The Wild Inside (39 page)

“Like I said—you were only fourteen.”

“Yes, I was,” I managed. “That’s definitely one piece of truth.” I stood for a second—stared down at him, my face hot, my knees going weak, my jaw clenched. “If you’ll excuse me,” I finally managed. “I’ve got work to do.” I strode out and left him to my diagram and my notes with one small, petty thought in my mind: that when I stood and knocked the chair over, he flinched.

• • •

I drove to Kalispell in the dark. I’d lost my temper with the super, and now I was furious with myself. I stood on Ma’s doorstep sometime well after dinner. She had already gotten ready for bed and was in a pale-blue bathrobe and slippers. She grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me in.

“Holy Mother of Mary,” she said once I was inside the front door. “You look ghastly. Haven’t you been eating?”

“I’ve been eating. Just not sleeping.”

“Well, good Lord, there’s help for that. Have you forgotten that your mother’s a pharmacist?”

I shook my head.

“What can I make you? Soup? I have some leftover chicken in the fridge. I could warm it up?”

“I’m fine. I’m not really—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You need to eat.”

I didn’t feel like anything, but I knew there was no getting away from her making me something. “Either sounds great.”

“Sit down, sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”

I took a seat in front of the gas fireplace, which she’d converted from a wood-burning insert about five years before to make life easier.
Otherwise, the place was the same. After the incident, we stayed in the house Ma and Dad built together after moving to Montana until Kathryn left for college. Then Ma insisted that we needed a smaller place and that there were too many memories haunting the old house, not to mention how unbearable it became to drive every day by the neighbor who shot Tumble. So we moved smack into the center of Kalispell on the east side of its main drag, where sidewalks and maple and chestnut trees lined the streets. For me, it was a relief to leave the woods and the foothills.

Ma hadn’t changed the place much over the years. The white mantel with the tall silver candlesticks in the center, the antique rocking chair my parents brought up from Florida, the nautical coffee table with the hinged flaps on each side were all remnants from my childhood. The same striped wallpaper was in the dining room, although she had had the kitchen and the living room repainted several times over the years. And I noticed that the area rug on the oak floor and the throw pillows on the couch looked new since my last visit.

“Why didn’t you call me and tell me you were coming?” Ma called from the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, I know I should have. I just had a lot on my mind. Just kept driving and thinking.”

“If I’d known, I’d have waited and had dinner with you—made you something good.”

“No worries. I just thought I could use a visit.”

She didn’t answer, and I could hear the pots rattling, the fridge opening and closing. She made some tea when I showed and brought out two cups that she set on the dining room table. Eventually, she brought me chicken and rice that she’d heated up and broccoli that she’d steamed fresh. When I told her that she shouldn’t have, she shushed me and told me to eat, so we sat together at the dining room table. I ate while she drank her tea, her hands folded neatly around the base of the cup. “So what’s going on with this investigation?”

“Oh.” I sighed. “Answers just aren’t coming as quickly as they should.”

“But you’re getting there?”

“I think so. You read the paper about the grizzly?”

She nodded.

“What was your take on that?”

She put her hand to her chest. “
My
take?”

“Yeah? What was your first reaction?”

“That you were doing what’s necessary to figure out this case. I mean, the bear ate part of the victim, right?”

I nodded.

“I figured you’re taking all necessary precautions by keeping him for a bit, studying him—getting DNA or whatever you do.”

I chewed the broccoli, actually happy to eat something healthy.

Ma studied me. “Is that Eugene Ford giving you a hard time?” Her voice was pointed.

“Why do you keep thinking that? He doesn’t even remember who I am,” I lied.

“I don’t mean that; he doesn’t need to know who you are to give you a hard time. Like I said, he’s just not a good guy in my book.”

“Well, lots of people really like him.”

“What’s the problem, then? Why do you look like you haven’t slept in a week?”

I smiled. “Because I haven’t slept in a week.”

“Let me rephrase that.
Why
haven’t you slept?”

I finished chewing a piece of chicken, took a sip of tea. “I don’t know. It’s been weird being up there after all this time.”

Ma looked at her hands, then tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I can imagine.”

“Do you still have those old clippings?”

“Of the incident?”

I nodded.

“I do.” She studied me. “You can see them if you’d like.”

• • •

After I ate, Ma poured more tea and we moved to the gas fire. She had gone into her bedroom for a bit and reappeared with a faded-blue pocket folder, then sat down beside me on the couch and set the folder on the table before us. It was soft and bent at the edges from years of being stuffed in a drawer. She opened it, and I could see a number of thin, yellowed clippings. I felt strange sitting with her as if we were simply going to go over some old high school basketball write-ups or something equally nostalgic. Only the fact that we were stone quiet gave us away.

Of course, I’d seen the clippings before, when I was still in high school. I’d gone into her room and looked through her top drawer for no good reason, only that I knew she kept family pictures, school photos, our report cards, and other sentimental items in it. I was drawn to the drawer as if it held life’s answers and would go through it several times a year, but I never really could bring myself to read the clippings. I’d just quickly thumb through the folder and move on to other items—pictures of our family with Dad still in them.

The gas fire hummed in the background, and she carefully began to open the first article on the top of the pile. She smoothed it out before us with her palm, and I could see it held its sharp creases from years of being folded. I had to hold back from grabbing the ones underneath and spreading them all out as well. It was more my style—to see it all at once—to take it in and see how it all fit together in my mind. Ma was different, more meticulous from years of grinding, cutting, and counting pills. She pushed it toward me—an article from a local Billings paper. The ink on the headlines looked as if it had darkened over the years, while the background had turned a brownish-yellow sepia tone, the color of unbleached grain. The ink on the front-page pictures had faded, and the headline stood at the top: “Fatal Grizzly Attack in Glacier Park.” There were no pictures accompanying it.

The date was September 24, 1987, so it was one of the first reports. I scanned the article, and neither of us spoke. It mentioned that a man had been taken in the night and dragged some one hundred and fifty feet from his tent and fatally mauled by a grizzly bear. It said that the man was with his fourteen-year-old son, who was in critical condition in the Kalispell hospital recovering from sustained injuries while trying to get back to the Two Medicine campground. It mentioned the emergency helicopter that retrieved him and flew him to the hospital as well as the couple that found him in the a.m. on their way to hike Dawson Pass.

Mom pulled out several more, still slowly, one at a time: the local papers in Kalispell, Missoula, Great Falls, and Bozeman. All of them were from the same date with similar accounts. Then she pulled out one from Missoula, dated September 25, the day after the others. This one’s headline made my pulse speed up. Ma shifted in her seat. The headline read: “Possible Careless Camping Habits Leads to Glacier Park Grizzly Attack.”

I fidgeted in my seat and ran a hand through my hair. I couldn’t wait any longer for her to pull them out one at a time. “If you don’t mind?” I grabbed the thin pile left underneath and began unfolding them, spreading them out before us.

Ma said nothing.

I had them laid out: the age-stained, putrid-looking thin sheets of newspapers. I could smell a dry, musty scent from them. I took in the headlines: “Careless Camping May Have Caused Glacier Bear Attack.” “Mauled Father’s Careless Camping Habits Lead to Tragedy.” “Fatal Mauling Brought on by Careless Camping Habits.”
All were from local Montana cities, though two were from Sheridan, Wyoming, and Denver, Colorado. “Where did you get all of these?”

“You know, the old news shop.” She pointed to the northwest wall of the house to its direction. “It’s still there, you know?”

I grunted some response. The last one I opened was the
New York Times,
with a similar headline: “Possible Careless Camping Brings Grizzly Fatality in Montana.”

“Go ahead.” She waved her hand in the air. “Read them.” She stood and grabbed our cups. “More tea?”

“Sure,” I said, without glancing up. I chose the Kalispell one first: “Fatal Mauling Brought on by Careless Camping Habits
.
” I ran my hand over it, my palm moist against the aged surface, now grainy and fuzzy from the slow disintegration of the fibers. Briefly, it ran through my mind that the paper would be completely decomposed someday, but that it would still exist long after the Systead family was gone.

Saturday’s fatal mauling of a camper by a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park, the first killing since 1976, has raised concerns of many camping enthusiasts due to the suspicion of park officials that the victim may have been less than careful in keeping a clean campsite.

The victim, whom park officials have identified as Dr. Jonathan Systead, a pathologist who worked for Kalispell Regional Medical Center, and his fourteen-year-old son, Theodore Systead, from Kalispell, Mt., had hiked about six miles in from the Two Medicine area to fish and camp at the Oldman Lake backcountry campsite.

Judging by the ripped state of the tent, in the night the grizzly dragged Jonathan Systead one hundred fifty feet from the tent, where there was sign of a struggle.

According to Glacier Park superintendent Eugene Ford, park officials have reason to believe that techniques for avoiding encounters were not closely followed. He refused to give further details in an effort to respect the victim and the victim’s family members.

Theodore Systead is in critical condition in Kalispell Regional Hospital for a serious head injury sustained while staggering out of the woods alone in the early hours of Sept. 23. Glacier Park officials emphasize that bear attacks remain extremely rare and that no visitors have been injured by bears in the park in the last decade and that Sunday’s killing was the first bear-caused human fatality in Glacier since 1976.

Rangers are in the process of trying to capture the grizzly responsible for the fatality to take appropriate measures against it.

I read the others, all with similar accounts. Ma brought me the tea and sat down again, this time in the rocking chair. “So, you see?” she said and began rocking, the wood chafing against the oak floor. “He painted it like it was your father’s fault.”

“I know. We’ve known that for years.” I rubbed my forehead. “What I’m wondering is why you’re so sure that he’s not correct?”

“Of course he’s not correct. You told us that you were careful.
You
told us that, and you had no reason to lie.”

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I just wanted to believe it was clean. Maybe we did something stupid, like going to sleep with the clothes we cooked in.”

“No.” She shook her head stubbornly. “No. I remember. You told us that you didn’t. You told us the site was clean.”

“But memory is tricky. I know that now. I see it all the time in my line of work. Witnesses make stuff up constantly—their brains bend and fill in the details, and they truly believe them. Like, for years I believed I searched for him, but now I’m not so sure I ever did. How could I have? It was dark and I had to make a fire.” I looked into her eyes. They were moist; the brown had lightened as she’d gotten older. They looked more tea-colored than coffee-colored in the fire light. They were intense, not brimming with pity, but concentrated and crowded with something, perhaps love, perhaps horror. She was imagining it all over again—her boy in the night making a fire, sitting in his own urine, praying his father would walk back out of the trees. “Maybe they did find evidence that we were sloppy?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. You told us in the hospital what happened. You were right out of a coma; you had no time to make stuff up. You
had no time for memory to play tricks on you. And it’s not like I hadn’t camped with your father countless times. I know how careful he was, and I know that he’d be even more cautious in the fall in Glacier. Plus why doesn’t one single article mention what was found to indicate that there was any carelessness?”

I didn’t answer.

“Not one of those gives any details and that’s a bunch of bologna about wanting to respect the family members. When have you ever seen that in all the prior and subsequent grizzly attacks written over the years?”

“I haven’t,” I admitted. I sat back in the couch, laid my head back, and sighed. “You really think he made it up? It sounds so crazy.”

“I think he made it up to ease people’s minds about the park. To make them think that bears only go wild if there’s a good reason, and if there’s no reason, you’re safe. And for the most part, people are, but not that time. For whatever reason, not that time.”

“But does it really matter that he lied? Why do you care so much? Why haven’t you let it go? Why haven’t you thrown these away?” After my rage with Ford, I felt sheepish for asking, but had to anyway. I sat up, rested my elbows on my knees, and gestured to the table.