His tooled leather business backpack was stored where it always was, near the head of the tent. He retrieved it and unzipped the front flap, then reached down through his files, canisters of bear spray, the new portable GPS unit, and his loaded.44 Magnum secured in an Uncle Mike’s Cordura holster by an interior zipper that was hidden by design. The light from his headlamp bobbed around while he did it. He kept his ears open for Dakota’s boots swishing through the tall grass toward the tent.
He withdrew a thin brown envelope made stiff by the eight-and-a-half-by-twelve-inch piece of cardboard inside and dumped the contents on the top of his sleeping bag. Newspaper clippings, GPS coordinates, and most important, the Google Earth maps he’d printed off on high-grade photographic paper while Margaret Cooper was choking back tears out in the reception area as she read (out loud) the instructions on how to operate Windows Vista. She’d had no idea what he was doing.
The photographic images were precise. He found the location of Camp One, where they were now, and traced the trail south along the shoreline of the lake with the tip of his finger. He reviewed the place he’d marked with an X at the natural junction where they’d cut west toward Two Ocean Plateau as he described it to his clients around the campfire. Although the terrain and the creeks were burned into his memory from endless hours with the maps, he wanted to reassure himself for the hundredth time that it looked passable, that he could lead the group up and away from the Thorofare on terrain they could handle, that the horses and mules could navigate.
He hoped the new route from the Thorofare to Two Ocean was as clear and unencumbered as the photographs showed. He wished he knew how old the images Google had posted were. If they were a couple of years old, he prayed there’d been no severe timber blowdowns or microbursts in the meanwhile. In the back of his mind was his memory of seeing an entire mountainside in Yellowstone leveled by a nighttime weather phenomenon that scattered hundreds of acres of lodgepole pines like so many pick-up sticks. No one had seen it happen, and the Park Service, being the Park Service, refused to acknowledge that it did. But Yellowstone was a world of its own, as Jed knew better than anyone, and the physical landscape could change literally overnight as geysers shot through the thin crust or earthquakes rattled the ground or unspeakably violent storms blew through. Fires would be okay because they’d help open up the undergrowth, and he knew there had been a dozen lightning-caused blazes in the area the previous fall.
But he knew that no matter how carefully he’d planned things they’d never go exactly right in Yellowstone. The place seemed designed to foil human plans and aspirations. Conditions within the Yellowstone ecosystem were ramped up and exaggerated compared to the world around it. Every natural phenomenon-storms, fires, temperatures, thermal activity, wildlife, geography, weather in general-always seemed pushed to extremes. The more time he spent in the park the smaller he felt, and the less in control of the world around him. All he could do at times was point himself in the general direction of where he wanted to go-both figuratively and literally-and hope he’d get there. He remembered Bull Mitchell telling him something like that when he bought his company, but Jed discounted the statement and credited Bull’s advancing age. Now he knew it to be true.
He jumped when Dakota suddenly entered the tent. He hadn’t heard her coming, and she hadn’t signaled him in any way like she sometimes did with a whistle or a finger-drum on the taut tent wall. It was simple camp etiquette to do so and he’d taught her that. She’d disregarded it, though, and he scrambled to stuff the maps back into the envelope before she saw what he was doing.
She winced when he looked up at her and shined his headlamp directly into her eyes, pretending it was inadvertent.
“Jeez, Jed,” she said, waving her hand at him, “you’re blinding me.”
“Sorry.”
“I bet.”
Once the papers were back in the envelope and the envelope slipped under his sleeping bag, he turned his head and the beam of light.
She didn’t unzip her jacket or remove her boots, but sat Indian style on the foot of her sleeping bag.
He pulled the headlamp off and hung it from a loop so the light hit the inside tent wall and was diffused. “Horses okay?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“Food hung up?”
She nodded.
“Kitchen wiped down and locked up?”
“Like always,” she said.
“Anyone left at the camp?”
Dakota said, “Donna Glode is still there with Tony D’Amato and James Knox. Knox is trying to protect his friend from her, I guess.”
“Donna will be easy to track if she gets lost,” Jed said. “We’ll just have to follow the cougar tracks.”
Dakota didn’t even smile as she fixed her eyes on him. “Jed, what the
