a couple of rocks?” he asked her.
“Because I’m thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
Hesitating, she said, “If I tell you, do you promise not to say anything to Mom?” She looked at him, half scared, half defiant. When Jack nodded, she said, “I’m…I’m watching out for grizzly bears. You know how Mom wouldn’t let me read that book Night of the Grizzlies because she said it was too intense? Well, I read it anyway.”
“Ashley—”
“I’m old enough. And I’m glad I did, ’cause even though Mom knows a lot, she doesn’t know everything. You should put on bear bells because a grizzly can charge out of the woods and kill you fast as lightning. Those bears’ll eat you!”
Jack crossed his arms as he studied his sister. He remembered the argument. Ashley had brought the book home from the library, and Olivia had immediately told her not to read it, explaining that she didn’t want it to spook Ashley right before their trip. It was rare for their mother to say no to any book. This one was banned, Olivia said, only until they got back home to Jackson Hole. “Here, Ashley, try reading this instead,” she’d suggested. “It’s a book of Native American legends from around the Glacier area. This won’t give you nightmares.”
Reluctantly, Ashley had taken the folklore book and scanned the first page. She didn’t answer when their mother asked, “Isn’t that better than reading about those gruesome bear attacks?”
“So you’re all freaked, just like Mom said you would be, right?” Jack asked Ashley now.
She nodded miserably. “I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s a few of them in the mountains around Jackson Hole, where we live, but there’s lots more of them up here. Hundreds of grizzlies.” Her eyes squinted as she looked into the distance. “They could be right in those trees, watching us this very minute.”
Jack snorted. “Look, McDonald Inn is right next to us, and behind that is a bunch of cabins, and up the road are two stores and a restaurant plus the visitor center. Quit worrying. There are way too many people around here for a bear to show up.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Ashley snapped back.
“Well, I know that the attacks in that book happened a long time ago, before we were even born. There’s nothing to worry about. Forget it.”
His sister’s eyes flashed. “Just ’cause I’m younger than you doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Ashley’s lips tightened. Her chin rested on her bent knees, while her toes extended beyond her sandals and curled over the edge of the tree stump she was sitting on. Dark hair skimmed forward to almost hide her face, but even so, Jack could see how pale she looked.
He dropped the fistful of damp skipping stones he’d been holding; they clicked against other rocks on the ground like rain on a tin roof. Walking to where she sat, he said, “What’s going on, Ashley?”
“Nobody ever listens to what I think. It’s like I’m too little, or what I say’s not important. Did you know a girl was in her sleeping bag close to Lake McDonald, and this grizzly went right into her camp and dragged her off and ate her? She was only 18 years old. And on the exact same night, a different girl got chewed up in her sleeping bag, except that was up in a place called Granite Park Chalet only ten miles away. She died, too.”
“That’s sad, but so?”
“So maybe we should buy bear bells. Maybe Mom should stay out of the woods where the grizzlies are. Dad, too. Maybe it’s too dangerous.”
“Mom knows what she’s doing,” Jack countered. “She’s a wildlife veterinarian.”
“People all taste the same to a grizzly.”
Jack wanted to laugh at that, but he pushed down his smile. “Look, this is the first trip we’ve had in a long time without some foster kid tagging along, and I want it to be good. We’re going to camp and fish and hang out with the animals. Can you drop the bear stuff?”
“It’s not just the bears,” Ashley told him, standing up. “It’s that nobody listens to me.”
CHAPTER THREE
The road flowed over the mountains like a silver creek—here dividing homesteads, there cutting through wild pine and underbrush that crowded right to the edge of the asphalt until the road emptied into ranchland again. To Jack, it was strange to see so many private homes and cultivated fields at a national park, but his dad had told him the homesteads had been bought long before Glacier had been created as a park, so the families who were already there got to stay. Jack wished people hadn’t marred the natural beauty, but then again, he’d jump at the chance to live in one of those log cabins that glowed with warm, yellow light in the midst of grassy meadows. He guessed he couldn’t get too mad at the people who wanted to stay put.
“How much longer?” Ashley groaned.
Peering at the map, Olivia answered, “It looks like we’re still about 15 miles away, and they told me the final six miles are going to be pretty rough. I wish that Dramamine worked on you better—you’ve always had to be different, haven’t you?”
“Rougher than this? Great!” Ashley moaned louder, clutching her stomach.
Jack knew what his sister meant. With the trailer hitched to their car, it seemed every bump gave them whiplash. Ashley always got queasy from rolling motion.
If the road ahead was even worse, she was really in for it. He was about to ask his dad if there was another way to the campground when their car slowed at a small ranger station that was not much bigger than a shed. A thin, weathered woman in a ranger hat leaned out of an open window. “May I see your park pass?” she asked.
“This is Olivia Landon, and I’m her husband, Steven, and that’s Ashley and Jack. We’re here from Jackson Hole, Wyoming—”
“Oh, yes, we’ve been expecting Mrs.—I mean Doctor—Landon. Hi, kids, welcome to Glacier.”
Ashley gave a faint wave as Jack said, “Hi.”
The ranger’s skin had tanned to a nut brown, which made her gray eyes look extra bright in her square face framed by blunt-cut gray hair. Her hands looked rough but strong, and the muscles of her forearms stood out in thick ropes. According to the tag on her uniform, her name was Jane Beck. “Weird thing about those missing baby grizz,” Jane said, leaning from the booth. “I’ve been watching for them but haven’t seen a single second-summer cub in, oh, I don’t know how long. I’m glad the officials brought you in to help figure it out, Dr. Landon.”
“Call me Olivia. Have you tracked any mother that still has her cubs?” Olivia leaned forward so that she could look the ranger in the eye.
Jane pushed her ranger hat back on her head. “I saw one in the area a while back with two cubs, but then all of a sudden the mom showed up alone. Early spring, I saw another sow with one cub. The mom had an odd coloration, something like a rugby stripe, so for fun I named her Polo and her little baby Marco. Anyway, I’ve seen her a couple of times since, but Marco’s been missing. Then there’s a ginger-colored mom with two babies, but I haven’t seen them in ages. Hold on, just one minute.” Jane’s head disappeared, then reappeared
