This is a work of fiction set in a real place. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Torrey House Press Edition, June 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Scott Graham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-60-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945496
Cover design by Rick Whipple, Sky Island Studio
Interior design by Russel Davis, Gray Dog Press
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
For Kirsten, Mark, and Anne,
my respected Torrey House teammates.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Two
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Three
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
About Scott Graham
Acknowledgements
About the Cover
She saw them only as a result of happenstance and thin air. The most remote place in the lower forty-eight, the three friends had crowed to one another via email. They would ride in on horses, enter the park from the south, head up Trident Peak from there. A dude-ranch vacation with a day climb tagged on.
They’d planned the trip for July, but busy schedules pushed it back to October. They hadn’t understood that the park’s grizzlies would be in the midst of their pre-hibernation feeding frenzy by then, on the lookout for anything—or anyone—capable of adding to their monstrous caloric intake. The horse packer pointed out four of the massive creatures during the ride in from the south, all, thankfully, in the distance.
The wrangler dropped them with their gear high above tree line on the Absaroka divide, south of the peak. He departed at the head of his string of horses with the promise to return in two days, muttering to himself about the hunting parties he needed to resupply.
As with the grizzlies, they hadn’t realized how thick with elk hunters the area would be this time of year. They’d thought their camp would be in the national park, where hunting was illegal. That’s where the peak was located, after all. Actually, they admitted to each other upon consulting their map following the wrangler’s departure, the summit of the massif was located across the park boundary a mile north.
A rifle shot cracked beyond a sloping ridge. Two dozen big, blocky elk topped the ridge and galloped across the divide, a pair of antlered bulls in the lead, making for the safety of the park.
After a freeze-dried dinner, they hunkered in their tent atop the divide through the night, blasted by wind and rain and ice pellets. The morning dawned calm and clear. They packed up camp and climbed hard and fast, leaving the grizzlies and elk hunters below.
She took a break a hundred feet below the summit, preparing herself for the final push behind the others. She planted her ice axe in the snow and leaned on it, drawing deep breaths, her boots wedged in the snowfield blanketing the ridge.
Yellowstone Lake spread expansively to the north. The Absaroka Mountain Range rose from the lake’s near shore and spilled out of the park to the east, an immensity of granite and tundra skirted by conifers.
Thorofare Creek snaked across a flat, upper basin at the foot of the massif’s west face. A grizzly, little more than a brown speck, foraged in a meadow beside the creek a mile below.
A tight drainage climbed east away from the creek between two ridges to the base of the massif. At the head of the drainage, far below where she stood, something unusual caught her eye. Something extraordinary, in fact.
They—whatever they were—stood like soldiers in a straight line, dark spots against bright white, early season snow. From this distance, she could determine with her naked eye only that, based on the uniformity of the line and the consistent shape of the objects, the distant spots were not the product of natural processes.
Someone or something had placed them at the base of the peak, out here in the middle of nowhere, for a reason.
“All my life, I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate.”
—Edward O. Wilson,
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Evolutionary Biologist
Grizzly bears