Yellowstone Standoff by Scott Graham Read Free Book Online

the road. The gray-haired woman next to Chuck stepped backward, her hand covering her mouth.
    The heads of the displaced willows bent forward and returned to their upright position in a shimmering wave that advanced through the center of the willow patch, headed straight for the place where the man had come to a stop.
    A snarl broke from the thicket, identical to the recorded growls of the grizzly that had come from Justin’s phone the night before. Chuck tightened his grip on the girls’ shoulders, his fingers digging into their fleece jackets.
    â€œAaahhh!” the man cried, his voice squeaky with terror.
    Chuck clamped his lips together. Carmelita and Rosie slipped behind him, their heads poking around his sides. The tourists drew back as one.
    The tops of the willows twitched as the father thrashed his way back the way he’d come, racing toward the front of the thicket. The wave from the rear of the patch rolled toward the man, marking the bear’s continued advance. The bear surged through the willows, moving twice as fast as the man. The wave almost reached him before he stumbled into the open and sprinted for the roadside.
    The wave came to a stop just shy of the front of the thicket. The bear, unseen, snarled once more, low and threatening. Then the motion of the willows reversed as the bear changed course, its movement back through the willow patch slow and leisurely.
    The bear emerged from the far end of the patch and strode westward, away from the road, across the open ground beside the stream. It was a grizzly all right, medium-sized at about three hundred pounds, its broad shoulders tapering only slightly to its haunches, its fur the light brown color of coarse sand, the distinctive hump between its shoulders blond in the mid-morning sun.
    Fifty feet from the thicket, the grizzly turned and rose on its hind legs, forelegs dangling in front of its chest. Standing taller than a human, it looked over the top of the willow patch at the tourists.
    As cameras clicked around him, Chuck shivered at the memory of the grizzly staring at the Territory Team’s remote camera after its attack. He leaned forward, squinting at the bear. Its ears swiveled one way, then the other, its right earflap smooth and undamaged.
    The bear dropped to all fours and padded away through the knee-high grass until it disappeared into a stand of pines a quarter-mile downstream.
    The man stood, quaking, at the side of the road, his hand on his son’s shoulder as if for support, gawking at the place where the grizzly had vanished in the trees. The two spotters remained at their scopes. Tourists headed for their cars, chattering excitedly with one another about what they’d just seen. Chuck took the girls’ hands and led them back along the roadside with Janelle.
    â€œThat was scary,” Rosie announced.
    â€œWill there be bears like that where we’re going?” Carmelita asked, her eyes wide.
    Chuck drew a quick breath. Last night, the video of the Territory Team attack. Earlier this morning, Lex’s wild suppositions about the killer grizzly. And now, the idiot father.
    In three hours, Janelle and the girls were scheduled to board a boat with him that would take them across Yellowstone Lake to the Thorofare region in Yellowstone National Park’s isolated southeast corner, by many accounts the single most remote region in the lower forty-eight states, an area as populated with grizzlies as anyplace in North America, and where help was a long way off.
    He pressed his hands to his stomach, containing a full-body shudder. No one had told him about the fears for Carmelita and Rosie he’d be subject to the instant he became a stepfather—worries of their being bullied at school, irrational concerns for their health, anxiety about the hits their self-esteem might take when they reached middle school.
    What had possessed him to bring the girls here?
    He lowered his hands, flexing his fingers.