Night of the Black Bear Read online

  “I watched you through the window. Great game!” she told them. “You’re probably thirsty and hungry after all that exercise.” She set the tray on the edge of the back steps and said, “Here’s bottled water, lemonade, and some towels to wipe off your sweat. Plus my special fry bread; you can put peanut butter and jelly on it if you want to.” As the kids gathered around Mrs. Firekiller—she told them to call her Lily—she sat on the steps and poured lemonade for them.

  Jack had tasted fry bread many times before—after all, Wyoming was Indian country—but Mrs. Firekiller’s was especially good.

  “Let’s go for a bike ride,” Merle urged, before Jack had a chance to finish eating. “Is it OK if Ashley uses your bike, Lily? And Jack can take Blue’s?”

  “Sure, that’s fine,” she agreed. “Take these water bottles with you, and I’ll get you some trail mix. But watch out for bears.” She hesitated. “You know, it seems strange to have to warn you about bears. Each year millions of people come to this park hoping to see black bears, and most of them are disappointed because the bears stay hidden. And now, suddenly, people are getting attacked. I wish we knew what’s going on.”

  Merle didn’t wait for Lily to finish talking. He started wheeling the bikes out of the shed, one at a time.

  Thanking Lily for everything, Jack and Ashley followed Merle and Yonah onto the street, heading north. Within a mile they’d crossed the boundary into Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Jack got the feeling that this bike ride was just one more competition between Merle and Yonah, with Merle trying to make up for the stickball defeat. The bikes were new, sleek, fast, and probably expensive, all except Merle’s. His bike still rattled. Jack and Ashley had to pump hard to keep up with the other two. First, Merle was in the lead, then Yonah. Once Merle came close to clipping Yonah’s front wheel when he cut in front of him.

  “Slow down,” Ashley yelled. “I want to enjoy the scenery. Look at all these butterflies—I’ve never seen so many butterflies in one place in my life!”

  The butterflies really were amazing, sailing and swooping high and then low enough to almost brush the kids’ shoulders as they biked. Pale gray ones with spotted wings; beautiful black ones with white dots that looked like eyes edging the wings; others of pale yellow rimmed with black, blue, and orange; or pure yellow, or bright orange, and even plain light brown ones that flitted around their spectacular cousins as though they weren’t ashamed to look ordinary.

  “I feel like I’m in a fantasy world,” Ashley sang out.

  Merle glanced back at Jack and grinned. Since Merle didn’t have any sisters, he wasn’t used to girly outbursts, Jack guessed. Suddenly, Merle cut crosswise in front of Yonah, coming to a stop with a skid and making Yonah and everyone else nearly run into him.

  “What the—what are you doing?” Yonah yelled.

  “I want you to pull your bikes through this opening into the trees,” Merle told everyone. We’re gonna leave them over there so I can show you guys something.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right to park the bikes here?” Jack asked, as they followed Merle through foliage that had just begun to leaf out in earnest. “I mean, this bike belongs to Yonah’s father. It’d be real bad if someone stole it.”

  “No one’ll steal it,” Merle promised.

  “Like you know that,” Yonah argued.

  “Nobody’s out here but us and the bears.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say,” Yonah told Merle. “You’ll scare Ashley.”

  Maybe Ashley was getting used to the bickering, because she ignored it, reaching out to the butterflies.

  A dark blue one landed on her outstretched fingers, raising and lowering its wings and waving its antennae.

  “If you guys want to go see whatever this thing is that Merle’s so hot to show you, I’ll wait here,” Yonah growled.

  “Oh, come with us,” Ashley told him, and took his hand. Surprisingly, Yonah followed her. Wow! Jack thought, how’d she make that happen?

  They were on a barely visible trail, winding through newly leafed trees that stood so tall and so close together they made Jack feel dwarfed. The trees grew thicker, and the leaves rustled—from wind? Or was there some critter back there in the woods? Maybe Merle hadn’t been joking. Maybe there were bears around here. Close by!

  Jack saw Ashley’s eyes widen, and he knew she was thinking the same thing. That happened often, that they shared thoughts without speaking them. He remembered last night’s evening news, showing the bloody wounds of the bear victims on TV. And he remembered the blood on the ground in the cemetery. But he didn’t want to say anything, because he didn’t want Merle and Yonah to think he was a wimp. Yonah, especially. Those two guys were forging ahead through the trees as if they were someplace safe, not inside the boundaries of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where bears had been eating people lately.

  After about a tenth of a mile, they came to a small clearing. Merle stopped, held out an arm, and said, “This is what I wanted you to see. Look over there.”

  At first Jack thought it was just a pile of rocks Merle pointed to, then he realized it was stones mortared together. “That’s what’s left of the chimney,” Merle said. “This used to be the Chapman family farm. My great-granddaddy built a house here, cleared the land, and raised kids and cows and corn.”

  “It’s mostly trees now,” Jack observed.

  “Yeah, but not back then. My granddaddy grew up here. When he was a kid, he’d hoe corn for 12 hours a day and get paid just 25 cents, he told me. And when he got bigger he carried hundred-pound sacks of sugar, one on each shoulder, for the moonshiners.”

  Ashley looked puzzled. “What are ‘moonshiners?’”

  It was Yonah who answered, “They’re the lawbreakers who made their own whiskey in illegal stills, until they were arrested by federal agents.”

  “Nah, they hardly ever got arrested,” Merle said. “And they weren’t criminals. Even during Prohibition, every family in these mountains grew corn and made moonshine from it, either to drink or to sell. City folks were always willin’ and waitin’ to buy ’shine.”

  Merle seemed to be admitting that his kinfolk were lawbreakers. “If they had farms here,” Jack asked, “why did they leave?”

  Yonah was the one who answered. “Look around you. You’re now standing in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. How do you think it got here?”

  Merle nodded. “The landowners got kicked out so the U.S. government could turn all this scenery into a national park. It was back in the Depression, and my family had to sell the land dirt cheap. Great-granddaddy put the money into a bank, and then the bank went bust. So there he was—no money, nine kids, and no job ’cause all the other people were looking for jobs, too.”

  Yonah’s face screwed up as he mocked, “Oh, boo hoo hoo! So your kinfolk got kicked off the land. Hey, Jack, want to know how Merle’s kinfolk got the land in the first place? They stole it from the Cherokee Nation! The Cherokees happened to be here first, and they got run right off this land, with guns pointed at their backs!”

  Now it was Yonah who threw out his arms. “About a thousand years ago the Cherokee people settled all the land from the Ohio River to South Carolina. They were doing just great…’til the Europeans came.”

  The way he said “Europeans” made Jack uncomfortable. After all, his own ancestors came from Europe.

  “This was our sacred ancestral home,” Yonah went on. “And listen to this, Ashley—the Cherokee men treated their women as equals. Yeah! And that was long before white men did that.”

  “So what happened?” Ashley asked softly. “What happened to all of them?”

  “The U.S. President Andrew Jackson sent American soldiers to force 14,000 Cherokee from the land around here. And those tribes didn’t get paid in dollars—they got paid nothing. The soldiers marched them all the way to Oklahoma. In winter!” Yonah was growing agitated. “Thousands of Cherokee people died along the way, mostly women and kids.”

 
; Even Merle was silent now, staring at the ground. Jack wondered which of the two guys had won the argument. Not a good kind of argument—a “my folks were treated worse then yours” contest. No real winners.

  “Hey, check over there,” Ashley said, walking a little way ahead. “It’s like there’s an old pot or something behind those trees. Maybe it got left behind when everyone had to move away.”

  That Ashley—she had sharp eyes! Jack wouldn’t have noticed the slight gleam of copper barely visible through the brush; in fact, it looked as though brush had been deliberately piled on top of it.

  “Uh-oh,” Merle muttered.

  “I know what it is,” Yonah yelled. “It’s a still. Where Merle’s great-grandfather made his moonshine.” He rushed forward and began to pull away the brush, revealing a large round copper pot sealed with a lid. A stovepipe rose out of the lid, then narrowed and curved downward to connect to a smaller copper tub.

  Merle looked slightly embarrassed, but he smiled. “Yup, that’s what it is. A still. Good ol’ great-granddaddy.”

  Close to the still were two wooden barrels, one standing, one lying on its side. As Jack circled around to get a better view, he asked, “What’s this stuff that spilled out of the barrel onto the ground?”

  “That’s mash,” Yonah answered. “Corn mash. Moonshiners grind up the corn, mix it with yeast and other stuff, then let it ferment and turn into moonshine. But, oh man, this spilled mash here isn’t anything Merle’s great-granddaddy left behind. It looks pretty fresh.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Merle said. “It’s not all that fresh because some of the corn kernels are sprouting, see that? This spilled mash has been here a while. Well, OK, maybe not that long, but maybe a couple of weeks.”

  “So who’s up here making moonshine? Some of your redneck cousins, Merle?” Yonah taunted him.

  Merle shrugged. “They’ve been known to do that.”

  “You know what I think?” Ashley suddenly cried out. “I bet some bears came, knocked over this barrel, and ate some of the mash. It made them drunk, and they got mean. That’s why the bear attacked Heather. He was drunk!”

  “No way,” Merle said. “That’s not the reason.”

  “What do you know about it?” Yonah demanded. “I think it’s a pretty good theory, Ashley. It really could explain why two bear attacks happened in the park in the past ten days. You don’t know anything about bears, Merle, so shut up.”

  Merle not only shut up, he clamped his lips tight, lowered his eyes, and sauntered away. That was unusual. It was the first time he’d let Yonah slam him without pushing back.

  Pulling his camera from his vest pocket, Jack said, “I’ll take pictures of this and show them to my mom and Kip and Blue. If they think maybe bears did get into the mash, they can come out here to investigate. Then they can check for bear hair and claw marks and stuff.” He looked up and called, “Hey, where are you going, Merle?”

  “To make sure the bikes are OK,” Merle answered. “I’ll meet you back there.”

  “Oh, OK. Later.” Jack began to take pictures. Just as his dad had taught him, he shot from every angle, circling the copper kettles and the spilled mash. The light was good, he avoided shadows, and after a dozen shots he could tell he’d taken some good ones.

  When he finished, he, Yonah, and Ashley went back to get the bikes. Merle was gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Where’d he go?” Jack asked Yonah, bewildered.

  “Don’t worry—Merle knows his way around.”

  Their bikes were still leaning up against the trees, undisturbed. Jack was tempted to say, See, Yonah, no one stole them, just like Merle said, but he thought he’d better not.

  After the three of them biked back to the Firekillers’, Jack found Merle in the shed.

  Bent over his red bike, he greeted Jack with, “Can’t get this chain to stop rattling. I’m tryin’ to tighten it.”

  “Can I help?” Jack volunteered, but Merle just shook his head.

  It was an old bike, from the looks of it. By contrast, the bike Jack had ridden into the park, the one that belonged to Blue Firekiller, was a sleek new mountain bike.

  “Why’d you leave us back there?” Jack asked him.

  “I just get tired of Yonah comin’ down on me all the time. Yeah, I know he’s smart—he takes college-level calculus and advanced history of western civilization and he’s only a junior. But he acts like me and my family are a bunch of dumb rednecks.” Merle gave a yank to a wrench handle, tightening a bolt.

  Before Jack could answer, Merle went on, “I come from hard-workin’ people. My daddy died in a logging accident when I was four, and my mom tries real hard to keep her and me goin’. Yonah’s mom and dad both have jobs, so they can pay for a nice house like this, and they can buy fancy bikes and—” He bounced his own bike on the floor of the shed, shaking his head when the chain still rattled.

  Turning to stare straight into Jack’s eyes, Merle said, “For now, I’ll take any job I can get. But someday I’m gonna be a famous singer and buy my mom a bigger house than this one, even, and a car. We don’t have a car now that it got wrecked….” He stopped then, looking a bit embarrassed. “Hey, why am I whinin’ to you like this, Jack? Blah, blah, blah. Just tell me to shut up.”

  “No, it’s OK. Where do you work, Merle?”

  Merle seemed to hesitate before he answered, “The Sunset Grill in Gatlinburg. I’m a busboy. I better get my stuff together now so I won’t be late. Don’t wanna lose this job. I just got it a week ago.”

  Not long afterward, while Jack was watching Ashley and Yonah play Sudoku on a computer, he glanced through a window and noticed Merle riding away on his bike. His guitar case was strapped to his back. That’s odd, Jack thought—why would he take his guitar to a busboy job? He didn’t bother to ask Yonah, because Yonah would just answer with some negative jab at Merle. And he didn’t ask Lily Firekiller, who came into the room a few minutes later.

  “Kids, your parents just called. They want you to meet them in Gatlinburg. You, too, Yonah, because your dad’s there. I’ll drop off the three of you, and then I’ll go on to the hospital to see if Arlene needs anything.”

  In the car, Ashley sat in the backseat with Yonah. They continued their Sudoku games, but this time in a magazine. The distance from the Firekillers’ house to Gatlinburg was a little more than six miles. Six miles in a car was nothing, but it would be a pretty long bike ride for Merle.

  Lily dropped them off at a building with an overhanging sign small enough that they might have missed it—The Digital Oasis. Inside, Steven was eager to point out some of the equipment to Jack.

  “Five workstations, all dual-platform. They’re total power-houses! High-end software, top of the line graphics-intensive,” Steven marveled.

  “I thought you didn’t like digital photos, Dad,” Jack reminded him.

  “Normally not. But today I used a digital camera when I photographed the elk herd. Digital is faster, and we’re in a big hurry,” Steven explained, “so Blue told us about this lab.”

  Glancing at the wall clock, Olivia said, “It’s almost six. We’ve already downloaded a lot of our pictures, so why don’t we take a break and go to dinner, guys?”

  “Yeah. We could go to that Sunset Grill where Merle works,” Jack suggested.

  “Let’s just order pizza, and we’ll eat it here,” Steven answered. “I don’t want to lose any time with these elk photos. This graphics-intensive software lets me examine each image almost pixel by pixel. We haven’t found any evidence yet, but there’s still a good chance we’ll notice clues we missed out in the field.”

  Turning to Blue, Olivia asked, “OK with you if we get pizza delivered for us? The kids can eat out—there’s nothing for them to do here, and they’ll just get bored.” Handing two twenties to Jack, she told him, “This should be more than enough for the place you mentioned. Yonah will know where it is.”

  “Uh-huh,” Yonah nodded, with a twist of the lips Jack co
uldn’t interpret.

  They walked along the sidewalks of the busy town of Gatlinburg, where side-by-side tourist attractions grabbed attention even more than in Pigeon Forge. Ahead, in the distance, Jack saw the tree-covered elevations that Tennesseans called mountains. Folks around here ought to see what real mountains look like, he thought. From his bedroom window in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Jack could look out at snow-covered peaks that reached nearly 14,000 feet, more than twice as high as the Smokies. Still, it was nice to see all those trees. Wyoming mountains were bare at the topmost peaks.

  “There it is,” Ashley announced. “The Sunset Grill.”

  It was an ordinary looking restaurant, Jack thought, and not too full of customers. As they entered, a hostess came up to them and asked, “Would you rather have a table or a booth?”

  “Booth,” Yonah replied. He’d hardly spoken at all during the walk to the restaurant, maybe because Ashley had kept up her nonstop chatter.

  “Follow me,” the hostess told them. She wore her hair in a long, blonde ponytail that swung from side to side as she walked ahead. After they were seated next to a window, Jack noticed that the top of her frilly apron was covered with pins and badges. One said “Elvis is Alive in Gatlinburg,” another one said “I Got High in the Space Needle,” another showed a fancy car with the words “Hollywood Star Cars Museum.” There were lots more badges, and above them was her nametag—Caitlyn.

  “What are you, a walking advertisement for Gatlinburg tourists?” Yonah asked Caitlyn.

  “Why not?” she answered, smiling brightly at Yonah. She kept her eyes on Yonah as she handed out the menus and told him, “Andrew will be your server tonight, but if you need anything at all, just ask me! Remember, I’m Caitlyn.”

  She started to walk away when Jack stopped her with, “There’s a guy named Merle Chapman who works here. He’s a busboy. Will you please tell him we’re here so we can say hi?”

  Caitlyn stopped. Turning around, she answered, “There’s no Merle here.”