Yellowstone Standoff. Scott Graham

junior researcher Justin Pickford, recently of Princeton, didn’t really understand what he was saying. But as a brand new member of the park’s grizzly research program, he clearly was pleased with the opportunity to say it.

      “In the case of the Territory Team,” Justin went on, “it just so happened the bear wanted to rip somebody to shreds.”

      Chuck Bender, junior even to Justin as a Yellowstone National Park researcher, looked the young man up and down. Justin wore the requisite park researcher outfit—sturdy hiking boots, Carhartt work jeans, untucked flannel shirt, and bandana headband, with bear-spray canister and all-purpose folding knife sheathed to his belt at his waist. While Justin’s clothes and gear looked like those of his fellow scientists in the Canyon Ranger Station meeting room, his scrawny, reed-thin physique did not. During the next weeks in the park’s rugged backcountry, Justin would bulk up to match the broad shoulders, trunk-like legs, and concomitant stamina of the three dozen more experienced researchers in the room. If he couldn’t cut it, however, he’d be gone, back to the computer-tapping, paper-pushing world of academia on the East Coast.

      Justin leaned toward Chuck and asked in a conspiratorial whisper, “Have you seen the footage?”

      Chuck glanced around the log-walled room. Folding chairs lined its scuffed, pine-plank floor. A platter of chocolate chip cookies and a three-gallon dispenser of lemonade sat on a table in back. The researchers were half Chuck’s age, in their mid- to late twenties, roughly two males for each female. They visited with one another in small groups, cookies and plastic cups in hand, waiting to take their seats upon the arrival of Yellowstone National Park Chief Science Ranger Lex Hancock.

      Chuck turned to Justin. “From two years ago?”

      “Yep. The fall before last.”

      The video had been yanked from the internet the instant it appeared.

      “Can’t say as I have,” Chuck said.

      Justin’s blue eyes glowed. “Want to?”

      Chuck hesitated long enough to convince himself viewing the infamous footage qualified as worthwhile research that would add to his store of knowledge as he pursued the questions awaiting him at the foot of Trident Peak. He nodded. Justin headed for a windowed door leading to the building’s side porch.

      Reflected in the glass door, Chuck’s attire matched the other scientists—hiking boots, work jeans, flannel shirt—though his shirttail was tucked and he needed no bandana to keep his short, thinning hair in place. The reflection displayed his lean, weatherbeaten frame and the deep crow’s feet cutting from the corners of his blue-gray eyes to his silver-tinged sideburns.

      On the porch outside, the chilly air bit through Chuck’s cotton shirt. It was eight in the evening, the second week of June, the days long and lingering here in the northern Rockies. The sun, a white disk behind a veil of stratus, hung above a tall stand of Engelmann spruce rising beyond the parking lot to the west. He drew in his shoulders, shivering. Back home, at the edge of the desert in the far southwest corner of Colorado, daytime highs were in the nineties by now, and the nights, while crisp, weren’t anywhere near as frigid as here in Yellowstone, where the last vestiges of winter held sway even as the longest day of the year approached.

      “Let’s make this quick,” Chuck told Justin, rubbing his palms together. “Hancock will be here any minute.”

      Justin fished his phone from his pocket. “The video-frame sequence is every three seconds, but the sound runs in real time. That’s what makes it so brutal.”

      The young researcher swiped the phone’s face with his finger. “Martha forwarded this to me.” Martha Augustine served as logistical coordinator for the park’s research teams. “Said I should see it before I decided for sure if I was in.” He tapped at his phone. “It happened in upper Lamar Valley, at the foot of Pyramid Peak.”

      “A long way from where we’re headed,” Chuck said.

      “Thirty miles at least,” Justin said, nodding. “With the lake in between.”

      He held up his phone and stood shoulder to shoulder with Chuck. A paused video feed filled the phone’s tiny screen. The trunk of a tree framed one side of the shot. A sweep of meadow, brown with autumn, filled the remainder of the frame. Green lodgepole pines blanketed a hillside on the far side of the grassy meadow.

      Justin punched play. A rasping noise issued from the phone’s small speaker. Chuck frowned.

      “That’s the griz,” Justin said. “Snoring.”

      A sudden grunt broke in. The bear had awakened.

      “The Territory Team showed up,” said Justin. “They were just doing their job, comparing carnivore biomass consumption in various pack territories. Blacktail Pack had taken down an elk at the base of Pyramid a week before. The wolfies—” he used the informal term for the park’s Wolf Initiative team members “—hiked in and rigged the camera to film the pack’s behavior around the carcass. The two of them were coming back to retrieve the camera and find out what they’d managed to record. Little did they know, the griz had chased off the wolves and was sleeping right on top of the kill.”

      Chuck flinched when a dark shadow covered the video feed. When the video advanced to its next frame three seconds later, the shadow drew away to become the back of a grizzly bear’s broad, brown head.

      The bear remained still through the video’s next three-second frame, its unmoving head captured from behind by the camera, the fur on its neck standing straight up, its stubby ears erect. A distinctive, V-shaped notch cut to the base of its right earflap.

      Over the sound of the bear’s gravelly breaths came unintelligible human voices, those of a young man and woman. The tone of their conversation, relaxed and jovial, was of co-workers comfortable in one another’s presence.

      The young woman laughed, a high-pitched peal, and the bear’s head dropped from view. The animal growled deep in its throat, the pitch so low it rattled the phone.

      The woman’s laughter cut off. “Bear,” she cried out. “There! See it?”

      The bear reappeared on the video feed. The grizzly’s body, thick and muscular, stretched full out as it sprinted toward the voices.

      Chuck’s heart tattooed his chest at the sound of the bear’s harsh breaths as it charged.

      The young man hollered, “Whoa, bear!”

      The next screen shot captured half the bear’s body as it angled out of the picture, running flat out across the meadow toward the off-screen man and woman.

      The grizzly woofed, a dog-like exhalation of warning.

      “Stop!” the young man yelled. “I said stop!”

      Chuck sucked a gulp of air, his throat stiff. The man’s exclamation should have given the bear pause. Instead, the bear woofed again, the sound farther away, and the video feed returned to a serene shot of the meadow and forested hillside beyond.

      A terrified screech from the young woman came over the speaker, after which her voice and the young man’s united in a powerful, “No!”

      “Stop!” the man cried out a millisecond later. Then, under his breath, “Get behind me, Rebecca. Back up.”

      A savage roar shook the phone’s speaker.

       2

      Me,” the man shouted in response to the grizzly’s roar, his voice strong and forceful. “Hey, bear. It’s me you want.”

      Justin raised his free hand. “Wait for it,” he said, his eyes big and round and shining.

      Chuck’s jaw tightened.

      The hiss of releasing aerosol came over the phone. From the reports he’d read, Chuck knew the two wolf researchers were spraying a protective screen of red pepper mist between