The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  She was surprised when he answered, not having realized this was his and Ranger’s day off. He’d just gotten back from the small grocery, where he’d picked up a steak and some fresh corn.

  Marian told him about the boulders and cliffs and the incredible colors, which, though he had seen this part of Utah before, she said maybe one day they could see together. And in the sun and dust, with Emily and Arkansas in sight, she told him about Emily’s sister, careful that her voice would not carry. “I like her,” Marian said about Emily. “It’s nice having her with me.”

  Tate didn’t respond, and Marian heard noise in the background as if he was moving things around, unpacking his groceries perhaps. She was disturbed by his reticence and asked him why he wasn’t saying anything.

  “I’m listening,” was all he said. And so Marian continued, “I’ve been thinking about the victims and what you told me. You never said the name of the woman you found.”

  Tate said he didn’t see why that mattered. And Marian said, “I was just wondering if you were the one who found Melissa.” But Tate said he wasn’t sure. And Marian said, how could he not be sure? And she heard the alarm in her voice and hoped Emily had not been in earshot.

  Then Tate said, “Maybe these women had it coming to them. Did you ever think about that? Every day there are women making poor choices, putting themselves in danger. You two should be careful out there.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this.” Marian’s voice had risen a decibel. She said she had to go, in fact, maybe they shouldn’t talk for a while. And Tate said, “Well, all right, then,” and told her not to get eaten by any lions.

  * * *

  • • •

  After those first few days, Marian and Emily traveled deeper into the Nokai, where the only vehicular access was by way of narrow, often washed-out roads of desert dirt and rocky debris. These deeply gullied roads led to old drill holes and drill pads, and if not navigated carefully, a vehicle might roll into one of the many arroyos or worse yet one of the steep canyons. There was no cell service, and though Marian carried a satellite phone that belonged to the program, handlers were only supposed to use the satphones for emergencies or to check in with Lyle each day and give him an idea of their next day’s transect.

  About a week into the study, after they had returned to camp and the dogs had been put to bed and the stars were as magnificent as any the two women had ever seen, Marian built a fire and laid a tarp on the ground, and she and Emily stretched out beside the fire as it hissed and popped, and they watched the night sky, and there were shooting stars, at least three that they saw.

  Marian sat up and put more wood on the fire and stoked the flame.

  Then Emily said, “She had this thing she used to say, my sister, about letting a place talk to you. About understanding a place and the qualities that make it what it is.”

  The new wood caught; the smoke changed directions as if the wind had shifted. Marian asked, “What was she like?”

  Emily told Marian about her sister’s way with animals, and her love for the mountains and glaciers. “She loved growing up where we did. She loved the summers she spent working in the park. She could cut down a tree and clear a trail and she wasn’t any bigger than you are.” And Emily told Marian about the way her sister would study a place and take it all in—the trees and rocks and streams and clouds.

  “She was a really good artist,” Emily went on to say. “She could draw anything. Especially birds. She did a lot of work with the Audubon Society in Kalispell. Snow geese were one of her favorites. She liked peregrine falcons, too. Really, any kind of bird. She would sit quiet in a place and study them. Then she would draw them for hours, over and over again, until she got every detail right.”

  Emily said her sister had been saving money to buy some land she could put a small trailer on. “She just wanted to live around nature.”

  And in listening to Emily, Marian wrapped herself around the story of this young woman’s sister, felt the words that Melissa had spoken, in the sky and the shadows and the colors that Marian knew awaited her come morning, listened to the qualities of this big, lonely space where she’d felt her bones warm from the dry desert sun, a warmth that agreed with her in ways humid places never had. Even now she felt the heat from the day still on her skin and in the ground beneath her, despite the cool night, and she felt a purpose in this simple and complex and beautiful moment that left Marian both hungry and full.

  “Thank you for telling me about your sister,” Marian said.

  * * *

  • • •

  After nearly two weeks since arriving in Utah, and their water and food supply almost gone, Marian and Emily drove the sixty-five miles of mostly slow, graded-road travel to the small town of Blanding. They checked into a hotel and went out for a real dinner and bathed the dogs and returned calls and answered email. Marian had a text message from Tate: I guess the thrill is gone. But there were no voice messages, so she would not have known if or when he had tried to call. And she didn’t call him right away. Instead she waited until everything was done for the night and the truck had been packed, and then she went down to the lobby. But her call to Tate went to voice mail and because he had not left a message, she did not leave one either, and her irritation made her fully awake, so she sat at a desktop computer in the lobby’s small business center and, out of curiosity, ran a search on Emily’s sister.

  Marian read through the articles on the Stillwater murders, including one that was written after the skeletal remains of Melissa’s body had been found, by a man bear hunting, the article said, and she read posts online about Emily’s sister, and a copy of the obituary that had appeared in the Daily Inter Lake News out of Kalispell, and another copy in the Flathead Beacon. And she felt completely unsettled, and suddenly worried that Emily might come down to the lobby and realize what Marian had been doing all of this time. And so Marian quit the browser and tried Tate again, and when he didn’t answer, she kept trying to call, until she finally left a message: “Pick up your goddamn phone.”

  22

  PRESENT

  August 2017

  MARIAN

  U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, Idaho

  As Marian drove to the cabin in Cusick, Washington, where Tate had stayed, and sipped black coffee from a travel mug, the elation she’d felt earlier that morning muted. And perhaps she was still thinking of red rocks and desert sheep, of Emily and Melissa Marsh, and of the last time she and Tate had spoken. Her grief was changing, she realized, and despite her fatigue from too many nights with little sleep, she felt stronger, as if she were no longer the victim of her own nostalgia.

  On the drive, Marian had tried to reach Nick to tell him about the studies she’d found, to say Tate couldn’t have been involved in the Stillwater murders. Nick hadn’t answered, and she’d decided to call him again later, rather than leave a message.

  She was crossing the Idaho panhandle when she saw a sign for Coeur d’Alene. She thought of Rick Waller, the coordinator for the Grizzly Bear Recovery Program and one of the wildlife managers who had investigated Tate’s death. Waller worked out of Coeur d’Alene at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife office. Marian hadn’t set out that morning as early as she’d hoped. Already she was going to have to wait and ship the samples out the next day; another delay wasn’t going to matter. Waller’s number was programmed into her phone. Marian gave him a call. His voice message said he was in the field but should be back in the office by two.

  The first two weeks after Tate’s death Marian had called Waller several times, as well as Mike Blais and Heidi Tevis, who worked for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and had also worked on Tate’s case. And yet with each call she’d been told these investigations take time, and that the bear responsible for Tate’s attack had not been caught and identified.

  Within a day or two after Tammy had signed the necessary p
aperwork to have Tate’s body released, the DNA analysis of hair and saliva found on Tate’s body and clothing came back from a lab in Bozeman, and yet there were no matches with any of the collared bears in the recovery program, nor did the DNA match that of the three grizzly bears the biologists had caught in snares that had been set near the fatality site. Within those first weeks after Tate’s death, the wildlife investigators were still undecided regarding what had transpired that day. Had Tate surprised the grizzly, had the dog triggered a defensive response from the bear, or had the bear’s behaviors been purely aggressive and predatory?

  “You need to be patient,” Lyle had told her. “And at some point you may have to accept the fact that we can never really know what happened.” And Lyle had talked with all of the handlers, reminding them to take precautions when working in bear country. “Continue to make noise. Talk to the dogs. Be aware of your surroundings. Keep your bear spray within easy reach.” But he also reminded handlers that this was an isolated incident, and that lightning was by far a greater threat to them.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Marian arrived at Waller’s office, she told him she was on her way to Cusick to pack up the samples Tate and Ranger had found, and did Waller have any new information; had they identified the bear?

  Before Marian could say anything else, Waller asked her how much she wanted to know, and she told him she wanted to know everything.

  “You two were friends,” he said.

  “We were.”

  “You two were more than friends.”

  And Marian nodded.

  He led her to a small conference room. He told her she could have a seat and that he needed to collect a few things.

  When Waller returned he was carrying a file full of papers and a large brown paper bag, like a leaf bag, that had been folded over and sealed with packaging tape. He said he had a box in his office with reams of notes and paperwork from the investigation that had been assimilated into a twenty-two-page case review that the team had recently completed. Waller laid the folder on the table. “I’m going to ask your permission before I show you anything,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Did she want to see the drawing of the crime scene? And so this was how it began, and every so often Waller would ask Marian if she wanted to continue, or he would ask her how she was doing. And Marian would reassure him that she had prepared herself, and that she wanted him to tell her everything he knew.

  He set the drawing on the table and slid it toward her. The drawing was done by hand. Waller had constructed the diagram on three separate visits to the scene. The first thing Marian’s eyes went to was the drawing of the body, face up. The right arm was bent and raised above the head. The left arm along with the torso had been partially covered with soil and debris, indicating that the bear had cached the body to continue feeding on it later. The torso had been opened ventrally. The left leg was bent slightly out to the side. The drawing noted that Tate was still wearing his daypack, which was beneath his torso. His hip pack, though not on him, had been cached with the body. Much of Tate’s clothing had been torn from him. Different pieces had been found around the site and were identified in the drawing, as well as a water bottle that was about a third full, a can of bear spray that had been partially discharged, and Tate’s phone.

  The drawing also noted matted grass and broken branches in a path leading up to twelve meters from where the corpse was found. And despite the heavy rain the night before, the team identified two hind prints along that path, and a partial front print next to the body. All of these findings suggested that the body might have been dragged from where the attack occurred to the cache site.

  The diagram was alarming and terrifying and made everything real, and it was all Marian could do to keep her composure. “What do you think happened?” she asked.

  “We found Tate’s prints and the dog’s. I think they were working the area. I’d like to think it was a defensive attack, that they startled the bear.”

  Marian mentioned the noise that handlers and their dogs were always making. And Marian had examined the map of the area until her eyes had burned dry. There were no streams near the attack site. She’d checked the weather. There was no wind that day. The storm had not moved in until sometime after dark. There was nothing that would have absorbed the noise Tate and Ranger would have been making.

  “I’d like to think it was a defensive attack,” Waller said again. But he also acknowledged the disturbing fact that the body had been both eaten and cached, and that they had not found any carrion that the bear might have been protecting within two hundred meters of the site. These were indicators of a predatory attack. If the attack were defensive, meaning if the bear had been reacting to a perceived threat to either him or a carcass, the bear would have walked away without consuming the body.

  He said at first they thought it could have been a fatal defensive attack by one bear, and a second bear may have scavenged the remains, but the DNA evidence only showed one individual bear species. Because the bear spray had been at least partially discharged and because there were bite marks to the right arm, along with bruising, the investigators believed Tate was conscious before the attack and had tried to defend himself. There was a knot on the back of Tate’s head, confirmed by the coroner’s report to be subcutaneous bleeding, which led the team to believe the bear had charged Tate, knocking him to the ground, where Tate had landed on his back and hit his head.

  However, investigators were unable to determine at what point the body was consumed. Tate had been dead for at least twenty-four hours before the two game wardens found his remains. It was possible the bear had attacked and killed Tate and then returned later to consume the body.

  “Could Ranger have incited the bear?” Marian asked.

  Waller said anything was possible. “Without a witness, there’s no way to know at what point the bear’s behaviors became predatory,” he said.

  “And there was no sign of the dog.”

  “No.” Waller went on to say that though a lot of dogs might bark at a bear, once the bear attacks, particularly a grizzly, most dogs will run in fear, and often back to the owner, which can get the human in trouble. Whether that happened, there was simply no way to know.

  “Ranger could be anywhere.”

  “That’s correct. There was no evidence at the scene that the dog had been attacked.”

  Marian realized that everyone back at The Den had just assumed Ranger had died in the attack also. They could at least hope now that the dog had gotten to safety. And yet Marian also knew that the bear wasn’t Ranger’s only threat. If wolves and cougars could reduce the caribou population down to near single digits, a dog could easily become prey without a human by its side. All of the dogs in the program had been microchipped. If Ranger had been found and taken to a shelter or a veterinary hospital, the program would have been notified.

  Marian asked if the review was public record.

  When Waller said it was, she asked if she could have a copy.

  He was leaning back in his chair with his hand held to his chin. He watched Marian for a few seconds. She remained calm and looked at him straight on. He said he would make her a copy. Then he stood and walked out of the room.

  About five minutes later he returned. He set the copy in front of her.

  “How confident are you that you’ll find the bear?” Marian asked.

  “It’s hard to say. We set snares around the area immediately following the attack. Out of the five bears we captured, three were grizzlies and none of them were a match. We also canvassed the area by helicopter but didn’t have any sightings. We’ve notified conservation officers in British Columbia. Most likely our suspect got spooked with all of the smells and commotion and took off. By now that bear could be four hundred miles into Canada or Montana. Still, we’ll keep the area closed a couple more weeks.”


  Marian knew that Waller and the others had worked hard to protect the bears and to bring the grizzly back. She was familiar with the Grizzly Bear Recovery Program. And yet in most incidents of a fatal bear attack, the animal was identified and euthanized, especially if the attack had been predatory.

  Marian had done her research. She was aware of the increasing number of predatory attacks by both black and grizzly bears in recent years, as well as attacks in which the bodies had been consumed. A couple of them had taken place in Alaska. There were others that had occurred in Yellowstone. A woman in British Columbia had been attacked and killed in her yard by a black bear. DNA evidence showed that multiple bears had fed on her corpse. Conservation officers had set traps to identify all of the bears involved in the feeding and emphasized the threat bears posed to people once those bears had become habituated to human flesh.

  The situation was similar with a case in Yellowstone in which a man was killed and cached by a grizzly. In that case investigators believed a sow and two cubs had collectively fed on the body, though there had been no clear indication whether the sow had been responsible for the fatal attack. The sow, already responsible for a defensive yet fatal attack on another person in the park within the same month, was captured and euthanized and her two cubs were relocated to a zoo. And there were other cases in which bears had acted as predators and fed on a human body, including an incident with a man camping outside the Yellowstone park boundaries. Marian knew that bears had a keener sense of smell than any other animal, three hundred times that of a bloodhound. A bear could detect its prey up to a mile away, and some scientists believed a bear could detect a carcass upwind from twenty miles away.