Night of the Black Bear (5 page)

Slowly standing up, Ashley said, “You're way too suspicious, Yonah.”

Yonah got up, too, and shrugged, saying, “Think what you want.” Without waiting for them, he left the dining room and headed for the door. Jack stopped to pay the bill, then hurried to catch up with Yonah and Ashley.

As they walked back toward the digital lab, Jack glanced across the street where a small bus was parked. The sides of the bus had been painted with scenes of the park, or at least he figured that's what the pictures showed—tall mountains filled with mist, and black bears standing on their hind legs, bears running, climbing, holding fish in their mouths, even boxing each other. “Smokies Touring Service” was the name on the side of the bus. As Jack watched, a dozen people started boarding it.

At that moment Ashley tugged the sleeve of his sweatshirt to say, “Check over there. It's that Space Needle in the picture on Caitlyn's badge. Look how tall it is! I want to go to the top.”

“It's got a virtual reality roller coaster,” Yonah told them. “You should ask your folks to take you.”

“I will!”

As soon as they opened the door to the digital lab they smelled the pizza. An open box with a few pieces left lay on the table, next to three paper cups for soft drinks.

“So far, we can't find a tie-in between the elk herd and the aggressive bear behavior,” Olivia announced to the kids.

All over the room, elk photos appeared on tall flat screens. They were dazzling pictures—clear, bright, and intense in color—elk with rough coats and soft brown eyes, elk gracefully moving their large bodies on thin legs, an elk scratching behind an ear with a hind hoof. But there were no signs of disease. Jack stared at the images, wide-eyed, hoping that some day he'd be as good a photographer as his father.

Moments later the door flew open again, and this time Kip Delaney burst in, calling out, “Glad you're all still here. I just got back from the lab in Knoxville.” Dangling from his hand was a sealed plastic bag containing a digital camera. “Heather and Mrs. McDonald have already left for North Carolina, but I told them I'd send Heather's camera by express mail as soon as we finished the tests.”

“What tests?” Jack asked his mother.

“The bear had that camera in his mouth,” Olivia explained. “We wanted to check the camera for bear saliva. If we can get gene identification from the saliva, we'll know when we've caught the right bear—if we
do
catch him.”

“How'd it go, Kip?” Blue asked.

Kip shook his head, answering, “No go. Too many people had handled the camera—that Jordan guy, the paramedics, the nurses at the hospital—there wasn't enough bear spit left to get a good analysis.”

Olivia looked disappointed until Kip announced, “However…the flash card is still here in the camera. We can look at the pictures Heather took before the mauling.”

“Good job!” Right away Steven inserted the flash card into the card reader. The first pictures to come up on the screens showed a tombstone that read “Howard McDonald 1912–1983 Rest In Peace.” The next picture showed a smaller tombstone: “Grace Neely McDonald 1916–1982 Returning To The Arms of Jesus.”

Then the photos got exciting. Steven clicked to change the images about every two seconds, making them appear one right after another. It was almost like watching a movie.

The bear could be seen in the distance, standing up, arms dangling. In the next picture he'd come closer, his mouth slightly open to show those big canine teeth that had ripped flesh out of Heather's thigh. The following pictures showed him first raising then lowering his head. Next, he lifted one paw as his shoulders shifted, almost as if he were dancing. With each picture he moved forward, his head lowered. In the last photos he stood up tall again, and as his face came closer and closer, Jack felt like those two black eyes were staring straight into his own!

“That crazy girl!” Blue exclaimed. “I can't believe she kept taking these pictures. In this final one the bear's no more than five feet in front of her!”

Steven added, “Yeah, right before the bear grabbed the camera.”

“Ugh!” Ashley cried. “I wouldn't want a bear coming after me like that. I mean, he's
big!”

A pause, then, “You're right, Ashley,” Kip said. “He's way too big.”

All of them turned toward Kip, unsure what he meant. But Olivia caught more meaning than the rest of them. Frowning, she said, “Go on, please, Kip.”

His finger on the keyboard, Kip clicked back to the first picture. “This black bear is a male. Males average around 175 or 200 pounds—you probably thought they were bigger than that, Ashley, but that's their average weight. The weight changes through the different seasons of the year.”

He faced them. “At this time of year in the park, the black bears have just recently come out of their winter dens.” To Ashley, Jack, and Yonah, he added, “Maybe you kids know this, maybe you don't, but the reason bears spend winters in their dens is because each autumn, their source of food decreases or is eliminated altogether. So after most of the food is gone, they just go to sleep to conserve their energy. Nature has programmed them to sleep when there's nothing much left to eat.”

“Right,” Olivia agreed. “It's called denning.”

“So here it is, now—early spring,” Kip continued. “Once bears wake up, their systems are really undernourished, and they're looking for food. They've been living off their own body resources while they were in the dens, and their weight is a lot lower than when they first went into their dens. At this time of year—right now—there isn't a lot of high quality natural food around, so—” Kip picked up a pencil to point at the bear on the screen. “This bear should be a lot thinner than he looks here.”

“Strange,” Steven murmured.

“Yeah. Maybe. Or not,” Yonah said softly.

I
t was Sunday morning, early. This time Olivia drove, and Steven turned around from the front seat to tell Jack and Ashley, “Lily Firekiller just called on my cell phone. After we drop you off at the Firekiller house, she's planning to take you to the Space Needle in Gatlinburg. Yonah told her you wanted to go there.”

“Yay!” Ashley cried. “Mrs. Firekiller is the
nicest
lady!”

“Next to you, Mom,” Jack said, figuring it never hurt to throw out a little compliment, especially since his mother hadn't been making many touchdowns in trying to solve the bear mystery. “Where will you and dad be this morning?”

“Searching for clues again,” Olivia said. “We have some big questions we're trying to answer—why these bear attacks happened, and most important, will we need to close the park?”

Jack was silent for a moment before he asked, “What about that spilled mash at the still? I mean that moonshine mash I took the pictures of. If the bear got drunk from it, he could have turned mean.”

Slowing the car to make a turn, Olivia answered, “Your pictures were good, Jack, but they didn't show any evidence of bear activity. Blue is going to the farm to check out the site today just in case, but we don't expect he'll find anything.” Then, pulling into a driveway, she announced, “OK, here we are at the Firekillers'.”

Lily came to the door to greet them, and told them that Yonah wouldn't be going to the Space Needle. “He's been there lots of times, and he's upstairs now studying for a calculus exam tomorrow. He says he'll see you later—I'm inviting all of you to Sunday dinner after Blue and Kip and you Landons finish your work.”

“Thank you!” Olivia and Steven both exclaimed wholeheartedly. “It'll be great to have a real home-cooked dinner after all the take-out food we've been eating since we arrived,” Olivia added.

Right then a thundering of footsteps on the stairs grew loud as Merle rushed into the room, shouting, “I finished all my homework!” Raising his right hand, he said, “I swear I did, Lily! Can I go to the Space Needle with you all?”

Homework! Jack and Ashley were supposed to keep up with their assignments for the three days of school they would miss, but Jack hadn't opened a single book. Oh, well, he would deal with that on the long flight home.

“So, can I go to the Space Needle with you all?” Merle was pleading.

“Sure,” Lily answered. “Let's get moving. Even on Sundays the Space Needle opens at nine, and I'd like to get there before it's too crowded.”

The drive to Gatlinburg from the Firekillers' house on that quiet Sunday morning took no more than 12 minutes, but to Jack it seemed longer, because he shared the backseat with Merle. After listening to all of Yonah's suspicions about Merle the evening before, Jack couldn't fall into the easy, friendly kind of talk they'd had during the bike ride. He kept remembering how casually Merle had spoken about the moonshine still, as though breaking that particular law didn't matter. He mentally questioned why Merle would insist on biking to his job, with the guitar case strapped to his back. Was Yonah right? Was Merle involved in something illegal? Or was Yonah totally off base, making up false accusations just because he didn't like Merle?

Merle didn't seem to notice that Jack stayed quiet. He kept talking enthusiastically about Jack's Photoshopped pictures, like the one of the fish with Ashley's face. Jack had downloaded some of the silly ones onto Lily's computer yesterday, and Merle said he'd looked at them several times because they were so funny.

“You're a real digital artist, Jack,” Merle told him now. “Someday, if I ever make a CD, you can design the jacket.”

“Uh-huh,” Jack answered, beginning to feel even more uncomfortable.

The entrance to the Space Needle looked pretty ordinary until Jack stood still and raised his eyes all the way up to the observation platform, towering 400 feet above them. Lily Firekiller bought tickets for herself and Merle; Jack and Ashley paid for their own with money their dad had given them earlier.

It was a fast elevator ride all the way to the platform at the top. Jack was glad he'd brought his camera because the view was really spectacular: the city of Gatlinburg beneath them, the tree-covered hills so close he didn't need to zoom the lens to feel right on top of them, the clouds skimming the mountaintops, and way over there was Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“See any bears through your zoom lens?” Ashley teased, knowing that was impossible.

Jack swung around and snapped a quick picture of her; he'd Photoshop it grotesquely when they got home to Wyoming. He could feel Merle's impatience, though, because Merle kept urging Lily about going to the virtual roller coaster. That meant more tickets to buy. And they weren't cheap.

Two to a pod, the four of them climbed into VR roller coaster seats, with Lily and Ashley in one pod and Merle and Jack in another. Bars swung down to secure them. Jack figured that must mean the pods actually flipped, so the ride would have real movement as well as virtual imaging to give the sense of speed.

“Whoa!” he yelled, when the ride started. It moved, all right—upside down! He was loving it, but one part of his brain kept thinking how cool it would be to create realistic virtual-reality graphics like the ones spinning around his head inside the pod. Maybe that's what he'd do when he got out of college.

“Cool!” he yelled, when it stopped.

“Wait 'til I show you what's next!” Merle shouted.

The two of them raced down some stairs to an amusement area that had a laser tag arcade—Jack paid for those tickets. The guy in charge put them on the same team. That meant they fought against another team while lights swirled through the vacuum-like space, fog rolled in, and music blasted their eardrums. As they ran around the maze, firing at the other team while they tried to capture the base, Jack's doubts about Merle vanished—blown away into the game's rolling fog. Merle was really good at laser tag. He was fast, and the whole thing was such a blast that ended way too soon! Afterward, when they compared their scorecards, they discovered they had nearly the same score. Each had fired 136 shots, each hit an opponent almost 90 times, and both of them earned the rank of Cosmic Sergeant.

Minutes later, Lily and Ashley approached from the souvenir shop where Ashley'd bought a T-shirt decorated with black bears. If Merle and Jack looked enough alike to be cousins, Lily and Ashley could have been mistaken for mother and daughter. They had the same brown eyes and dark hair, although Lily's hair was straight as a ruler and Ashley's curly as a lamb's. They both wore skirts that hung below their knees and swung as they walked. Maybe that's why Yonah had liked Ashley from the start: She reminded him of his mother. And maybe that's why he was less friendly to Jack, because Jack looked something like Merle.

“I'm afraid we have to leave now,” Lily told them. “I'll drive you kids back to where your parents are, and then Merle and I will go to the hospital to see Arlene. After that I need to get back home in time to put the turkey in the oven, because dinner shouldn't be too late tonight. Tomorrow's a school day.” Merle groaned at that reminder as Lily added, “I'll get the car out of the parking lot. You kids meet me out front.”

“Wait, I'll go with you,” Ashley told her.

As Jack and Merle wandered toward the entrance, studying every number on their complex laser tag scorecards, an older man wearing plaid shorts and a “Save the Hemlocks” sweatshirt accidentally bumped into Jack.

“Sorry,” he said. Then, peering at Merle through his bifocals, the man asked, “Aren't you the kid who was up at Chimneys picnic area last night?”

“No,” Merle answered abruptly.

“I recognize you,” the man said. “You were up there with—”

“You're wrong. I was here in town. Excuse me, my ride's waiting.” Merle practically sprinted toward the exit, with Jack trying to keep up. They reached the curb and had to wait several minutes before Lily pulled up in her car.

“Crazy guy,” Merle was muttering while they waited. “He needs better glasses.”

A tiny doubt tried to creep once more into Jack's mind. Why had Merle run like that? But he brushed it aside—he'd had a great time with Merle. He was a good kid. Yonah had to be delusional to suspect him of any crime.

On the way back they joked around in the back seat, imagining crazy pictures Jack would be able to make with the one he'd just taken of Ashley. Then Merle invented song titles he could change: “Five Hundred Miles Away from Home (And I'm Out of Gas)”, or “Country Roads (Full of Cow Pies).”

“You do art, I do music,” Merle said. “We're creators.”

Lily dropped off Jack and Ashley at Park Headquarters, telling them they'd find their parents in the conference room upstairs. When they got there, they saw Steven, Olivia, Kip, and Blue standing around a table that was spread with printed reports and photographs, although they didn't seem to be Steven's photographs.

“We have at least 30 different species of salamanders in this national park,” Kip was saying. “That's more than anywhere else. They call our park the Salamander Capital of the World.”

“Maybe the bears are eating salamanders,” Blue joked, and then he saw Jack and Ashley. “Oh, hi, kids. Come on in. This is interesting—you might learn something.”

Olivia explained that they were now searching for anything the bears might have eaten to make them aggressive. “This park is an International Biosphere Reserve,” she said. “Plants, animals, and other critters—more than 10,000 species have already been documented within the boundaries of the park, but the actual count could be more like 100,000 species!”

Steven added, “Right, but at the moment we are focusing on mushrooms.”

“Mushrooms?” Jack exclaimed.

“Mushrooms are a long shot,” Kip explained, “but we have 2,000 species of mushrooms in the park, and we certainly don't know everything about each species.”

“You ever heard of magic mushrooms?” Blue asked. “Some people take them like drugs, to get high. They're also called hallucinogenic mushrooms, or psychedelic mushrooms, but on the street they're just called 'shrooms.”

“Are they illegal?” Ashley asked.

“Sure! They're bad stuff,” Steven answered. “People who use them get delusional. They see things that aren't really there, or hear things, and in a few cases, they will become aggressive.”

Kip cut in, “We don't really know what psychedelic mushrooms might do to bears. Maybe nothing at all. But we're exploring the data—that's what science is all about. So let's look at these pictures once more.”

As the adults focused again on the materials lying on the table, Jack drifted closer, wanting to get a look. Kip was pointing to a photograph as he said, “Here's a plentiful growth of mushrooms, and it looks like it's been disturbed. But I don't think bears did it. Seems more like some visitor gathered a bunch of them, probably to put on her pizza—a dangerous thing to do, because you don't know which mushrooms are poisonous. In this magnification, you can see that they were cut off at the stems with a knife.”

“Where was that photo taken?” Olivia asked.

“Chimneys picnic area,” Kip answered.

Jack froze. Chimneys picnic area. Where the stranger in the “Save the Hemlocks” sweatshirt said he saw Merle. Merle…and mushrooms? Yonah hinted that Merle was doing something illegal. Selling psychedelic mushrooms would be against the law, for sure. “I think I'll go over to the bookstore,” Jack announced. He wanted out of that conference room, away from any more talk about magic mushrooms. He had to think.

“I'll go with you,” Ashley told him, “to see if I can find a Cherokee legend. Yonah said there might be one in the bookstore.”

As they walked along a paved path between the headquarters building and the visitor center, Ashley stopped suddenly. “Look at these butterflies,” she cried, pointing to a flock that clustered together on the ground, moving their blue-tipped gray wings only a little, crawling instead of flying. “Take a picture, Jack,” she begged.

“I don't think so,” he muttered, troubled about Merle and mushrooms.

“Why not? You have your camera—you took pictures at the Space Needle.”

“Why not? Because I don't want to,” he growled. “Don't be dumb, Ashley. Those butterflies are not sniffing the flowers—they're mating!”

“Shut up!” she cried. “Why are you being so mean? I heard what you said about me in the car.”

“What did I say?” He'd honestly forgotten.

“You told Merle you put my face on a fish!”

He snorted. “Yeah, well, if you don't stop bugging me, I'll put your face on a wanted poster and hang it in the post office.” He walked away then, leaving Ashley to find the bookstore by herself.

Dropping to the ground under a tall tree, Jack struggled to figure it all out. Was Merle a good guy or a bad guy? The man at the Space Needle said he'd seen Merle at Chimneys picnic area. Someone picked mushrooms at that picnic area, and they might have been the kind of mushrooms that made people high. Each evening, Merle biked to Gatlinburg with his guitar strapped to his back, claiming he worked as a busboy. Why the guitar?

Why did all those clues twist and slither in Jack's imagination like a bag full of snakes?

He knew why. It was because a scene from a certain movie wouldn't stop playing in his memory. That scene with police inspectors asking questions…of a famous singer getting busted for hiding drugs inside his guitar. Stop! he told himself.

But his thoughts didn't even slow down. Merle couldn't be on drugs; he acted too normal. Could Merle be dealing drugs? Not the worst kind of drugs, maybe, but magic mushrooms? That he picked himself? If he did that, why would he put them inside his guitar instead of carrying them in a plain old backpack? That didn't make sense. None of it made sense. But Jack kept wondering, if Merle was a busboy like he said he was, why did he take his guitar to work?