Night of the Black Bear Read online

  Yonah yelled, “No! Stand still and make yourself look big! Show you’re not scared of them.”

  “Be bear food if you want to,” Jack shouted back. “I’m taking my sister out of here. Come on, Ashley!”

  Torn between what he believed was right and yet wanting to protect his friends, Yonah hesitated, then decided to follow them.

  The trees were deep in shadow, like pools of ink, but patches of sunlight remained where the tourists were gathered. Fighting the impulse to run, Jack moved into the open, toward them. He wanted to get where other people were. Closer…closer…they were going to make it.

  Ahead, the tourists waved their arms. Some of them cupped their hands around their mouths, calling out something, but Jack couldn’t make out their words.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “Back!” a deep voice was yelling. “Turn around!”

  “What are they saying?” Ashley cried.

  “I don’t know,” Jack answered.

  Glancing backward, Jack suddenly realized what everyone was hollering about. Three more bears were coming down another slope. Eight bears! How could it be possible?

  “Go the other way!” Yonah yelled at Jack, grabbing Ashley’s arm.

  As Jack whirled around, his voice froze in his throat. Black bears were coming at them from every direction—large bears, small bears, bears pawing the ground and swatting the tree branches, bears huffing, growling, and chomping their teeth—always moving toward them.

  In minutes they would be surrounded with no way out!

  “Ashley, climb this tree. Right now! And stay there!” Jack ordered her. For once Ashley obeyed him, letting him boost her foot with his hands since the lowest branch was higher than she could reach. That left Jack and Yonah on the ground, Jack tingling from anxiety as he locked eyes with the nearest bear across the 50 yards that separated them.

  “Over here! Come near us! Get closer!” the tourists were shouting,

  “No, don’t go! Don’t leave me here in the tree by myself!” Ashley pleaded.

  “No way!” Jack assured her, his eyes riveted on the biggest bear.

  Snapping its jaws, lowering its head, flattening its ears, the bear growled and slapped the ground to show his irritation. He looked from Jack and Yonah to the cluster of tourists as if deciding which would be the biggest nuisance in keeping him from getting where he wanted to go.

  For Jack, it was as if time had stopped, as if his breathing might never begin again. This time Yonah didn’t order him to make noise because Yonah was silent, too. The other bears came a little closer but seemed to be deciding which was more important: the humans or the chicken pieces on the creek banks. Most of them decided in favor of the chicken.

  Then, suddenly, the near bear charged. “Whoa!” Jack yelled, because it was charging right at them!

  “Jack!” Ashley screamed, terrified for her brother.

  “He’s bluffing,” Yonah said, and sure enough the bear stopped after a mere ten feet. He pawed the ground, huffing, pacing first toward the tourists and then circling back toward Jack and Yonah.

  “Grab that branch,” Yonah told Jack, pointing to a good-size limb lying on the ground. “If he runs over here, start hitting him with the branch. But keep looking around—make sure you know where the other bears are.” Yonah unzipped his sweatshirt, grabbed the two sides, then raised his hands high, stretching the shirt between his arms.

  “What are you doing?” Jack yelled.

  “Making myself look bigger to scare them off.” Pumping his arms so that the sweatshirt flapped between them, Yonah yelled some Cherokee words at the bear.

  “Ashley, shake those tree branches as hard as you can,” Yonah told her. “Make a whole lot of noise. Act like you’re a mountain lion or something.”

  None of it worked. The big bear decided to take action. With frightening speed, he came rushing—not toward the tourists, but toward Yonah, reaching him faster than Jack thought possible.

  Ashley yelled as Jack started to swat the bear with the branch. That was useless, because the bear swatted back—but not at Jack. Sweeping his paw with those curved claws in a powerful arc, he sliced through the sleeve of Yonah’s sweatshirt, leaving four parallel scratches across his arm.

  Yonah tried to hit back, but his arms got tangled in the sleeves of his sweatshirt. The tourists shouted at the tops of their lungs, Ashley shrieked, and Jack hollered as he kept swatting the moving bear with the branch, but nothing helped. The bear’s mouth opened wide, and he lunged toward Yonah’s face.

  In the wild confusion, Jack hadn’t noticed Merle racing across the ground toward them. But suddenly, there he was, his guitar raised above the bear’s head. The guitar made an odd thudding, vibrating noise as Merle hit it against that big male bear, beating him on the head with it and across the back and on the shoulders and chest until the sound became a loud c-r-ack, as the back of the guitar broke in half, crosswise. Merle kept hitting. Next, the front of the guitar splintered, sending bits of wood flying everywhere.

  Now the bear turned toward Merle, its jaws wide, the long canine teeth gleaming. Still Merle swung at him, using all that was left of his guitar—the neck with the fingerboard. The guitar strings dangled and whirled crazily as he smacked the bear’s snout with it. When the bear lunged, Merle shoved the neck of the guitar sideways into the wide open mouth, and the bear clamped down on it.

  The scene suddenly turned so crazy that Jack couldn’t tell what was happening. Out of nowhere, Blue appeared, forcing himself between Yonah and the attack bear. And Steven—where had he come from?—grabbed the branch from Jack’s hands and started whapping the other bears that milled around, way too close.

  “Ashley, stay up in that tree!” Olivia screamed.

  Kip sprinted across to the man in charge of the tour, grabbed the bullhorn from his hand, and started bellowing into it, “Go! Get gone! Get out of here, bears!”

  He must have turned the bullhorn to full volume, because his amplified yelling echoed so loudly it not only scared the bears, it made the whole scene feel like a nightmare or a horror movie. “Go! Get away! Scat!”

  The bears decided that was enough. With the neck of the guitar still in his jaws like a dog carrying a bone, the biggest bear turned and loped away from all those shouting, screaming, panicked, excited people. The rest of the bears took their time leaving the scene, climbing the hill until they became lost in the foliage. Piles of chicken remained along the creek bank.

  “I’m OK. I’m OK, Dad,” Yonah kept assuring Blue. “How’d you get here? Where’d you come from?”

  “Later. I gotta radio headquarters and tell every ranger on duty to come here right now. Who brought these park visitors here?”

  Merle stood silent, breathing quickly, a large flat piece from his ruined guitar in his hand.

  Steven was calling, “It’s safe to come out of the tree now, Ashley,” as he reached up to help her.

  “Are you hurt, Jack?” Olivia cried.

  “No, I’m fine. Just scared.”

  “How’d these visitors get here?” Blue demanded again.

  Yonah panted, “Some guy from Gatlinburg brought them. I can’t see him now. He’s gone.” After a glance toward Merle, Yonah asked Blue, “Hey Dad, do you have a handkerchief or something I can wrap around these scratches? They’re bleeding.”

  “Right. Let me look at that. Olivia, will you tell Kip to find the guy who brought the visitors here, wherever he is? And tell Kip to get names and addresses from the visitors. We’ll need witnesses.”

  Merle’s body seemed to slump as though the air had been let out of it. His gaze sank to the ground.

  “And Steven,” Blue added, “why don’t you get your kids into your car right now, and I’ll take Yonah in the patrol car.”

  Yonah stammered, “Uh…what about Merle?”

  Was it happening? Was Yonah going to accuse Merle right here and now? How could he do such a thing, after Merle had kept him from getting his face chewed off! Exp
ecting the worse, Merle stood unmoving, his knuckles white as he clutched a piece of his broken guitar.

  “I mean, I want Merle to ride with us, Dad.” Turning to Merle, Yonah said, “I owe you big time, brother. You saved my skin. I feel awful about your guitar.”

  “’It’s OK,” Merle muttered, looking relieved.

  So Yonah was finally on Merle’s side. But even if they all stayed silent, Merle would find himself in trouble because of the witnesses. It was just a question of how much trouble.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tuesday 9:45 a.m., Park Headquarters.

  The table seemed about the same size as the one in the teachers’ lunchroom at Jack’s school, but instead of middle school teachers chattering over lunches they’d brought from home, the eight people around this table sat in silence. No coffee cups, no glasses of water—the scene resembled interrogation rooms on TV crime dramas. Merle and Yonah had been allowed to miss school to take part in this meeting, but they looked like they’d rather be anywhere else but here.

  Were they seated that way on purpose? Jack wondered. The four adults were on one side: Kip Delaney, Blue Firekiller, and Olivia and Steven Landon, in that order. And on the other side of the table, in the same order, Merle, Yonah, Ashley, and Jack. The trouble with this picture was that Yonah, Ashley, and Jack had parental support directly across from them, while Merle, the kid in trouble, was on his own. And pretty scared.

  Jack drummed his fingers on the table and then stopped, because it sounded too loud in the stillness. Across the table, Kip concentrated as he shuffled some reports in a pile in front of him. Then he peered over his reading glasses, cleared his throat, and began speaking.

  “Well, first I’ll tell you that we got the guy. A couple of rangers drove the tourists back to where they first boarded the bus in Gatlinburg. The tourists gave us the name of the man who was running these tours—Orson Moffett. In fact, those folks just wouldn’t stop talking about the whole experience.” Kip paused, then smiled a little. “By the time I got there, they’d downloaded about a million pictures onto their laptops, and they made me look at all of them. Video, too!”

  Merle slumped so far he nearly slid out of his chair. Even if he’d wanted to, there was no way now he could deny he’d been part of the Smokies Touring Service bear excursion.

  Kip continued, “Moffett’s in trouble because he didn’t have a permit for commercial activity in the park. That’s the small stuff.” Looking up, Kip added, “The big stuff is that there’s a law against feeding, harassing, or disturbing the park’s bears. A federal law.”

  He handed one of the papers to Blue, who passed it to Olivia, who read it quickly and gave it to Steven. With his expression turning serious after he read it, Steven slid it across the table to Jack.

  At the top of the page it said:

  Don’t Feed the Bears Act

  108th CONGRESS

  1st Session

  H. R. 1472

  The Secretary of the Interior shall enforce

  the regulatory prohibition against the feeding of

  wildlife on National Park System lands

  to prohibit individuals from intentionally

  feeding bears for the purpose of enticing bears

  to a particular area, a practice known as bear baiting.

  There was more, but Ashley tugged the paper from Jack’s fingers. Anyway, he’d seen enough.

  “A little background here,” Kip was saying. “I’m going to explain the three different bear behaviors in this park. First, there’s wild behavior. Bears that have wild behavior rarely ever come near people. If they smell humans, they run away from them because they’re afraid of people—that’s why park visitors usually don’t see many bears. And we work very hard to keep it that way.”

  Kip was speaking to all of them, but Merle hung his head as if the words were arrows aimed right at his heart.

  “The bears’ number one defense against humans is their fear of people,” Kip continued. “When we strip that fear away from them, it puts not just peoples’ lives in jeopardy, but also the bears’ lives.”

  Ashley pushed the paper showing the federal law toward Yonah, who reached forward to take it. He jerked back fast, his lips forming a silent “Ow!” as the table’s sharp edge stung his bandaged arm.

  “The second behavior,” Kip went on, “is called habituated behavior. That’s about bears feeding near picnic areas or trails where they find food that people have dropped or otherwise left behind. The food still smells like humans and that would normally scare them off, but they get over their fear pretty quickly because the food rewards them.”

  “And speaking of food,” Steven said, staring at his daughter, “as I recall, you had a half-eaten hamburger in your pocket yesterday, Ashley.”

  “No I didn’t. I threw it away—after a while.”

  Jack, Ashley, Yonah—all three of them had had the smell of food on their clothes the night before from wiping greasy fingers on their shirts and jeans.

  Kip added, “I suspect last night’s attack at Chimneys had more to do with the third level—food-conditioned bears. That means that when bears become so used to getting human food, they start to depend on it. We found out that Orson Moffett has been feeding bears at Chimneys since the first spring thaw.”

  For the first time Merle spoke up. “I only started working for him a week ago,” he said in a shaky voice.

  Ignoring that, Blue explained, “You can’t say every bear that’s food-conditioned is gonna attack somebody, but you sure can’t say if you food-condition a bear it’s not gonna attack somebody. Moffett has made big trouble for us. And for the bears.”

  Silence. Jack felt bad enough, but Merle looked like he was ready to fall to his knees and beg for mercy.

  “In those pictures from last night,” Blue said, “I saw tubs labeled Charlie’s Chicken Shack. When I checked with the Shack manager, he told me Moffett’s been buying leftover chicken and chicken parts there regularly, paying $100 a tub.”

  “That’s a lot of money!” Jack exclaimed.

  “Humph!” Blue snorted. “That’s negligible, compared to what he was earning. He had 18 tourists in the bus last night at $200 a person.”

  “Two hundred dollars!” Quickly Jack did the math. $3,600 minus $600 for chicken parts—that was a big profit for one night’s work.

  “He paid me $50 for singing,” Merle said. “Fifty dollars each time I went with the tour bus people.” Then, more softly, “How much trouble am I in?”

  Blue didn’t answer directly. Instead, he said, “I’d like you kids to wait in the hall while we have a little meeting here.”

  Yonah asked, “Including me? And Merle?”

  “‘Kids’ includes you and Merle,” Kip told him.

  Jack looked toward his parents, who didn’t return the look because they were talking quietly to each other. As the four “kids” filed out of the room into the hall, they heard the door close firmly behind them. There was nothing in the hall but four chairs, a wastebasket, and a copy machine. As each of them picked out a chair to sit on, Jack felt the way he had when he’d been sent to the principal’s office for firing off potato nuggets in a cafeteria food fight in sixth grade.

  Ashley broke the silence. “Jack and I are grounded for the rest of the month.”

  “Why?” Merle asked.

  “For going off in the car with Yonah and not telling anyone,” she answered. “What about you, Yonah?”

  “My driver’s license has been suspended—by my parents. If I don’t do anything wrong between now and the first of June, they might let me drive a date to the junior prom. But that’s conditional. I’m allowed to appeal.”

  It was a relief to talk about it. Jack hadn’t been alone with Merle and Yonah since the bear attack the night before. He said, “I never figured it out, and I didn’t want to ask my parents last night because things were kind of…uh…tense, after we got back to the hotel. But how did they find us at Chimneys picnic area? I mean, you pu
lled the car way off to the side of the road, Yonah. Did they drive all over the park and just happen to notice the car?”

  Yonah shook his head. “Our car has a Starfind Auto System. It’s one of those communication things where if you lock yourself out of the car, you can call them and they unlock it. Or if you’re in a crash, they instantly radio for help. And if your car’s missing, you phone them and they find it.”

  “So they found us easy, then,” Jack said.

  “Noooo! That’s one of the things my dad’s maddest about. I mean, maddest at me. He called Starfind, and they told him he would have to report that the car was stolen. Report it to the police, and then the police would have to contact the Starfind people before they would even start to look for it! My dad knew it wasn’t stolen. He already figured I had it. But he had to call the police anyway.”

  “Whew!” Jack could just imagine the stress in that whole process, with Steven, Olivia, and Blue informing city police about a missing car and three missing kids.

  “Then, after our folks got to the car,” Yonah continued, “they heard all the people yelling and screaming so they ran toward the noise. Lucky for us!”

  Suddenly Jack noticed something sticking out from a corner down the hall. Something red!

  “Is that your—?”

  “Uh-huh,” Merle nodded. “My bike. Kip found it last night when they gathered evidence in Moffett’s garage. He found my guitar case, too.” Merle stood up and walked to the end of the hall, then came back carrying the case. He sat down with the guitar case on his lap, the clasps toward his chest. After unsnapping them, one clasp at a time, he opened the lid very slowly and reached inside.

  If he has mushrooms in there, I’m going to freak, Jack thought. Instead, Merle took out something that might have been a box, but the guitar lid hid most of it.

  “Uh…,” he began.

  For a guy who could write great song lyrics, Merle seemed to have trouble finding words at that moment. After letting the guitar case slide gently from his knees to the floor, he stood up and carried the box to Yonah.