Night of the Black Bear Read online

“Yes, his name’s Peterson. I have to photograph the site of the attack. I shot the other ones yesterday but didn’t make it to the Peterson site. There might not be much evidence left by now, but it’s still worth documenting. You never know when you’ll spot something useful.”

  Chimneys picnic area had several paved lanes where cars and even buses could park. The trees were so thick and close together that Steven warned the kids not to go so far that he couldn’t see them, or at least hear them. They scrambled down the banks of a fast-flowing creek, then up a hillside, looking for the trail. Since the place was called Chimneys, Jack wondered if they might come across a broken-down chimney like the one at Merle’s great-granddaddy’s place. Instead, they found fresh green trees and moss-covered rocks and spring flowers in new bloom, but no chimney ruins. And after half an hour’s search, no trailhead, either.

  “Keep looking,” Steven told them. “It’s got to be here somewhere. I don’t know why we can’t see any signs.”

  “What’s that over there?” Ashley asked, pointing. “Oh, gosh! There are chicken bones lying under that bush. What’s the matter with people? There are plenty of garbage cans in the parking lot. What kind of person would leave food scraps on the ground to mess up this beautiful park?”

  “Thoughtless, careless kinds of persons,” Steven answered. “You’ve heard it, I know, the motto that’s in every national park: ‘Take away nothing but pictures; leave behind nothing but footprints.’”

  “I’ll put the bones in a garbage can,” Jack said. As he picked them up, he saw that the leg and thigh bones were still connected, though there wasn’t any meat on them. “Whoever ate here must have been really hungry. One end of this is all chewed off.”

  Jack managed to find a garbage can just as Steven called to him, “After you dump those bones, let me take a look at your map. I’m starting to wonder if we’re in the wrong place.” Wiping his hands on his jeans, Jack took the map out of his jacket and handed it to his father.

  “Aha! No wonder we couldn’t find it,” Steven exclaimed. “This is the Chimneys picnic area. Chimney Tops Trail starts about a mile up the road.”

  They got back in the car. After going a very short distance, they saw the marker for Chimney Tops trailhead. If they’d driven a little farther in the first place, they’d have found it earlier. The trail began just beyond a low rock wall bordering the parking lot, an easy, level introduction to a climb that was going to get a lot steeper. A few hundred yards past the beginning they saw another sign announcing, “Chimney Tops Trail, The View Is Worth the Climb.”

  “Are we going to the top?” Ashley asked.

  “Not today, although it would be great if we could. Check the sign—it says the hike to the top and back takes two and a half hours. Maybe we can come again before we go home to Wyoming. But this morning, we have to examine the place where the Peterson attack happened.”

  The hike started off pleasantly enough, with birds chirping overhead and the butterflies Ashley loved so much fluttering nearby. They crossed a little wooden bridge, and then another one over a winding, bubbling creek.

  “The attack happened farther up the trail,” Steven told them. “Kip made me a sketch so I could find the place.” A little later he said, “This is it.”

  The evidence of a scuffle was still visible. “Peterson must have fought really hard,” Steven said. “According to the report, he hit the bear with rocks and a tree branch and everything he could pick up, which is what you’re supposed to do. That’s probably why he didn’t get hurt worse than he did.”

  “Why’d the bear go after him?” Ashley asked.

  “Food again. Mr. Peterson had a big lunch in his backpack, and the bear was trying to get it. Peterson lives in Pennsylvania, so Kip is e-mailing him Heather’s pictures to ask him if the bear that attacked him was as large as Heather’s bear.”

  “Hah! Heather’s bear!” Jack exclaimed. “I bet there’s no way she wants to call it Heather’s bear, like she owns it.”

  As Steven took more pictures, Jack walked carefully around the area, studying the ground. Once again he found drops of blood, which discolored the leaves of vines that had been trampled underfoot. This time the blood was dry to his touch, but he knew it was real blood, maybe even bear blood if the guy had hit the bear hard enough. He licked his finger and touched a little of the blood on one of the leaves, capturing a red smear—a souvenir that would stay on his fingertips until he washed his hands again.

  “You’re weird,” his sister told him. “Really weird, Jack.”

  “No, I’m not. Like Dad said, I’m a biologist, or maybe an animal behaviorist.”

  “I think I have enough pictures of this place. Let’s go to the next stop,” Steven said, repacking his cameras.

  “Which is?” Jack asked.

  “The Oconaluftee Mountain Farm Museum, pretty far south of here, but still in the park. They grind corn at an old mill near there, and Kip asked me to find out what happens to their corn after it’s ground. Whether there’s any connection with the mash you kids found at the still on Merle’s great-granddaddy’s farm.”

  “Former farm,” Jack corrected him. “It belongs to the park now.”

  After they drove off again, the road continued to climb as they passed more pulloffs. Trees had been fully green at the lower elevations, yet the higher they drove, the fewer leaves they saw on branches.

  Jack, read from the back of the map, “‘Spring takes a long time to reach the top of the mountains. Some species of birds stay in the park year-round. In autumn, they fly from the mountain elevations into the valleys, as though they were migrating from north to south for the winter. This difference in altitude creates a difference in climate.’ Hey, that’s cool, Dad. The birds don’t have to pack up and leave.”

  “Yeah, way cool. Especially when they’re still here in winter and get snowed on.”

  “Let me see the map,” Ashley told Jack. And then, “Dad, I know we’re supposed to be investigating things, but we’re not getting to enjoy the sights. You said we couldn’t climb up to Chimney Tops, but there’s another place here where the view is supposed to be fabulous. It’s called Clingmans Dome. It’s the highest point in the park. Can we stop there? Please? Can we just be tourists for a little while?”

  “Well,…OK,” Steven agreed reluctantly. In another ten minutes, when they came to the markers for Clingmans Dome, Steven pulled into the parking lot. “As long as we’re doing this, I might as well take pictures,” he said, hoisting his camera bag over his shoulder before he locked the car. “But we need to make it fast.”

  “You want fast? We’ll race you to the top,” Ashley challenged him.

  “Not fair! I’m carrying these heavy cameras.”

  “Your legs are longer, Dad. That evens things out,” Jack told him.

  Ashley and Jack took off at a run, skittering past tourists on the half-mile trail, both older tourists and young families with little kids. Since long legs were the contributing factor, Jack outran his sister, who came up panting three whole minutes behind him. After resting a very short time at the top of the path, they climbed a concrete lookout tower that was bigger than the one at the Space Needle. A sign told them they’d reached the highest point in the Smokies.

  “We’re in the sky!” Ashley exclaimed, raising her arms. “Where’s Dad? He needs to take pictures.”

  “I’ll take pictures,” Jack told her.

  “Dad’s are better.”

  “Thanks a lot! If I had real expensive cameras like his, mine would be better, too.”

  By then Steven had arrived, and the three of them walked around the complete circle at the top of the tower, enjoying the view. In every direction, waves of mountain peaks rose one after the other, far into the distance.

  “You can see a hundred miles from here,” a stranger standing nearby said. “Or, at least you can on a clear day. When it isn’t cloudy, you can see five states, but today it isn’t clear enough for that.”

  “I do
n’t care if I can only see three or four,” Ashley whispered to Jack. “It’s like an angel could fly down out of the mist onto one of those trees. This is heaven.”

  A marker explained that the park had been named for the mist or blue haze that surrounds the mountains, and that the Cherokee name for the area, Sha-co-na-ge, means “place of blue, like smoke.”

  Steven murmured, “This scenery is so different from the Grand Tetons out West. It’s just as beautiful, but in a whole different way—trees and mist instead of snow-capped peaks. When we get back to Wyoming, I’ll turn these photos into 16-by-24-inch prints. You can each have one in your room.”

  Reluctantly, they left the tower, with Steven following the kids on the downhill path to the car. They hadn’t driven a tenth of a mile farther when Jack called out, “Hey! We’re in North Carolina. We have now crossed the state line from Tennessee, but we’re still in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Dad, I found this Oconaluftee place on the map.”

  “OK, keep checking the mile markers along the road, so you can tell me when we’re getting close to the exit.”

  It was good to get out of the car again, once they reached Oconaluftee. While Steven went into the visitor center to talk to a ranger, Jack and Ashley toured farm buildings that had been moved there from other places in the Great Smoky Mountains. “This must be what Merle’s granddaddy’s place looked like a long time ago,” Ashley said. “Or his great-granddaddy’s.”

  “Can’t see any moonshine stills around here, though,” Jack joked.

  A ranger showed them a short cut toward another old building called the Mingus Mill. Just as they reached the mill, a park aide started talking to a group of tourists.

  “This mill operates on water power. That wooden platform—it’s called a flume—carries water from the creek. The water rotates a turbine that’s attached to two huge handmade blocks of granite that grind the corn. Come on inside, and you can see how it works.”

  As they followed the aide through the door, Jack told Ashley, “Maybe we’ll find the answer ourselves to what Dad’s trying to learn right now about the mash.”

  Inside, the walls of the old mill looked just as rough and unfinished as the outside walls. A counter stood in the middle of the floor, with plastic bags sitting at each end.

  “Hey, Ashley, the labels on these bags say ‘wheat flour,’ and those on the bags at the other end say ‘cornmeal.’ And look at the stuff coming out of that grinder thing over there. It’s real smooth—smooth like flour, not grainy like mash.”

  The aide overheard him and said, “We don’t make mash, just cornmeal and flour. How’d you hear about mash?”

  “Oh, a guy mentioned it.” No point talking about the spilled mash or the still they’d discovered. “Come on, Ashley,” he said, grabbing her hand. “We need to tell Dad about this.”

  They found Steven exiting the visitor center. Before he had the chance to speak, Jack announced, “No mash tie-in. They just make cornmeal here. Am I right?”

  “You got it,” Steven agreed.

  “So now where do we go and what do we do?”

  Steven motioned them to follow him to the car. Right before he unlocked the doors, he said, “We’ve done our sleuthing pretty quickly this morning, faster than I expected. So I’ve been thinking—we’re almost at the southern boundary of the park. How about if we give Ashley a little treat?”

  “A treat? For me?” Ashley brightened.

  “For you. Take a look at Jack’s map, Ashley. What’s the next town, heading south?”

  Jack unfolded the map to let his sister study it. “It’s called Cherokee!” she answered.

  “Yes. It’s on the Cherokee Indian Reservation. The ranger I was just talking to mentioned that there’s a Museum of the Cherokee Indian we can visit. Since you haven’t found your Cherokee legend so far,” Steven said, patting Ashley’s shoulder, “I thought this would be a great place to look for it.”

  Ashley was so excited she practically dove into the car. But since Jack was hungry, he persuaded his father to stop first at a fast-food place for lunch, where Ashley kept urging them to eat faster. She didn’t even finish her own burger. Wrapping the last part of it in a napkin, she shoved it into the pocket of her zip-up flannel shirt.

  “That’s going to make your shirt greasy and smelly,” Jack told her. “I don’t care. Let’s go.”

  The museum was less than two miles farther. After they parked and went inside, they were greeted by a guide, a Cherokee woman named Juanita.

  “First I’ll show you the exhibit rooms,” she said, “and then we have a film.”

  To Ashley, and to Jack, too, this was a wonderful part of the day’s trip. The museum was filled with life-size statues of Cherokee warriors and Cherokee leaders, arranged in scenes to make them look real. One scene showed richly dressed Cherokee elders greeting the arriving ships of Europeans. The scene Jack liked best was a warrior in buckskins holding up an offering to the gods.

  While he was admiring that, Ashley cried, “Look—masks! Like Yonah made, but different kinds, too.”

  “These are masks worn by warriors from each of the seven Cherokee clans,” Juanita explained. “The Bird clan, Wolf clan, Wild Potato clan, Paint clan, Long Hair clan, Deer clan, and Blue clan.”

  “Could I ask you a question?” Ashley moved closer to Juanita and began, “Yonah…uh…a friend of ours, said the Europeans came here and pushed the Cherokee people out of the Smokies. Can you tell me what kind of Europeans they were?” Jack knew Ashley was thinking about their own Italian grandparents. She’d inherited her dark eyes and hair from them.

  “Way back in the 18th century,” Juanita answered, “the English and Scotch-Irish first came to these parts. A century later, they had moved onto much of the Cherokee land.”

  Jack, whose blond hair and blue eyes matched Steven’s, whispered, “Was that us, Dad?”

  Steven whispered back, “Yep. Those Scotch-Irish and English folks, the ones who chased away the Cherokees, were our long-ago ancestors. I know you’re not proud of what they did, and neither am I.”

  Juanita had moved ahead of them so she didn’t hear that—not that it would have mattered, probably. Turning around, she invited them, “If you’d like to come here into this small movie theater, you’ll be able to watch the history of the Cherokee Nation on film.”

  That was when the Trail of Tears came to life for all of them, the story of the Cherokee people forced off their land, pushed away by soldiers on horseback. There were scenes of women carrying babies across cold rushing streams, of children shivering as snow blew in swirls around them. Then a deep, halting voice, one that sounded as though it belonged to an ancient Cherokee man, spoke the words slowly:

  Long time we travel on way to new land.

  People feel bad. Women cry and make sad wails.

  Children cry, and many men cry, and all look sad like when friends die.

  But they say nothing, just put heads down, keep on go toward west.

  Many days pass. People die very much.

  People sometimes say I look like I never smile.

  But no man has laugh left after he’s marched over long trail.

  As they came out of the theater, Jack saw a real trail of tears on Ashley’s cheeks. She’d found her Cherokee legend, a sad one, but true.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The front door was open, so Jack and Ashley walked right into the Firekiller house. They must have startled Yonah because he whirled to face them, his right hand behind his back.

  “Where’s your mom and dad?” Yonah demanded.

  Startled by Yonah’s intensity, Ashley stammered, “Mom called Dad on the cell phone…”

  Jack broke in, “The manager of a hotel near the town dump saw some bears there. Dad dropped us off. He’s gone to meet Mom and take pictures. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “So what are you hiding?” Jack came right out and asked him.

  Yonah scowled, then slowly brought his hand out in fro
nt of him. He was holding a fresh, crisp $50-bill. In a rush he explained, “My mom’s working late. She said there’s leftover turkey in the fridge, and I should get it out and make sandwiches for us. But Merle’s books were on the kitchen table, and when I moved them, this fell out of his biology book. So—what do you think it means?”

  “It means he got paid,” Jack answered. “He has a job as a bus—” His words faltered.

  “Not at the Sunset Grill, or any other restaurant, I don’t think. When people get paid in cash like this, it’s from some shady operation.”

  Ashley sighed. “You’re so suspicious, Yonah. Did you ever just come out and ask Merle where he works?”

  Yonah shrugged. “What’s the point? He’d lie to me. But hey, here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s the plan.

  We’ll drive to Gatlinburg and go up one street after another ’til we see that red bike. It’s about a thousand years old, so no one else will have a bike like that anywhere in the city.”

  “You’re going to drive us?” Jack asked uncertainly. This would be a much longer drive than going two blocks for a burger. Their dad would not like it one bit.

  “You scared?” Yonah asked, opening his eyes wide in mock fear. “I could maybe get you a car seat for babies.”

  That did it! After that slam, if Yonah had dared Jack to leap off the Space Needle, Jack would have take the dare. In an hour or two his parents would come back here, expecting them to be at the Firekillers’, and they’d freak out because their kids wouldn’t be around. But it would be worth any consequences to shove Yonah’s sneer down his throat, and maybe at the same time prove Merle’s innocence. If he was innocent.

  “Let’s get in the car,” Jack said, his voice gruff.

  Yonah asked Ashley to sit in front because he said she was great at noticing things—just one more put-down for Jack, who crouched forward in the back staring intently at the streets of Gatlinburg. He made a personal vow to be first to spot that red bike. They passed the Book Warehouse in the Mountain Mall, a Subway sandwich shop, which reminded Jack how hungry he was, Ripley’s Aquarium, and then—