Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  But the mountain underneath them wasn’t shaking.

  Motion caught Cloyd’s eye, some motion high up on Mt. Oso, and he looked to see the leading edge of a titanic waterfall where no waterfall had been before. Carrying enormous blocks of ice, the waterfall was cascading down a fissure in the north face of the peak. Ice and water were tearing rock loose as it all came hurtling down; it was happening so fast that it was hard to take it all in, and it was overwhelmingly loud in this nearly closed bowl of peaks.

  The mother grizzly was standing on two legs, trying to discern the source of the danger. She looked this way and that, and she couldn’t tell which way to flee. Her death was raining down on her from above.

  Helplessly, Cloyd saw it happen. In a moment the grizzly’s life was snuffed out, and the life of her grayblack cub as well.

  “Oh my God,” cried the grizzly woman.

  It took a minute or two for the torrent of water to become a trickle, and several more minutes for the last slides of finest rock to pour into the far side of the lake. Then it was quiet again, all quiet.

  “An ice dam must have broken up,” Ursa concluded. “In a crevasse up near the peak.”

  “The cubs!” Cloyd cried. He could see the two survivors through the glasses, coming up over the edge of the lake shelf and looking around for their mother.

  It wasn’t long before their noses led them to their mother’s scent. Through the field glasses, Cloyd could see a small dark patch among the rocks that had to be a bit of her fur showing. The gray-black cub was completely buried.

  Cloyd could hear something, some new sound. The high bowl of stone around the lake amplified the sound uncannily. It was the whimpering of the orphans that was coming to his ears.

  Cloyd stood up and started to look for the way down. He wanted to get down there to the cubs. The bears had known a way down to the lake. Now he thought he saw it. A ledge angled down through the cliffs and onto the rockslides. “I think we can get down there,” he told her, and pointed.

  The grizzly woman was shaking her head.

  Cloyd couldn’t understand why Ursa had insisted they leave the cubs behind like they did. He was confused, and still stunned. All he could think of was those two cubs, so alone and bewildered.

  He was following Ursa back down to Rock Lake, where a sheepherder tent, tiny and white from this height, had been erected while they were on the mountain. “But can those two cubs make it on their own?” Cloyd asked doubtfully.

  The grizzly woman was picking her way down from the heights in grim silence. “We just have to hope they can,” she answered without taking her eyes off the ground. Ursa’s voice didn’t seem to have much hope at all in it. Then she added, “I can’t see a thing we could have done that would do them any good.”

  It was late in the afternoon. There would be time, during tomorrow’s long walk back to East Ute Creek, to ask the grizzly woman what would happen to those cubs.

  As they dropped closer to the lake, they could see two men in gray uniforms fishing down below from the grassy spot where the creek ran out of the lake. “The game wardens who are looking for grizzlies,” Ursa said.

  “Do you think they heard the mountain cracking and the rocks falling?”

  “Prom down there, I wouldn’t think so. That mountain we were watching from is in between.”

  Cloyd wouldn’t have spoken to the two men with starched gray shirts and brass nameplates who were fishing at the lake. He wouldn’t have spoken to the gray-haired older man who stood straight as a soldier even when he was fishing. And he wouldn’t have spoken to the younger one either, the one with the big smile and curly blond hair who had waved them over.

  Cloyd had learned the hard way, the summer before, not to talk about bears that he had seen.

  But the grizzly woman was a professor, and she was used to working with, men from the fish and game departments in Wyoming and Montana, and she assumed she needed to report finding grizzlies alive in Colorado. Before Cloyd could even think to warn her, Ursa was talking to them and telling them everything.

  The younger, whose nameplate said Simpson, was amazed as Ursa told them who she was, of finding the bears, of the proof in her camera. His smile was replaced by surprise and disappointment as the grizzly woman told of the death of the mother grizzly and the gray-black cub.

  The older man, Haverford, showed no emotion throughout her telling. But Cloyd could see that he didn’t like this Indian woman who was a professor who’d gone looking for grizzlies on her own. Haverford’s bristly gray hair made him look like he’d been buzzed by a helicopter flying upside down.

  “I specialized in bear biology and behavior,” the younger man was saying. “Those two cubs’ chances can’t be good. There’s starvation, predators, accidents,” he explained with a glance at Haverford, “and the problem of denning. Those two cubs would be denning with their mother this coming winter.”

  “Quote me some odds,” Haverford said. It was clear who was in charge. Cloyd was afraid of this man. If only he’d been able to think more clearly. If only he had warned Ursa.

  Simpson hesitated, then said, “I could be wrong, but I’d give each cub a one-in-five chance of being alive next summer. For both, if I remember my math, onein-twenty-five.”

  “Slim odds,” Haverford put in disapprovingly.

  “What do you think?” Simpson asked the grizzly woman.

  With a glance at Cloyd, Ursa said, “I’m afraid your odds are … realistic. We’re going to have to go four-fifths on hope that at least one of them survives. That will keep reintroduction alive, right? More would be brought in?”

  Simpson looked at the older game warden almost apologetically and said, “That’d be the way we’re all reading the Endangered Species Act, what it would mean in this case. Eventually.”

  Haverford, who’d said almost nothing, now said coolly and mechanically, “The Endangered Species Act requires us to protect those two cubs that survived.”

  Cloyd watched the confusion in the grizzly woman’s face and the regret clouding the face of the younger man. “What are you getting at?” the grizzly woman asked with alarm.

  “We’ve got to take the cubs out,” Haverford stated, with no emotion at all.

  Cloyd felt sick, down deep in the pit of his stomach.

  “Oh, no,” the grizzly woman said quickly, as she tried to catch Haverford’s eyes. “If you take them out, grizzlies will be extinct in the wild in Colorado. You know how it works. The Endangered Species Act won’t be applied. There has to be at least one grizzly surviving here to make a clear case for reintroduction.”

  “That may be the case,” the man replied with an indifferent shrug, “but our job is to protect those individual grizzly cubs.”

  “You can’t take them out,” Ursa pleaded. The grizzly woman was trapped, and her eyes flashed wildly here and there as she tried to think. Cloyd could see that Ursa knew now, the younger warden knew too, that she had made a big mistake telling Haverford about the cubs. It was the same fatal mistake he had once made.

  “They’ll wind up in a zoo,” she pleaded, unbelieving, angry, almost begging. “There’s already plenty of grizzlies in zoos, and zoos are no place for them! These are Colorado’s last grizzlies you’re talking about!”

  Cloyd was trying to think. “Can they be raised in a zoo and then be brought back here?”

  Simpson shook his head. “No, there’s no chance of that. That would never happen. They’d starve. They would’ve lost their fear of people—they’d become problem bears. There’s no chance of that happening.”

  “I'm going to try to call Denver,” Haverford said. “They’ll decide.”

  “The Division of Wildlife,” Simpson explained.

  The game wardens were watching the night sky for the last flight from Denver. Cloyd and the grizzly woman had set up their camp nearby. Ursa was muttering to herself, and then Cloyd realized she was talking to him. “Such bad luck! I’m so sorry … and I never for a moment considered they
might have a ground-to-air radio. I should have suspected.”

  But Ursa hadn’t given up yet. After she and Cloyd ate, she returned to the wardens’ campfire.

  “Been on it a number of times,” Haverford was saying to the younger warden. “Half the time it flies right over Rock Lake. Gets into the Durango airport at 8:40 P.M. It should be over here fifteen minutes shy of that.”

  Simpson checked his watch. “That’d be ten minutes from now.”

  Ursa was pacing in front of their fire. “Please,” she pleaded. “Think about what you’re doing.”

  “If you don’t mind—,” Haverford said. He walked a short way down the lakeshore to get away from her. The ground-to-air radio in his hand looked like a black telephone with an antenna.

  “I’m sorry,” the younger man said to the grizzly woman.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Ursa said. “Have him tell the Division, in all likelihood there are no other grizzlies in Colorado but those two cubs. If you take them out, there will be none left in Colorado.”

  Simpson rubbed his eyes wearily. “They’ll know that, I assure you.”

  Cloyd was thinking hard. He thought it might be possible to pass close enough to the gray-haired man to grab his radio and toss it way out into the lake.

  It would be a crazy thing to do. No, he couldn’t do that. All he could do was hope that the plane wouldn’t pass over Rock Lake tonight.

  “Why doesn’t he care?” Ursa was asking Simpson.

  The man scratched his chin, and then he bit his lip, but finally he decided to speak. “Please don’t quote me on any of this,” he said. “You can talk to Tom until you’re blue in the face. Before he was with the Division he worked fifteen years as a government trapper. Rifle, trap, and poison are where he’s coming from. Tom’s from an old Colorado ranching family, and he grew up believing there’s good animals and bad animals. With the bad animals out of the way, there’s more deer and elk for hunters, and no hazards for sheep and cattle on the public land. He just doesn’t understand or appreciate the natural scheme of things.”

  The grizzly woman sat down on a rock, looking defeated. “A government trapper turned game warden.” She sighed.

  Now Cloyd could hear the airplane.

  The older warden dashed away from the lake, into the clearing beyond the stunted spruces, and began talking into his radio. Cloyd could see the lights of the plane now as it came quickly their way.

  “Emergency, emergency!” the game warden was calling. “Tom Haverford, Colorado Division of Wildlife on the ground at Rock Lake. Do you read me?”

  “Reading you fine,” the radio crackled. “Make it quick. Be by you in a few seconds.”

  “Division helicopter needed at Rock Lake early tomorrow. Two grizzly bear cubs orphaned and in need of evacuation. Bring hypos with cub dosages.”

  “Message received,” the pilot replied.

  Just as the plane passed over the high peaks, Cloyd heard the word “Grizzlies!” crackling on the radio.

  Ursa left the fireside and walked into the darkness. Bad luck, Cloyd thought. Such bad, bad luck.

  Cloyd found her a while later up on the hillside above the lake. It was cold, and Ursa didn’t have her jacket or her wool hat with her. She was crying.

  He sat down beside her. He wasn’t going to ask her not to cry. He wanted to cry too. All he could say was, “Maybe they won’t be that easy to catch. Maybe there’s no place to land over there.”

  The helicopter arrived midmorning. The pilot who climbed out wore the gray shirt and the insignia of the state wildlife department. The grizzly woman pleaded with this warden too. He had those kind of sunglasses that looked like silver mirrors, and Cloyd could see the Indian woman’s round face and delicate chin in those sunglasses. Ursa was shouting to be heard over the roar of the helicopter’s motor and whirling blades. “There’s no future for grizzlies in Colorado if you take them out!”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he told her. “I’ve checked with the Division in Denver. They say we have to protect these particular grizzlies, not the idea of grizzlies. That’s our responsibility.”

  “Name me a state;,” she said desperately, “name me a state where grizzlies have been brought back after the last one in the wild was gone.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Some of us agree with you. I’m just following orders.”

  “You could kill them trying to tranquilize them! Bear cubs are tricky to sedate!”

  The man motioned to Haverford. “I know that,” he told her. “Now if you’ll excuse me….”

  The new game warden knew exactly where to land in the wild basin to the west. “The northern edge of Lost Lake’s the only possible place,” he shouted as Haverford and Simpson started toward the helicopter. “We’ll have to get to Lake Mary Alice from there on foot.”

  Ursa ran for her map as soon as the helicopter had taken off. She and Cloyd spread it out on the ground and studied the wild, narrow canyon of Roell Creek. The creek ran east-west, with a towering ridge high above it on the north side. On the south side of the creek, three lakes were tucked in high bowls with peaks horseshoeing around them.

  “Lost Lake sits in between Mary Alice and Hidden, but the peaks cut each off from the other,” the grizzly woman observed. “When they land at Lost Lake, they’ll have to drop down through the timber to the canyon bottom, then climb all the way up to Mary Alice. These rockslides the last half mile are awful steep. It’s going to take them some time to get there. We could watch them from our spot up above.”

  All the way up the mountain, Cloyd kept hoping that the cubs had fled. But when he and the grizzly woman finally looked down on Lake Mary Alice, the cubs were still there by the high blue lake, still at the side of their dead mother.

  “We could shout,” Cloyd said. “Scare them away.”

  “But the only way for them to go is down. There’s no cover for another mile down there. We’d only chase the cubs toward those men and save them the climb up the mountain.”

  The wardens didn’t appear, and didn’t appear. Cloyd was studying the way down to the lake from this perch in the sky he shared with Ursa. Only the one ledge was difficult, and it didn’t look so bad, really. He wished he could go down there. If only there was something he could do.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before the three men finally appeared. They were lugging a rifle and two of those fiberglass cages people use to send their dogs on the airplanes.

  The cubs scampered away onto the ice shelf, but then they edged back toward their mother. It didn’t take long before Haverford’s first shot rang out, and then the second. The limp forms of the cubs were loaded into the fiberglass caiges, and then the men disappeared with the cubs over the rim of the high lake.

  It wasn’t a full moon. It was three-quarters of a moon, rising an hour before midnight. But it was bright enough to light Cloyd’s way as he slipped out of his tent at Rock Lake. He had a lot of hard climbing to do, and he went quickly, resting only when he had to, watching his heaving breath turn to ice crystals in the freezing night air. He knew the way to the gap. He wouldn’t have asked Ursa to come along; he didn’t want her to get the blame.

  The air was thin and burned his lungs just as badly as before. But at last he was back in the tiny gap between peaks again. Cloyd pulled his wool hat down over his ears. His hands were cold, but blowing on them helped. In the moonlight, Mary Alice shone black and silver instead of blue, and around its north side the snowbanks were shining so brightly they seemed lit up with lights. He guessed it must be half an hour after midnight.

  Cloyd started down, picking his way carefully down the ledge. A misstep, he knew, and he’d fall to his death. Yet the bears had come this way, and he could use all fours like a bear. He had those canyon crawling years back in Utah behind him. His hands were like claws, his feet were sure. In two minutes’ time the steepest, slanting part was behind him, and he was starting down, slowly picking his way down the uncertain, sliding scree.

  Final
ly he dropped to the lakeside, at the foot of the hovering, treacherous peak of Mt. Oso, and he walked the ice-free shore on the north side toward the outlet. Without pausing to locate the dead bear, he turned his back on the lake and dropped over its rim. As steep and rocky as this slope was, it wasn’t nearly so difficult as above the lake. He made good time, and before long he was hastening down the very bottom of the narrow canyon.

  Cloyd descended to the elevation of the first tundra and bushes and then headed through the first stunted trees at timberline, toward the shaggy shapes of the spruce forest below.

  His map was in the daypack on his back, but he didn’t need to pull it out. He knew that the creek coming down in waterfalls from the left, in leaps through the trees, had to be flowing out of Lost Lake up where the helicopter had landed. Cloyd began to climb his way up through a maze of deadfall timber. He only hoped that the grizzly woman was right, that the game wardens would have moved slowly with those cages, returning too late to fly out. They would have had to spend the night at Lost Lake. It would be too dangerous to fly out of the Roell Creek Basin in anything but good light.

  Carefully, carefully, he made his way out of the trees at the top of the slope and into the brushy willows. Then he saw the lake, gleaming below its horseshoe of rockflows and snowbanks and jutting peaks. Yes, there was the helicopter near the lakeside, its blades gleaming in the moonlight, in a large grassy opening among clusters of dwarf spruces. Not far away, the men’s tent. And not far away from the tent, there were the two white fiberglass cages side by side.

  On his elbows and knees, Cloyd crept out of his cover in the bushes. It was a good thing that the men were sleeping in a tent instead of out in the open. He crept closer, pausing to listen. One of the men was snoring. He could see the whites of the cubs’ eyes as they looked his way. They could see him coming, but they made no sound.