by Linda Jacobs
Though Wyatt had come late to the study of the earth, he liked to say he got there as fast as he could, arriving in the park a year ago at age forty-four to become their oldest rookie geologist. Today’s excursion wasn’t about rocks, though.
Ahead of him in an abandoned chute of the Lamar, Alicia Alvarez with the Wolf Advocates wriggled through scrubby vegetation. He appreciated the way her parka rode up over rounded hips, revealing designer jeans streaked with dirt. Following her lead, Wyatt crawled up a gravel bank and peered over the river-rounded cobbles.
There they were, five darker specks contrasting with golden autumn grass. The Specimen Ridge Pack trotted across the sage-dotted slope below the treed ridge where they’d denned last spring. Though Wyatt had watched them before from up by the highway at Yellowstone Institute’s Buffalo Ranch, Alicia’s association with the non-profit organization allowed her to work in closer. Her father, a South Texas banker and cattleman, made regular contributions to the wolf’s cause.
In 1923, rangers had deliberately destroyed the last known den in Yellowstone, to leave the park without its most significant predator. Without a mechanism to take out the weak and sick, the winterkills became cruel. Fortunately, because of the hard work of people like Alicia, the 1995 re-introduction of wolves had begun to change the balance.
Beside Wyatt on the bank, the transplanted Texan’s chocolate eyes looked out forthrightly from a bronzed face framed with midnight hair. Her wide, generous mouth wore a smile as she pointed a manicured finger. “See the alpha male,” she whispered.
The largest member of the pack, with a coat so dark he looked black, held his tail high. The other wolves indicated subordinate status by adopting a slouching posture.
While Alicia set up her Bausch & Lomb spotting scope on a tripod, Wyatt reckoned the cost of her optics at more than he brought home in two weeks. Next, she reached for the Nikon slung over her back and uncapped her 1000-mm lens. Wyatt moved to man the scope, adjusting the focus for his nearsighted eyes.
Once the image sharpened, his first impression was of the alpha male’s smoky ruff. Such a coat this early in the fall might mean they were in for a tough winter. A scattering of snow already spotted the talus beneath the cliffs on Specimen Ridge and pale hoarfrost coated the trees below.
As the wolf’s quick gait carried him out of the scope’s range, Wyatt drew back and studied the terrain. Several hundred yards upwind from the canines, a herd of elk grazed. Separated from the rest, a single cow stood alone at the top of a thirty-foot drop to the sagebrush flat.
Wyatt put his eye back to the lens. The Specimen Ridge pack moved as one, downslope toward the hapless loner. When they got closer, they stopped and spread out into a semicircular pattern to cover all escape routes.
The cow looked out at the river with apparent unconcern.
The wolves began their stalk, slinking behind cover of vegetation or topography. When they were within seventy-five feet of their prey, her head jerked and Wyatt saw the whites of her wide brown eyes. Although this was nature’s way, he still rooted for her.
The circle of wolves drew tighter and Wyatt heard Alicia’s quick breathing.
The cow glanced over the cliff and appeared to weigh her odds. With a tentative step out onto treacherous ground, the cornered animal began to slide toward the lip. At the last moment, she twisted with surprising agility and managed to leap to the side. Landing on an isolated block, she stood trapped and panting in her precarious sanctuary.
Wyatt focused back on the alpha male. Well fed this time of year, the wolf stalked with assurance.
However, as the first cold gust hit ahead of the lowering squall the male’s ears pricked. Zooming out, Wyatt noticed that all of the pack listened intently and tasted the wind.
All at once, as if someone had blown a whistle they spooked, running with their tails flat out, legs pumping. The elk herd also took flight, the trapped cow watching them go.
“I wonder what scared them,” Alicia said in a normal voice.
Thinking it might be the squall, Wyatt nodded at the cloud sweeping toward them. The first drops of rain stung his cheeks and Specimen Ridge dissolved into the mist. Now that the wolves had gone, he became aware of his knees covered in cold mud and his soaked shirtfront.
“What say we go start a fire?” he asked with a shiver.
“If this blows over.” Alicia flashed a grin that promised more than sticks and kindling.
Before he could get out a bawdy suggestion, the ground jerked beneath him.
“What the …?” Her eyes widened to dark pools in a face gone pale.
“Earthquake.” Hunkering on hands and knees, his sensation was of being rocked in a boat. It went on for a number of seconds, and then all went so still he wondered for a moment if he had imagined it.
But no. Across the river, the elk no longer stood on the bluff.
Earthquakes too small to be felt by humans were standard operating procedure in Yellowstone. For the past fifteen million years the North American continent had been sliding west, while a hotspot in the earth’s upper mantle traced a line of fire from Hell’s Canyon on the Oregon border, through the cinder cones of Idaho’s Craters of the Moon, and on to Nez Perce Peak in eastern Yellowstone.
The park itself had suffered three great eruptions, occurring respectively 2.0 million, 1.3 million, and 630,000 years ago. Each time hundreds of cubic miles of real estate were thrown into the stratosphere the collapse created a crater known as a caldera.
Wyatt routinely related these facts to some of the three million tourists who visited Yellowstone each year. A seismograph at Old Faithful Visitor Center showed how the ground shuddered and shook with regularity.
Today, lying on damp earth that once more felt solid, Wyatt felt an unaccountable sense of dread. It was Alicia’s unease about the quake transmitting itself to him, he figured, as he pushed his tall frame up and headed toward his Park Service Bronco.
Ranger Helen Chou answered the radio in the Yellowstone Resource Center in Mammoth. “You feel that?”
“Oh, yeah.” He glanced at Alicia, who still looked unsettled. “Actually, I ordered that up to get my gal in a pliant mood.”
Alicia rewarded him with the ghost of a grin.
“Right,” Helen said crisply. “Magnitude 3.5.” Her impeccable credentials of a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, earned at twenty-three, trumped Wyatt’s Utah degrees. Wiry and tough, with black hair that brushed her waist, she was his right hand in park geology. “Epicenter is the eastern shore of Yellowstone Lake.”
“No surprise there.” The current hotspot was centered near the lake, where the most recent great eruption had taken place.
“The frequency of small tremors has increased since you left yesterday to go wolf watching,” Helen added.
Wyatt tugged off his itchy wool cap, a gift from Alicia, and ruffled his thick hair. “Speaking of wolves, before the quake the Specimen Ridge pack bolted for the hills.”
“The animals know,” Helen agreed. “Did you hear about the big one?”
His alarms set off. If the Wasatch Fault in Salt Lake broke loose, Stanton and Kyle might get caught in the Institute basement. “Big one?”
“Sakhalin had a 7.3.”
“No kidding.”
“Brock Hobart was on Mornings with Monty and predicted it. Just before it hit.” A note of excitement penetrated Helen’s professional delivery.
“Be still my heart. Another sideshow courtesy of the self-appointed seer of the seismic community.” Despite his flippancy, a frown creased Wyatt’s forehead.
“You coming by to look at the chart?”
Wyatt considered. The squall was almost past, the clouds breaking up in the west to let through shafts of golden light. He’d been anticipating a nice campfire, along with the succulent aroma of beef stew on the night air.
Alicia came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist.
“I’ll be camping out again tonight at Slough Creek,” he told Helen.
The patter of rain on a tent always made Wyatt feel sad. This night was no different, as the brief sunset clearing was followed by another storm. Lying in a cocoon of cozy warmth reminded him of the simplicity of childhood campouts.
Born and raised in Bozeman, he grew up feeling blessed by each day spent in the Mountain West. A high-school rodeo champion, he’d planned on college until his father’s declining health dumped the family steel fabricating business onto his youthful shoulders. A brief and turbulent courtship ended in marriage to Marie Marvell, a local Pizza Hut waitress.
The note she left said I need more in slanting blue ink, along with the salient point that she was headed east on I-90 with a long distance trucker. Shell-shocked at thirty, Wyatt decided he wanted more, too. He got off his ass, sold the business, and went to the University.
The tempo of the rain increased. A long rumble rolled through the Absaroka Peaks.
Alicia turned toward Wyatt in her sleep. The instinctive gesture managed to hearten him, although he thought she read more into their relationship than he did. They’d been seeing each other since June, sometimes staying at each other’s places or camping out, yet he had not suggested a more permanent arrangement. Perhaps it was undue caution on his part, but after Marie, he always kept some distance between him and any woman.
Alicia burrowed into Wyatt’s shoulder, her long black hair spread over his chest. Capturing a strand that curled around his finger, he shifted in the zipped bed of down and brought her warmth against the length of him. It was colder than usual for September.
Thunder rolled again over the Lamar Valley. Snow showers on the peaks, while autumn rain fell at lower elevation. As if the earth was in concert with the sky, the rumbling seemed to send a shudder beneath the tent.
With this afternoon’s magnitude 3.5, Wyatt didn’t think he imagined the new tremors. He’d been in one big quake in his life, a 6.1 right here in the park.
In July 1975, he and his high-school buddies had been lunching on a ridge above the broad smoking plain of Norris Geyser Basin, the spot with the highest heat flow in the park. Wyatt had just popped the top on a beer when the ground beneath him leaped. He dropped his can and watched it roll away in a spreading puddle of suds. An instant later, he was knocked onto his stomach, his cheek scraped by gravel. For an incredulous moment, he couldn’t figure out what was happening, but snapped to when a fissure opened like a zipper.
“Wyatt,” cried a thin voice.
He turned to see Jules Feinstein, helpless without his glasses. Horn-rimmed spectacles danced in the dirt. As Wyatt scrabbled toward him, the glasses disappeared into the trench.
Grabbing Jules by the jacket, he braced his feet against a tree, fighting to keep them both out of the yawning chasm. Together, they hung on while the ground bucked and jerked like one of the rodeo broncos Wyatt rode on the Friday night circuit.
When it was over, they decided to get out of the park.
Since Jules couldn’t see, Wyatt drove, only to be stopped by a roadblock in a few miles. A great slide of boulders covered the road south from Norris to Madison Campground, forcing the young men to spread their sleeping bags by the roadside that night.
The storm at Slough Creek grew more intense, the tent’s rain fly flapping. Another tremor struck, stronger than the one before. Because Alicia had been alarmed this afternoon, Wyatt was glad this one did not wake her. She wouldn’t understand that after years of studying the facets of this violent planet he found the sensation of feeling the ground move fascinating.
With his back flat to the earth, he imagined his body as a stethoscope, a listening device pressed to a living organism.
Another growl reverberated, a guttural warning from the land.
CHAPTER THREE
SEPTEMBER 12
Thursday evening, Kyle guided her 1984 Mercedes 380SL east on 1-80, winding up into the Wasatch Range. She counted herself fortunate she preferred the older models, for a consequence of teaching life was that she couldn’t afford a new one.
For two days, Stanton had ‘rested comfortably’ in University Hospital, although Kyle could see nothing comfortable about his situation. Every time she managed to find a break in her workload, or plain neglect it to stop by, she could hardly manage a cheerful face. Though she usually tried to get home before dark, this evening she’d stayed late because she believed Leila needed her.
Their vigil reminded her of the days when she was eighteen and had joined her grandmother in sitting Zeke’s deathwatch. Franny, still slender and energetic at seventy-one, and standing nearly as tall as Kyle, had fought with everything in her to infuse her own strength into her husband’s failing heart… to no avail.
To imagine what Leila’s life would be like if Stanton did not survive, Kyle had only to recall how Franny’s remaining six years on earth had been marked by a succession of days she described as having no meaning and no end.
As she left the lights of Salt Lake City behind, Kyle became aware of the dark forest and rugged red sandstone and limestone cliffs that loomed on either side of the road. Switching on the radio for company, she heard a newswoman on public broadcast. “After yesterday’s major earthquake at Sakhalin Island, the death toll is counted in the thousands and climbing.”
Kyle shuddered and turned up the volume.
“The quake was predicted by scientist Brock Hobart on the L.A. talk show Mornings with Monty. No one at the National Earthquake Information Center was available for comment.”
NEIC had a public information officer on call 24/7. Apparently, they wouldn’t touch this.
Kyle took the exit for her subdivision in a broad high valley. She’d looked carefully at the topography, evaluating it for landslide risk in the event of an earthquake.
It would be cheaper and an easier commute to live in Salt Lake, but her reasons had nothing to do with mountain charm. People in the valley built their houses, schools, and hospitals upon the sand; sediment laid down 10,000 years ago in Lake Bonneville. The freshwater glacial lake had covered vast portions of what would become Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, with Great Salt Lake a hypersaline remnant of former grandeur. The problem was that when shaken, loose sand saturated below the water table would liquefy … like in the Marina District of San Francisco, where the 1989 “World Series” quake had reduced unconsolidated landfill to the consistency of a milkshake.
Although she’d downplayed the Wasatch Fault to Hollis this afternoon for effect, Kyle knew all too well the USGS gave the probability of it spawning a large earthquake in the next fifty years as one in four. With two million people living within fifteen miles of the fault, studies had placed the potential death toll at over 2,000, with 30,000 homeless.
Rather than live in the valley, Kyle chose mountains cored by 200-million-year-old sediment. Though there was ongoing debate whether a Wasatch earthquake would be felt more severely in the heights or the valley, she slept better knowing she was grounded on solid rock.
Kyle turned in at the complex where she owned a modest townhouse, parked, and used her key-ring flashlight to augment the streetlight. Once inside, she began with the living room where overstuffed armchairs metamorphosed to crouching beasts in the shadows.
Preceding her entry with the flashlight beam, she switched on Franny’s porcelain lamps that flanked her couch. In the dining room, she lit the fixture over a glass-topped rectangle of deep-green labradorite she’d saved along time to purchase. Feldspar crystals in the stone winked.
Moving from room to room, Kyle turned on every light in her house.
From the point of view of escape, it would be preferable to have the master bedroom on the ground floor. Yet, that was balanced by the fact that upper floors could pancake like they had in Northridge, California, where TV had brought a collapsed apartment house’s image into the living rooms of the world.
Upstairs, beneath Kyle’s bedroom windowsill, her climbing rope waited rigged and ready. Her earthquake clothes lay folded on the chair beside the bed, clean underwear
to make any mother proud, socks, jeans, a sweatshirt, raincoat, and well-worn running shoes. In case the lights went out, a lantern powered by a six-volt battery rested on the floor.
Ready to face the night, she decided to try calling Wyatt again. After half a dozen tries today, she had not yet reached him.
Back downstairs in the kitchen, she dialed the number for Wyatt’s employee housing in Mammoth. Just when she thought he wasn’t going to pick up, a sleepy female voice answered.
Kyle kept her tone even. “I’m calling for Wyatt.”
“It’s a woman,” she heard.
“Hello?” Wyatt said a moment later.
“It’s Kyle. I’m sorry to call so late, but…” Her voice broke. “Stanton is in the hospital. He’s had a stroke.”
“Oh, no.”
“His left side is pretty weak. He can talk.”
“Are you and Leila holding up?”
The warmth in his tone made Kyle wanted to pour out every detail of the past two days, beg him to get into his truck and come straight to Salt Lake …
“Do you want your robe?” the background woman asked.
“Hold a sec?” Wyatt said.
The moment for dumping her troubles on a man sleeping with another woman passed, as a rustling might have been the robe going on. The sound of metal against a hard surface was probably him ferreting out his glasses on the nightstand. Kyle imagined him standing beside the bed, his long feet pale against the dark wood floors she’d seen in his housing the one time she’d stopped by. He’d be settling his titanium frames on the bridge of his nose, his dark brows knitted with concern.
He was back. “Ah damn. Stanton.”
“It happened the morning before yesterday in the lab. I’ve tried to call you.”
“I was in the field.” He paused. “Have you seen the seismic pattern up here for the past forty-eight hours?”
“I’ve been so caught up with Stanton and trying to keep a class schedule …” She knew she should have taken the time to check the signals from Yellowstone.