Free Off the Grid by C. J. Box Page A

knew it meant it would draw down further on the battery capability of the collar.
    In addition to his .40 Glock semiauto, Joe carried his Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge shotgun. He’d replaced the buckshot shells with slugs for close-in lethality. An M14 carbine chambered in .308 Winchester was in the saddle scabbard on Rojo. A fresh canister of bear spray was clipped to his belt.
    “I’ve done this before, you know,” he said to White. “We had a rogue grizzly bear about ten years ago in the Bighorns. I saw him attack a man from behind. I still can’t get that image out of my mind—how fast and how powerful that bear was.”
    “Did you kill it?” she asked, sure of his answer.
    “I was too slow,” he said, surprising her. “It ran off.”
    “Did you ever see it again?”
    “Nope.”
    “Good for both of you, I guess,” she said. “What are you going to do if we walk into GB-53?”
    Joe hesitated a moment and said, “Whatever I have to.”
    “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said.
    •   •   •
    GB- 53 WAS YOUNGER and bigger than the grizzly Joe had encountered ten years before. At that time, a terrific drought had caused some bears in Yellowstone to wander out of the park in search of food. The reintroduction of gray wolves into the park by the federal government had skewed the balance, and there was terrific competition for carrion and other staples. The rogue bear was four hundred pounds of desperation.
    This five-year-old, 550-pound male grizzly was another matter. Some males, known as silvertips because their heavy coats eventually looked frosted, reached eight hundred to a thousand pounds and could be eight to nine feet tall when standing up. A single swipe from their three-inch razor-sharp claws could disembowel a horse. They had no natural predators. Jessica White or Marcia Mead couldn’t provide a good reason why it had left Grand Teton Park on its own and had subsequently covered so much ground. That it had apparently stalked and attacked Bub Beeman would make it—and them—infamous.
A fed bear is a dead bear,
Joe thought again.
    “Ursus horribilis,”
Joe said, citing the scientific name for the grizzly.
    “We don’t use that name,” White said.
    “Of course you don’t,” Joe said. “If you don’t say it out loud, it can’t mean ‘horrible bear.’ Right?”
    •   •   •
    “I HEARD A THEORY about why the grizzly bears are acting the way they are,” Joe said as they probed deeper into the forest. “I heard it from an old hunting guide. He wasn’t a biologist and I don’t think he even finished high school, but he’d spent his life hunting elk and bighorn sheep in the most rugged country in Wyoming. Want to hear it?”
    White sighed and said, “Sure. I love these old unscientific mountain-man theories.”
    Joe smiled and said, “His theory was that by overstudying grizzly bears we’re creating a whole new and more dangerous strain of them.”
    She rolled her eyes. “That makes absolutely no sense.”
    Joe continued anyway. “His theory was that the bears are constantly being tranquilized, transported, measured, weighed, and tracked. From when they’re cubs there are people knocking them out and checking their teeth, then buckling tracking collars on them. These bears, which maybe a hundred years ago stayed as far away from humans as they could get because they might get shot on sight, now grow up with people sticking their hands in their mouths and crowding everything they do. They no longer have a built-in fear of humans, and why should they? Besides, maybe we taste good and we’re easy to kill because we no longer think of them as ‘horrible bears.’”
    “That’s ridiculous,” White said with heat. “Are you saying people should go back to killing them on sight? That’s probably what your old mountain man would want to do.”
    “I’m not sure what his solution was,” Joe said. “I just thought it was an interesting theory.”
    “He