and she doesn’t care what she smashes along the way.”
“Let’s go get her and finish it,” Cress said to Hoaglin. “Let’s hope she’s mortally wounded and will bleed out.” He showed his fingers to Hoaglin.
“Not a lot of blood,” Hoaglin said. Then to Joe: “Do you know where you hit her?”
“Nope.”
“Joe,” Cress said, “I’m going to ask you to stay here with Jennie and Bill until the EMTs show up. I don’t want to chance it that the grizzly circles on us again and comes back to cache Brodbeck’s body. Are you okay with that?”
Joe nodded. Although Gordon had shown she was fully capable of defending herself, she was presently engaged in patching up Brodbeck’s wounds and stopping him from losing too much blood. He just couldn’t leave her there on her own.
“If that bear comes back, do what you did last time,” Cress said. “Keep shooting until your barrel melts down.”
Joe patted the deep pockets of his jacket to confirm that he had a fresh twenty-round magazine within easy reach. He did.
“Got it,” Joe said. “Now go end this nightmare.”
*
BRODBECK WAS BARELY alive, but fading, after he was carried across the river to the Twelve Sleep County emergency medical van a half hour later. The response time had been impressive given the distance to the ranch, but to Joe it had felt like an eternity.
He looked for Gordon and found her sitting with her back to a tree trunk, her rifle across her thighs. She looked shell-shocked, and Joe felt the same.
“I can’t see how he makes it,” she said. “He lost a ton of blood and some of those bite wounds looked deep. I can’t believe what happened. That bear came down the mountain by a different route and just attacked him. She hunted him down right in front of us.”
“Yup.”
“Bears don’t do this, Joe,” she said, almost plaintively.
“Let’s hope one of us made a solid hit on her,” Joe said. “And that Cress and Hoaglin can track her down.”
*
JOE WAS GRATEFUL when, an hour later, one of the fixed-wing aircraft Cress had requested appeared over the mountains and descended to search the timber in tight concentric circles. The pilot made radio contact with Gordon and confirmed they were searching for a lone grizzly bear.
They’d heard nothing from either Cress or Hoaglin over the radio since they’d left.
“You don’t think that bear is crazy enough to go after them both, do you?” Gordon asked aloud. Joe was startled to hear in Gordon’s voice what he was thinking to himself.
*
CRESS AND HOAGLIN didn’t find the grizzly, and they returned to the scene of the attack looking worn-out and frustrated. So was the pilot of the plane and his spotter. They’d radioed to say that they’d failed to get a visual on the bear and that they were forced to return to the Jackson airport before they ran out of fuel and sunlight.
“She’s gone,” Cress reported to Gordon. “We got on her track for a while, but she outran us.”
“The blood trail dried up,” Hoaglin sighed. “She must not be hit that bad.”
“Which means we need to find her tomorrow,” Gordon said. “And now we know we’re looking for a wounded bear who shows absolutely no fear of humans, and who wants to kill us before we kill her.”
“Not exactly the most optimal situation,” Cress deadpanned.