The Wild Inside Read online

  “The ranger that came across it,” Moran said as we ascended. “She’s pretty shaken.”

  I nodded. “Where’s she from?”

  “Pennsylvania. Been here for years, but has never seen anything like it before.” He let out a small nervous laugh that I couldn’t really hear but could see by the slight shake of his shoulders. “Not like these anyway.”

  “Sounds like it’s a new twist for all of us.” From my chest pocket, I pulled out my notepad, where I’d scrawled details down during my meeting with Sean and found the ranger’s name along with the chief of Park Police, Joe Smith. “So, this ranger? Karen, Karen Fortenson—experienced?”

  “Oh yeah. Probably mid- to late forties. Nice gal. Came to work Swift Current Lodge as a teenager. I think she’s been here as a ranger since her early twenties.”

  “How soon did Park Police get it sealed off after she reported it?”

  “Within thirty, thirty-five minutes.”

  “So no one else got near the scene besides this Karen and Joe Smith?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How soon was the county forensics office called in?”

  “As soon as your boss gave Smith the go-ahead.” Moran flipped a switch on his panel. “Around eight thirty. They arrived ’bout forty minutes later.”

  I nodded. Working regionally, of course, meant we came in late and irritated everyone with our usurpation of the case. But the beauty of it was that there was less waiting for the details since much of the analysis was taking shape and much of the evidence would be getting photographed, logged, and bagged. In the park, where every raccoon, mountain lion, coyote, raven, and eagle wanted to get the remains when mama or papa griz was done with his or her share, the quicker an expert got on it, the better.

  “We’re touching down in West Glacier, and we’ll drive from there.” He banked sharply so that we could land a few miles south of West Glacier. As we descended near a group of tall cottonwoods, the vicious wind rattled the branches so thoroughly that yellow leaves filled the air like confetti, and I have no idea why, but for some reason, perhaps because of the frenetic energy the helicopter created, I thought of the televised New Year’s Eve ball-drop in Times Square. We were a long way from the swirl of energy created by New York City’s population, DC’s, or even Denver’s, and I found myself remembering the overpowering need I had felt after my marriage fell apart to leave this area—to go to a city where I could become anonymous, as if my life was a child’s Etch A Sketch toy and I could shake the slate clean, the drawing dissipating into a creamy fog of filament, and start over again.

  • • •

  Before we moved to Montana, we lived in Gainesville, Florida, and my father, Dr. Jonathan Systead, worked for the University of Florida as a pathologist. He came home every night smelling of formaldehyde and the mysterious tang of other important laboratory smells that the humid Gainesville air seemed to intensify in his clothes. One Saturday, a sunny fall day in late November—I remember it because it was the day after my twelfth birthday—my father took me to work with him.

  The laboratory was smaller and more cluttered than I recalled. The last time I had been to work with him was when I was five. But it didn’t matter, it still felt like a place where only intellectual and important things happened, even though I couldn’t fathom what those would be. I only knew, as most young boys believe, that my father was the most important piece of the puzzle to whatever discoveries were being made.

  In my memory, the room takes on a chiaroscuro effect—a narrow space filled with black microscopes, white rows of shelves with tall textbooks, old petrified bones, and joints on display, stained coffee cups on Formica countertops left from other students working under my dad’s tutelage. A yellowing model skeleton dangled in the corner, and dark refrigerators hummed quietly in the background. My father sat me down on a black vinyl swivel stool, and I began spinning around and around until he said, “Ted, stop that. Not in here.” I stopped and rested my bony elbows on my lanky thighs.

  My dad turned the knob on a microscope and looked intently into the eyepiece. “I’m looking at what’s called a frozen section,” he said. “It’s a very thin slice off of a brain.”

  “A human brain?”

  “Yes. But I don’t have a good sample here, so I’m going to need to get some more.”

  I hopped up from the stool and went and peered over his shoulder. “Who did you get the brain from?” My dad wore a white lab coat and thin latex gloves. He slid open the lid of the cold, glass machine that he called a cryogram. From the large blade in the center, he scraped a minuscule portion of white matter off a section of brain—frozen to a white cauliflower color.

  “Someone was killed,” he said. “Usually, we put the organ in formalin to preserve and study it. But with this one, the police were in a hurry to understand the pathologies associated with it, so when we did the autopsy, we cut a portion of the brain out and froze it in liquid nitrogen so we could study it immediately.” We went back to his microscope with his sample on a thin glass slide, and I watched him grab another to prepare the specimen. When he was ready, he dimmed the lights.

  “Why such tiny scrapes of it?”

  “To learn about the body. Smaller segments teach about larger systems. I study these shavings to learn about pathologies, diseases—things that go wrong in the brain. Mortui vivos docent.”

  “What?”

  “Mortui vivos docent. The dead teach the living.”

  “Oh.” I could tell he was going to that place in his mind where things got mysterious and too complicated for me. I figured he’d be silent now, lost in thought, when he surprised me. “School going okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I looked at the shelf of textbooks, most of them with the words neuro and anatomy in the titles. Not that I needed to avoid his gaze; he was intently staring at his samples. I was no good in science. In fact, I had just gotten a slip from my teacher that day saying that I’d gotten a string of Cs and needed a parent’s signature confirming they were aware of my grades. I still had the folded note burning a hole in my pocket. I began to swing again, side to side this time instead of all the way around.

  “Good, well, I need to tell you something. Your mother and I have made a big decision.” He glanced at me for a second, then back to his work. “We’ve decided to move.”

  “Move?” I said. “Where?”

  “Montana.”

  “Montana? Isn’t that really far away?”

  “Yes. In fact, where we’ll be going is less than an hour from the Canadian border.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I began to swing faster and farther to each side, my hands tucked under my thighs. My dad wrote something in a notebook beside his work, then placed the pencil back on the page and looked back at me. “I’m not kidding.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and placed his forehead back against the eyepiece. The little bulb under the slide projected upward, illuminating his forehead like a sliver of moon. “It’ll be great. There’s skiing, sledding, ice-fishing, snowball fights with your sisters . . .”

  “But why?” I blurted.

  “Many reasons. But mainly, we’ve always wanted to live near the mountains.”

  “But,” I said again.

  He lifted his head, his mouth lax and partly open, his eyes wide, filled already with other thoughts about his work. I didn’t finish. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t leave my friends. How I was finally getting a little cool in sixth-grade middle school and that I didn’t want to leave the beaches, swimming, and surfing. I wanted to yell at him, but I knew there was no use. Arguing with him was pointless when he sat that way, speaking slowly in his white lab coat, his eyes buzzing with curiosity and showing flashes of how his brain tick-tocked with all the important mysteries of the human body. I took my hands out from under my legs and began using my arms to swing
, pushing off the counter next to me and splaying my feet wide.

  He didn’t look up. I swung faster, not knowing what to do with his news until my right foot hit the cabinet under the counter so hard that he startled and banged his nose against the eyepiece. “Ted,” he barked. “How many times do I have to tell you not to do that?”

  I looked down at the white floor, sulking about having to leave my buddies and the heat—the smell of Coppertone still thick in my olfactory memory bank. I was unaware that moving would bring consequences far more complex than the trade-off of beaches for mountains, surfing for skiing, and suntan lotion for long johns.

  • • •

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that Eugene Ford was there when we landed in West Glacier, because it’s business as usual for me to talk to the park superintendent whenever I enter their arena. But for some reason, it felt absurd that I should meet him not two minutes after having my feet on Glacier Park’s soil. Moran introduced me to Ford and a Park Police officer, both looking stiff in standard gray-and-green Park Service garb. I already knew they called him Gene, even though in my fourteen years of service for the department, I’d never met him. In fact, Glacier was one of those parks that had the least amount of homicides of all the parks in the Northwest, so I’d only been needed on some small-time poaching issues early in my career, but his name loomed large in my family’s history. In those days, I’d caught earfuls from my mother on him—how he’d lied to the press and blamed my father for being careless, that it all could have been avoided with more careful camping habits.

  What I later tried to get my ma to understand was this: parks, ships, and prisons are tightly controlled places, and the super is the guy feeding the public relations officer and decides what goes out to the rest of the world. He may have made my father look careless, but he was only buffering the park, protecting the tourism trade, no matter the perfidy. I told her these things as if I had no hand in the game—a lie I would keep telling myself as I reentered Glacier.

  “This is Officer Monty Harris,” Ford said after we shook. He would have no reason to remember me other than the Systead name, and I’d be lying if I didn’t wonder if he had any recollection of it after all these years. Suddenly, I became aware of every aspect of my appearance, every flaw: my disheveled hair, my slouching shoulders, my boyish face. “Officer Harris is going to tail you.”

  “Tail me?” I stood taller, pulling my shoulders back wide. With the officer’s briefcase, glasses, and prim mouth, he looked like he belonged in a library running card catalogues.

  “Help you out. Show you around.” Ford’s features were angular and sloped downward. Even the outside corners of his narrow gray eyes seemed to point toward the sides of his shoulders.

  “Not sure I need it.” I wasn’t certain why I was put off by the suggestion. It’s not like we didn’t frequently get help from the uniforms.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Ford squinted. “Smith told me you’re from here. That you used to work for the Kalispell force. Well, the park’s not the Flathead Valley. We think it would be good for you to have some assistance.”

  “Nothing like familiarity.” I shrugged nonchalantly as if I had no care in the world, and I ignored the uneasy pit forming in my gut. “Let’s get going, then.” I held my hand out for Monty to lead the way.

  • • •

  We drove from the West Glacier helicopter pad to the scene in Monty’s SUV, up a twenty-seven-mile washboard dirt road called the Inside North Fork Road that leads to a ranger station on the north fork of the Flathead River. Few tourists drive it because not many know about it, and if they do, they soon turn back because it’s too dusty and bumpy. I had the urge to grab my quarter, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to roll it effectively.

  Other than some small talk, I was glad Monty didn’t chat while he drove. I took in the forest and was struck at how much it had changed since I’d seen it over twelve years ago. The Roberts fire of 2003 had lashed through and decimated it. Skinny ashen trees like old bones crossed over one another on the forest floor, while hundreds of charcoaled trees managed to continue standing. Thick reddish bark peeked out between black strips, revealing the sturdier ones as the old ponderosas trying to survive like great-grandparents of the forest.

  I was relieved when we began to emerge from the burn area just about five miles into the Inside Road, where green trees and mostly lodgepole pines and tamaracks with needles like yellow felt lined the dirt road. Flathead County’s Crime Scene Services van was parked behind a park ranger’s car and beside a line of caution tape. We pulled in behind two white county sheriff vehicles. A Park Police officer who’d been sitting in his car with the door ajar stepped out to greet us. “Hey, Benton,” Monty called. “This is Agent Ted Systead. I say that right?” He had pronounced the “stead” as “steed.”

  “Close enough.” I shook the officer’s hand. Usually, people missed the first syllable and pronounced the Sys part as sise instead of the short i sound, like sis. But people usually got the “stead” right. I didn’t correct him because I’m not one of those people who care if my last name gets butchered. What’s a name really, other than another signifier? So many are attached to them as if they bring immortality, and in a way, they do. But I can say that there have been many criminals caught because they were simply too proud or ego-driven to quit dropping them around. Yeah, Johnson, met him in the bar; he was drunk and mentioned that he stole that Buick. Oh yeah, Briggs, I’ve heard of him. My girlfriend used to date him before he took up with that neo-Nazi gang.

  “He’s from the Northwest Regional Division Homicide Unit,” Monty added. “Came in from Denver.” He said this as if I’d come across the border illegally.

  I gave a curt nod. “And you guys were happy that you finally had some quiet after your crazy summer?” Officer Benton tried to smile, but his face had that whitish-green tint like he’d been battling nausea. “Up for showing us the way? If not, I’m sure we can find it.” I gave him my laziest grin possible to try to ease any anxiety. I was known for that—for an easygoing smile that calmed people’s nerves, even when nervousness or pessimism brewed beneath my own veneer. It was this incongruous thing about me—my skeptical nature paired with a childlike grin that made you think I didn’t have a malignant bone in my body. I’ve also been blessed with my mother’s thick, dark wavy hair, so that at forty, I still have youthfulness about me, not entirely unlike the pilot Moran, which throws people off and has come in handy more than once when I enter the interrogation room.

  “No, I’m good,” he said. “It’s just in there a ways.” He pointed toward McGee Meadow.

  I took a deep breath and could smell the pine and the pungent decaying fall skunkweed. I knew the trail, if you could call it that. During snowy months, it’s not maintained and the underbrush and fallen logs claim it. From the road, you wouldn’t even know where it was if it weren’t for a little worn red, cross-country ski marker set high up on one of the ponderosas.

  “The trail to McGee Meadow.” Monty lowered his voice for an official effect. “In the winter, the locals ski in from Fish Creek, then cut over to McGee Meadow and out to Camas Creek Road and loop back. With all the snow, they have to find these markers.” He pointed behind me to the small tin flag nailed to the tree.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You’ve done it?”

  “Several times.” I thought of my ex, Shelly, and me with our cheap cotton long johns getting soaked to the bone with sweat even in the cold of February as we trekked up the ol’ snow-covered Robert Frost–looking road. Even all these years later, I could recall the smell of her cheap, overly sweet perfume made pungent by her perspiration, while we stood peering down and arguing over whether the large tracks in the snow were moose or elk.

  “One of the CS guys said we can’t come in on the path,” Benton said, almost in a whisper.

  I gave the officer a quick pat on the shoulder
to lead the way, and just as he stepped ahead, a raven let loose a piercing caw that made him pause. A cool breeze rattled the trees and a few small-diameter lodgepoles rubbed against one another and made an eerie groaning sound.

  We stayed left of the trail, trekking through vibrant red-and-yellow brush. A few stray spider filaments touched my face. The autumn light, although bright, felt slanted and oblique. Mostly, it felt quiet, as if it were waiting for something to happen. Unlike direct summer sunshine that had something specific to say and shouted it, this light held mysteries and patiently whispered its secrets. I was aware of our noisy, rustling movement through the foliage, as if we were disturbing such secrets. The fist at the base of my sternum clenched tighter, and I thought, only for an instant—like a shutter opening and closing—of the raw, wild solitary desperation I felt at Oldman Lake after I got the fire going and sat in my own wet pants, waiting in shock for enough light to make it down the trail so I could run for help.

  • • •

  We reached the spot a quarter of a mile in and about fifty yards off the path, where several huge old-growth ponderosas stood more vibrant, like sentries for that particular patch of forest. To our left, only one line of yellow caution tape draped from tree to bush to tree. Out in the woods, there was no telling how large a circle to mark, so there was simply no point in doing it. One line to block the area from the trail was sufficient.

  Two CSS techs in tan coveralls busied themselves. One inspected foliage, peering at branches of a small spruce, his gloved hands pulling down a limb and tweezing something from the bark and bagging it. The other snapped photos and carried the evidence log.

  A county sheriff spoke to Joe Smith, chief of the Park Police in West Glacier. Wispy tips of fine white hair shot out from under his cap against his still-tanned neck. His sizable but sinewy frame reminded me of some lean animal on the savannas of Africa. Monty and I waited for his wave to cross the tape. The officer who’d walked us out had stayed back and just stood on the trail.