Mountain Rampage (34 page)
Authors: Scott Graham
Jake's knife ripped through Chuck's shirt and sliced his sternum. Blood poured down Chuck's chest and stomach, warm and wet. He grabbed Jake's knife arm as it reached the apogee of its swing and drove the knife into the ground, following with the full weight of his body.
Jake's knife hand crumpled in the turf with a snap as Chuck
piled himself atop the wrecker owner's arm. Jake screamed in agony, then bit down hard on Chuck's shoulder. Chuck threw himself atop Jake, freeing himself from the ripping teeth.
Jake's arm, bent backward ninety degrees at the wrist, was useless. Chuck raised a fist, ready to pummel Jake into submission, but Jake twisted away, dragging himself through the grass on his knees and elbows. He slipped free of Chuck's grasp and rose to his feet. Before he could take a step, Chuck grabbed him from behind and spun him around. Chuck reached for the back of Jake's head with both hands and, summoning all his remaining strength, yanked downward while swinging his knee up.
Chuck's knee met Jake's nose with a sickening crunch. An explosion sounded and bits of Jake's skull and brain tissue sprayed away into the night. At the same instant, a dart of pain followed the path of a projectile into Chuck's gut.
Chuck looked up to see Anca standing a few feet away, a look of horror on her face, her pistol held out before her, smoke rising from its barrel.
Jake fell from Chuck's grasp to the ground, a portion of his skull missing. Chuck collapsed to a sitting position beside Jake's inert frame. He put his hand to his flayed chest, took it away, and peered wonderingly at his palm, red with blood. He probed his belly with his fingers, finding a small hole seeping still more blood. A shard of the bullet from Anca's gun must have ricocheted into his torso.
He lay back on the grass and stared at the smoke floating across the night sky above him. The smoke was thick and black, but his mind was clear, the pain in his stomach negligible. Seconds later, Janelle and Gregory leaned over him, their faces drawn. Carmelita and Rosie appeared, too, kneeling, teary-eyed, at his head.
“Chuck,” Carmelita cried.
“Daddy!” Rosie sobbed.
He stifled a groan. “I'm going to be all right,” he managed. “I promise.”
The girls quieted, their small hands stroking his hair.
Chuck closed his eyes and relaxed, confident in Gregory's capable hands, and surrounded by his family.
A dozen ewes topped the northwest ridge, followed by their calves. A pair of juvenile rams came last, sniffing the air and rotating their heads, on full alert.
The Rocky Mountain sheep worked their way across the north face of Mount Landen, nipping at bunches of brown grass on the high peak's treeless slope. The animals paused just below the rocky northeast ridge. The far side of the ridge fell away to a three-sided plateau topped by bent, rusted, ore cart tracks and a pile of logs where a cabin once had stood.
One of the calves trotted up and over the ridge crest. The remaining sheep hesitated, shoulders twitching, heads held high. When the calf did not race back over the ridge in panicked retreat, the rest of the herd followed, clambering up and over the crest one by one.
The ewes, calves, and pair of young rams fanned out on the east-facing slope, feasting on the low, dry grass that had grown untouched here throughout the long, hot summer. The animals grazed along the slope to the small plateau, where the rusted rail tracks led from a heavy, iron door set in the mountainside to the logs lying in a jumbled heap at the edge of the plateau. The mountain fell away from the plateau to foothills and on to plains stretching eastward to a flat, distant horizon.
The calves led the rest of the herd across the rock-strewn ground, kicking up their hind legs as they leapt the rails. The sheep spread out to browse again on the far side of the plateau, paralleling a dusty footpath leading around the peak to the paved highway that climbed the mountain's south flank.
The larger of the two young rams lifted its head to sniff at
the last of the wood smoke rising from the burnt trees below, a reminder of the thick pall of smoke that had enveloped the high peaks of the Mummy Range for the last several days.
The ram lowered its head and made a playful charge at its fellow young male, forcing the smaller ram to flee across the rocky ground. The larger ram planted its hooves and shook its half-curled horns in victory as the first drops of rain fell from the bank of dark clouds that hung close over Mount Landen. The rams bent their heads to the tufts of bunchgrass on the mountainside as the drops fell harder, wetting the parched alpine slope and initiating the centuries-long process of healing the charred forest below.
With this, the second installment in the National Park Mystery Series, I am ever more aware of the critical role my early readers play in improving the quality of my work. My utmost appreciation goes to my first reader, my wife Sue, and those whose blazing intelligence and strong editing skills join with Sue's to enhance my writing: Anne Markward, Mary Engel, Kevin Graham, John Peel, and, for spotting and correcting my police-procedural errors, Lt. Pat Downs of the La Plata County Sheriff's Department.
My thanks go to the smart, dedicated folks at Torrey House PressâKirsten Johanna Allen, Mark Bailey, and red-pen-wielding Anne Terashima. I count myself lucky to be a member of the Torrey House team of authors, whose friendship and camaraderie I have come to cherish.
My thanks also go to America's independent booksellers, whose dedicated work to keep books and reading alive makes possible what I do, including Maria's Bookshop owners Andrea Avantaggio and Peter Schertz and their inimitable staff in Durango, Colorado, my home turf.
Finally, my heartfelt appreciation goes out to all those devoting their lives to preserving and protecting the wild places that define the western U.S., particularly wildland firefighters and the national park rangers and staffers who so capably balance the preservation of the West's most iconic lands with the introduction of those places to an ever-growing number of park visitors.
Scott Graham is the author of
Canyon Sacrifice
, the first installment in the National Park Mystery Series. Graham's previous book,
Extreme Kids
, won the National Outdoor Book Award.
Graham was raised in the Rocky Mountain town of Durango, Colorado, where echoes of Colorado's gold-mining past featured in
Mountain Rampage
resonate to this day. He has explored the high mountains of his home state his entire life, including numerous hiking, climbing, and backpacking trips deep into the Rocky Mountain National Park wilderness.
Graham has made a living as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, radio disk jockey, and coal-shoveling fireman on the steam-powered Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. He is an avid outdoorsman and amateur archaeologist who enjoys mountaineering, skiing, hunting, rock climbing, and whitewater rafting with his sons and wife, an emergency physician.
A
BOUT THE
C
OVER
Famed nineteenth-century landscape artist Albert Bierstadt painted “Rocky Mountain Landscape,” a portion of which is featured on the cover of
Mountain Rampage
, in 1870. The painting is based on studies he made during a trip to the Estes Park region in 1863.
Bierstadt's paintings of geysers, waterfalls, and other magnificent topography in the Yellowstone area based on a trip there in 1871 played a significant role in Congress's decision a year later to preserve the region as America's first national park. Mount Bierstadt, a 14,065-foot peak south of Rocky Mountain National Park, is named in Bierstadt's honor.
“Rocky Mountain Landscape” hangs in the White House. It is used here by permission of the White House Historical Association.
A
BOUT
T
ORREY
H
OUSE
P
RESS
The
economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
âSenator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day
Love of the land inspires Torrey House Press and the books we publish. From literature and the environment and Western Lit to topical nonfiction about land-related issues and ideas, we strive to increase appreciation for the importance of natural landscape through the power of pen and story. Through our 2% to the West program, Torrey House Press donates two percent of sales to not-for-profit environmental organizations and funds a scholarship for up-and-coming writers at colleges throughout the West.
A
LSO BY
S
COTT
G
RAHAM
CANYON SACRIFICE
Book One in the National Park Mystery Series
This page-turner brings the rugged western landscape, the mysterious past of the ancient Anasazi Indians, and the Southwest's ongoing cultural fissures vividly to life. A deadly struggle against murderous kidnappers in Grand Canyon National Park forces archaeologist Chuck Bender to face up to his past as he realizes every parents' worst nightmare: a missing child.
“This riveting series debut showcases Graham's love of nature and archeology, simultaneously interjecting some serious excitement. Recommend to readers who enjoy Tony Hillerman, Nevada Barr, and C.J. Box's Joe Pickett series.”
â
LIBRARY JOURNAL
“A gripping tale of kidnapping and murderâ¦in a style similar to mysteries by Tony Hillerman.”
â
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
“A riveting mysteryâ¦Graham takes readers intimately into the setting, his knowledge of the places he writes about apparent at every turn.”
â
DURANGO TELEGRAPH
“A terrific debut novel⦔
â
C.J. BOX
,
New York Times
best-selling author of
Endangered
“All my life, I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate.”
âEdward O. Wilson
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Evolutionary Biologist
O
NE
“Grizzly bears are not what you'd call predictable creatures. When they're surprised in the wild, they're as apt to rip somebody to shreds as they are to run the other way.”
Yellowstone Grizzly Project junior researcher Justin Pickford, recently of Yale and Princetonâas he'd already boasted not once, but twice to Chuck Bender in the five minutes since Chuck had met himâdidn't know the first thing about what he was saying. But as a brand-new member of the park's grizzly-research program, he clearly was pleased with the authority he'd granted himself to say it.
“In the case of the Cluster Team,” Justin went on, “it just so happened the bear wanted to rip somebody to shreds.”
Chuck, junior even to Justin as a Yellowstone National Park researcher, looked the young man up and down. Justin wore the requisite park-researcher outfitâsturdy hiking boots, Carhartt work jeans, untucked flannel shirt, bandanna headband. While his attire matched that of his fellow young researchers in
the Tower Ranger Station meeting room, his scrawny, reed-thin physique did not. During his initial forays into the park's rugged backcountry in the weeks ahead, Justin would have to bulk up to attain the broad shoulders, trunk-like legs, and concomitant stamina of the three dozen other, experienced researchers in the room, or he'd be gone, back to the computer-tapping, paper-pushing world of academia on the East Coast.
Justin leaned toward Chuck and asked conspiratorially, “Have you seen the footage?”
Chuck glanced around the log-walled room. Folding chairs lined its scuffed, pine-plank floor. A platter of cookies and a three-gallon dispenser of lemonade sat on a table in back. The researchers, all in their mid- to late twenties, two males for each female, visited with one another in small groups, plastic cups in hand, waiting to take their seats upon the arrival of Yellowstone National Park Chief Ranger Lex Hancock.
Chuck turned back to Justin. “From two years ago?”