Lady of the Yellowstone

By Mike Kennedy

When one or both of the tunnels connect, the Yellowstone magma chamber will drain, releasing pressure, and giving mankind a century, or an age, or an epoch in which to prepare once more.

PBS will broadcast the two-hour special to an America that waits behind the Mississippi, or across the Canadian border, or beyond the high Sierras, facing the interior of a continent they have fled. The super volcano is awake.

A lazy summer of field work at Yellowstone is always the plum of Purdue’s PhD program. The Geology Department sends one lucky candidate out with Professor Bennington and his four Karelian Bear Dogs. Pretty Claire Cheviot is this summer’s lucky pick. West Lafayette, Indiana moves slower than erosion during the summer sessions. Even a romantic fling would seem a still life compared to drilling holes for dynamite charges.

It will be just the two of them. Separate tents seemed to end the argument about sharing a remote campsite with the professor. There are rumors in the department about Bennington, but they move slowly and have not worked their way around to Claire. The middle of May is still too early for tourists. The isolation at Craig’s Pass is complete. The wilderness of Lodgepole Pine and fantastic shapes must ever work its strange magic. Claire will return to the professor’s tent each night. Of all the many hidden things in Yellowstone, she will understand this least of all. The science at this place becomes her lover. Everything the Earth does, it does for her.

A vast construction project will set two tunnel boring machines in place four miles down inside an empty geologic feature discovered by Digger O’Dell: the Madison Valley Abyss. These will grind against the rock face of 40-foot diameter tunnels toward the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park. The work will run round the clock. They will proceed a mile farther each month from subterranean stations that are much like man-made environments orbiting in the cold of space, and the workers will be suited-up much the same.

The Russian Federal Security Service sends over agent Victor Rostov to sabotage the American tunnel boring machines. A super eruption will level the playing field. With the Americans knocked out, the Russians will be free to turn their full attention to China, who has sent five million squatters into Siberia.

Bennington and Purdue gave Digger O’Dell his PhD five years ago on the strength of the discovery of the Abyss. Now Digger is off fracking wells in Pennsylvania. The army will bring him back for the big meeting that assembles after Claire finds the first of the lava starting a fire near Craig’s Pass.

Digger turns the two hand-wheels of the hatch and pushes it open. The air is full of ash. Still in his suit, still gripping his mouthpiece in his teeth, he climbs half of the steps and peers out the hatch through the rectangle of gold tinted glass in his hood. A brown cloud floats above the Industrial Village. The skeletons of I-beams stand like rows of scarecrows in a ruined field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Kennedy
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311601148

Mike Kennedy

A note to Kennedy's readers: "Like many of you, in former times I thought of myself as not merely awake, but vibrantly awake. I was wrong. Beginning in 2019 and connecting the dots as consciousness is wont to do, I began my Red-Pill experience. Recently, and to my amazement, I see that the writing of three of my novels was channeled experience. 'Mali' turns out to be a story of the Deep State. It was always, from the start, a story of the illusion of free will. 'Taggart' turns out to be a story of Trans-Humanism. And 'All Our Yesterdays' turns out to have been an unconscious metaphor of the inner sanctum of the Cabal and its malign design upon mankind. I have long known that my stories find me (and not the other way around). Two attempts at designing a story have both resulted in ten-thousand-word dead ends. I quote from Aeschylus (his work 'Agamemnon'): 'Pain, which cannot forget, even in our sleep, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.' And we remember that 'grace' is an unmerited consolation. Finally, I see that my 'message to the publishing world' (final paragraph below) recognized the sad fact that agents & editors have betrayed their intrinsic debt to western civilization and consciously work in thrall to the dark side. One should keep in mind that the root word for 'inspiration' is 'spirit' and so must ever remain experience beyond the five senses. I have always written about those things that you know, but do not know you know."On a lighter note: "It is not too late to fall in love with language. You've just needed characters you wish you knew. I wish there were drawings, pictures, and maps in novels and short stories. Don't you? In the novel 'Mali,' a picture begins every chapter. So also, in these two anthologies. All in support of the magical movie in your mind. Go ahead and venture, 'It's showtime!'"Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: "Kennedy has a way with words. Readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts [A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI]." Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious."Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him."Listen to the video essays of WrongWayCorrigan on Rumble. https://rumble.com/c/WrongWayCorriganCJ

Book preview

LADY OF THE YELLOWSTONE

Mike Kennedy

Copyright 2014 by Mike Kennedy

Smashwords Edition

updated November 2015

www.GoodStorySaloon.com

www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mikekennedy

The Chapters

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Acknowledgements

Other Fiction by the Author:

The Prince of Staten Island and other stories

Leda and the Swan and other stories

Report From Mali

Bare Branches

In Their Own Likeness

Late Night Radio

One

The thought of being fourteen-miles underground gives me chills, especially the part about trying to get out in time. It’s like jungle fever. I don’t get it every night, but some nights, it wakes me and when I go back to sleep, it comes again. Reporters get this if they stay in the business long enough. I thought I was immune. Nobody’s that tough, except maybe Digger O’ Dell.

Digger turns the two hand-wheels of the hatch and pushes it open. The air is full of ash. Still in his suit, still gripping his mouthpiece in his teeth, he climbs half of the steps and peers out the hatch through the rectangle of gold tinted glass in his hood.

The sheds are gone. The steel above the shaft stands, but nothing else. In the distance, the trailer and the sheds around it are also gone. A brown cloud floats above the Industrial Village. The roofs have been peeled back. The sidewalls have been stripped from the steel. The skeletons of I-beams stand like rows of scarecrows in a ruined field. The sky is grey and without depth.

To the east, ash billows loosely, not in a compact column as before. Though Digger cannot see over the mountain, the top of the North Volcano is hundreds of feet lower. It has shredded itself a jagged crater.

Everywhere, long trunks of Lodgepole Pine are laid down like match sticks. Their tops radiate outward from Madison Junction at all of the degrees of the compass. Their trunks at the big end all point back to the Central Plateau. All of them are smoking. The brown grass has been blown clear and will be visible for a few minutes more, until new ash settles back down again. The mountain ridgelines are scraped bare and moon-like. The river is already swelling with logjams.

Digger now climbs from the elevator. It is stopped, yet it buffets in hot turbulence at the top end of the shaft. He walks dozens of feet before he removes his hood. He still has tank air and he keeps his bite on his mouthpiece. Although his legs are burned, his adrenaline does not yet let him feel it. He supposes that only he has survived. He senses the irony in this, that, after all, it was he who lived.

When the air begins pulling harder from the tank, he slips out of his suit, letting it lay where it falls. He wears only fire resistant long johns and kiln boots, as he begins the long and lonely walk. To where? He gives the scene only another superficial glance. Dead, he thinks. They are all dead.

All of this lies toward the end. All great adventures start with something out of place. Always, you will recall your impression of the light. It begins with brushstrokes.

There is always a first bird to sing in that long twilight hour between dawn and sunrise. It wakes the four Karelian bear dogs. They have been sleeping in a snug row of black and white bodies. Their noses point in the direction of Old Faithful, west-northwest eight and a half miles from the campsite. Professor Bennington knows that dogs cannot hear in the register of earthquakes and deep magma flows, and yet they sleep on the hilltop inclined this way most nights, as if they do hear. They did not act this way last summer.

After stretching and sniffing, and by some secret, silent sign of acclamation, the dogs adjourn abruptly to trot down the hillside, not to appear again until just before sunrise. They go to mark their territory, to leave a scent, from which the Grizzlies will turn away.

Most mornings they will not bark until Bennington begins to lower the fifty-pound sack of dog meal to the ground at the base of the hill. All their food not in cans hangs fifteen feet off the ground, suspended from a tall Quaking Aspen savaged by fire, yet still green at the top. Bennington has thrown ropes across a broken limb twenty feet up, and then tied them off at the bottom, as if they were halyards on a flagpole.

A blaze from a lightning strike several years ago has taken all of the trees off the hill, and also the smaller ones in the narrow valley that encircles the hill like an apron. Whitened trunks lay randomly across the hillside. The grass grows thicker and taller down their outlines. It has been a wet and snowy spring until two days before they arrived. Two mornings ago, their waterbag felt crunchy with a thin lining of ice.

The fresh scent of Lodgepole Pine will return as the day warms. Wispy fronds of fog now lazily cartwheel in front of the shadowy tree line.

It is the third week of May. The Professor and his graduate student have pitched three tents on the hilltop. The ropes are taut, yet the canvas quietly billows. The tents are staked at the top of an inclined path surfaced with thinning spring grass, printed now by many trips down and back. The tent in the middle is larger and shelters a picnic table. There is a fire pit in front of it. On the canvas roof, there is a black and gold Boilermaker logo. It is the property of the Geology Department of Purdue University. It is a snug camp, and sometimes seems as safe as home.

The first tentative bird song has grown to become a scattered chorus of tiny, hidden throats. This wakes Claire Cheviot. She cracks the tent flap open to peek at the rocky outcrop eroded by a stream at the bottom of the hill. There, she has been pecking away with her geologist’s pick-hammer for minerals. She does this on her own time when not planting dynamite charges for the professor’s reflection seismology. They have stayed busy.

Claire lingers behind her tent flap to admire the triangle of scene. Its loveliness fades, then reemerges, as the swirling tendrils of fog tease the morning’s dewy prologue. She prizes Yellowstone not only for its great beauty, but also for its great expectations.

When the smell of coffee reaches her, Claire sticks her head out the tent flap.

Bennington is poking into the fire. It flares. Always, she will remember Bennington appearing luminous in the low light. He sees her out the corner of one eye and speaks quietly. Good morning, C.C.

Good morning, Professor. Claire smiles, then quickly withdraws inside to pull on jeans and boots, and to tie her blonde hair in pigtails.

Bennington raises his chin to intone toward Claire’s tent. Pancakes and bacon, or bacon and pancakes?

Your turn to pick, she chirps from inside her tent. Two minutes later, Claire emerges, cozy in the folds of a black and gold hooded sweatshirt saying Purdue. Her hammer and leather gloves make the front pocket of the hoodie sag. She takes a cup. He pours. They dip their heads to enter the tent where Bennington is mixing pancake batter with cans of evaporated milk, and slicing bacon to arrange in a frying pan. They sit at the picnic table in lantern light.

Can I have an hour after breakfast to look for minerals?

Sure. I’ve got some e-mails to do. But after that, I want us to set off some charges up north and east of DeLacy Lakes. It will take us the rest of the day.

What have you noticed about the area?

"It’s too high. Except for a couple of isolated mountains in the north of the park, the place where we are camped right now—north of the Great Divide—should be the about highest elevation in the park, but DeLacy is 800 feet higher. The ground is also 600 feet higher on the other side of the Divide, north of Shoshone Lake. And to the east of here, there is a patch of ground nearly as high at Chickadee Lake, which then drops 700 feet down to the lakeshore at West Thumb. This is not old topography. It is not crustal folding. Something has pushed it up.

Now I realize that there is nothing sacred about the Great Divide. It is just a line that man likes to draw on maps. These high points on either side may be old established batholiths slowly eroding into view, or perhaps recent stocks bulging from intruding magmas. I think we should find out. Don’t you?

Oh, of course. I vote for batholiths that formed after the original eruption here.

"That’s my guess, too, C.C. Of course, the jackpot would be to discover that these prominences are new, giant magma bubbles pushing toward the surface. That would sell a few books.

Claire, you really should begin writing your dissertation while we are here. You can use the data and the images we collect. Keep in mind, a hundred thousand words is like writing a novel, Claire. The end of the next school year will be here before you know it.

She nods, but wonders how she will ever find that much to say Such an impossible word count feels like one of the eternal punishments in Dante’s inferno—at whatever level Dante had placed PhD candidates.

Then Claire asks, Is DeLacy where the recent surface bulging has been going on?

Not far. That new bulging is at Mallard Lake at the start of the Yellowstone Plateau, over by Old Faithful. For now, we are looking at old prominences all over the south central portion of the park. They are all near water—every single one. A collapsed volcano makes a great lake.

Claire leans, What do you think is happening underground? She draws a familiar story from Bennington that will seem lifted from the pages of Genesis.

"Yes. The show for us is underground. The planet crust that Yellowstone rides on is a small sliver of the North American Plate going by the name ‘Wyoming Province’. This piece of the plate has been on the move for about 17,000,000 years. But it might have gotten stuck temporarily, like for maybe 100,000 years. It has been roasting directly above the Hot Spot. My name for that is the Planetary Convector. This is like leaving a steak on the broiler too long. The melted rock that is broiling Yellowstone might be coming up from 100 miles into the Planet’s mantle.

"This upwelling has been going on so long at this location that all of the heavier elements in the magma have settled to the bottom, and, as you know, when the lighter buoyant magma rises, that means trouble.

The bubble in the Yellowstone magma chamber is buoyant. It is thick. It is holding pressure. When it encounters a ground water aquifer, it flashes off and the pressure under Yellowstone builds. This is pushing aside older structures and re-melting them.

Making things worse.

Not actually, C.C, the older rock is basalt.

Oh, that is the thin, runny magma.

Right. It won’t hold pressure. So, it usually does not explode. The main show is usually granite.

Which will explode.

"Yes, but we won’t be around to see it. What we might see, however, is a big earthquake. Whatever is holding Yellowstone will slip someday. The longer it waits, the worse it will be.

"Only a few hot spots, left over from the Archean Age, remain on Planet Earth—and Yellowstone is the hottest of them all. Back then, the planet may have had a thousand Yellowstones, each belching out what later became our atmosphere. A tell-tale sign at Yellowstone would be to discover the new release of some ancient gas

"If Yellowstone slips past the hotspot, then that part of the magma chamber that resides within the Earth’s crust will cool and become a harmless Pluton—the granite for some future generation to quarry for their public buildings.

"At this moment, there is re-melting going on, C.C. The older basalt is being re-melted by newer, rising granite magma. I think deeper, hotter magma is welling upward beneath the north half of the Yellowstone Plateau. It is pushing aside what it can, and sending intruding veins snaking through the South half, melting older rock formations as it goes. There must be a massive Pluton—a batholith the size of an underground mountain range—blocking right here in the middle, forcing the newer hot flow to either side.

"Someday, when this magma gets to within a mile of the surface, it will encounter abundant ground water—Yellowstone is loaded with it—and all hell will break loose. The magma will vaporize the ground water at one thousand to two thousand degrees Farenheit. Steam explosions will hurl rocks and squirt curtains of lava two city blocks into the air.

"Our magma bubble will load with gas and bulge the ground in the park. And when it reaches the surface, it will explode, and the supervolcano will become re-born. When that happens, a pathway will open up from the surface down into the hot spot of the planet’s mantle, perhaps a one-hundred mile deep river of liquid rock.

How bad can a steam explosion be? She asked.

Well, to use a familiar example a hundred miles west of here, if the steam explosion at King’s Bowl on the Snake River Rift had been back home in West Lafayette, it could have taken out Mackey Arena.

Claire visualizes. Damn.

"Of course, that one was the biggest steam explosion we’ve ever discovered. The odd thing is that one happened only 2,000 years ago.

Take heart, Claire, the crust of the Yellowstone Caldera is very thick and very heavy. Plutons the size of mountains keep the lid on.

Bennington’s story of the subterranean battle have been her morning’s dreamy entertainment. Claire knows a lot of what Bennington is saying, but hearing it from him always seems to make it come alive. Claire tries to keep it going. You were mentioning these lakes?

Bennington continues. Yes. These pleasant little lakes that dot Yellowstone are all the caldera of smaller eruptions since the big blast two million years ago. Volcanoes within volcanoes within volcanoes—magma flows that found the surface, expanded violently, then collapsed. Today, hot water still boils up into the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, after 170,000 years. This place is not done with us yet.

Claire thinks of quarried stone. The funny thing is, all that granite we all love to use is unexploded magma. Once it gets to the surface it changes to become Rhyolite and is not good for much.

Right, not as useful. It’s softer. Actually, almost the hardest rock is Basalt—that runny, lazy lava that flooded the Columbia River and Snake River Valleys, but it’s not a pretty rock, he shrugs.

Bennington thoughtfully tapped the side of bacon with his knife, thinking. We might see that lazy basalt once again before we see the more dangerous Rhyolite. Yes, it might become the opening number of the big show. My guess is that under us right now, Basalt is being re-melted and shoved aside by this huge bubble of granite searching for the path of least resistance to the surface.

Claire longs for it. Any guesses when it will happen?

Bennington resumes slicing. Oh, Claire. He laughs. The hands of our clock turn very fast, indeed. Time at Yellowstone is on a different scale.

Ever hopeful, she adds, There is always the example of Mount St. Helens. Its North slope heaved out suddenly.

Everything is proportional, Claire. For Yellowstone to bulge like that, the ground would have to suddenly expand a thousand feet. The Caldera floor here has only been acting as though it were breathing—heaving up and down.

On the Earth’s scale of time, that may seem like panting.

At that, Bennington paused to growl pensively. Fleeting thoughts, wildly unlike each other, danced across his mind. Claire wondered if he worried.

Breakfast over, the bear dogs return to camp to await theirs. Bennington watches Claire descend the hill. His mind flickers with thoughts like heat lightning.

Claire is a fine looking young woman, exactly the wrong type of graduate student to have given Bennington twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, or possibly even five. He wonders how he could have kept his hands off her then. It could have gone very sour. Of course, it could also have been a very beautiful thing. But now, he is no longer even 45 years old, which he has always considered to be the final, outer limit. It is a moot point. Probably.

Women will sometimes tolerate a nearly 20-year age difference, he has found, but he doubts if they would tolerate 24 years, though he has never tried. Twenty years seems to be the barrier. Twenty has a certain, unwelcome sound.

At age 52, Bennington understands that he has taken that first faint turn toward the look that he would now have for the remainder of his life. Still heavily muscled and straight, some forgotten shadow has passed over him, when suddenly it was not summer anymore.

He often thinks about the dialogue in Plato’s Republic, when Socrates and his buddies have run into Sophocles. They have kidded him about turning 70. They have ribbed him about no longer being a ladies’ man. Oh, thank god, Sophocles replies, thank god he has all that behind him. Now, perhaps, he can get some work done.

Yes, Bennington thinks, it will be good to lose those cravings. Then what follows, the infirmities of age? From the frying pan and into the fire? Bennington wonders what will become his portion, and when, and how bad it will be.

He still has, what? Twenty good years left? Twenty-five? And then the rocking chair? But this work, now, here, is too interesting to have missed. Bennington has labored all of his life to become the man fitted to this work. Now is his time and he is the man. Purdue has always funded his summer projects because of his reputation in the field. They know that it is Bennington that draws those students who pay the handsome out-of-state tuition.

First, to the dishes. He shrugs. Bennington notices that the golden glow atop the ridge to the east is pulling back into a single point. The sun will be up in moments. This longest and best hour of the day is nearly over.

Yes, he thinks, he must scrape these dishes before taking them down to the stream. He knows he must treat the stream with respect. Oh yes, and the coffee pot, too. These emptyings will first go into paper sacks for the dinner fire kindling. Bennington likes a tidy camp. Why tempt fate? It is less for Grizzlies to smell. In any case, the bear dogs should keep them away.

Then come the e-mails. There are always matters left over from the spring semester. It will turn quiet in June and then he can forget that he is only a glorified schoolteacher. For a few weeks, he will pretend that he is a man of science, pure science, a pure man, not one clinging to a sinecure. He smirks.

As Bennington works, he monitors the scene down below. He sees that Claire has pulled an old, white log into the gravel next to the stream. She wants to loft that pretty rear end high and dry while she chips at the rocky outcrop with the pick end of her geologist’s hammer.

Bennington wonders if the Park Service will mention it, or will discover it. Purdue’s permit does not include mineral collecting. Well, they would have to hike in a mile to reach the campsite. That is enough to keep nosey rangers away.

Yes, it is an odd little stream bank, he thinks. All of Yellowstone is odd. It is odd because it is very young, and very large, and, like any youngster, it is disorganized.

Claire’s outcrop looks to be an older igneous arm intruding upward into newer sedimentary layers. Basalt, it looks to be, from this distance. It is framed by shale’s and slates, and from gravels washed here from some ancient glacial moraine. Those sediments have worked for thousands of years to expose this Basalt and to wear it down. It is a complicated little spot.

Claire will not learn much from the ancient lava flow. It is too hard for her little hammer. She might find a fossil in the sedimentary rock. That would enable dating of the overall formation.

He wonders how the hill on which they camp came to be. It stands alone. Bennington thinks this is a smaller version of the massive Pluton known as Devil’s Tower on the other side of the state—before it fully eroded into view.

Their hill is not so high. It is covered with soil held against the pull of gravity by the searching roots of grasses made vigorous by a rainy spring. If this hill is not a Pluton, then Bennington wonders what force has propelled this ground upward, if this was crustal folding or if this was pushed by magma? Perhaps they might image it before they leave the camp at the end of July. Yellowstone is a writhing zoo of igneous intrusions among older Plutonic structures.

He sees that Claire is working slowly. He understands that she is forming and discarding hypotheses as she works deeper into the stream bank.

Claire is one of the better PhD students that they have assigned him over the years. Claire has been his teaching assistant for two years, grading his blue books and quizzes. His dissertation committee of three professors has approved her topic. This field trip would endow her eventual dissertation with an unmistakable stamp of authenticity. It would also establish her gravitas for the freshman year lecture-hall class that she will be given for the coming fall semester. Their department is not the place for lay-abouts. In perhaps 18 months, depending upon how fast she writes, she will become Dr. Cheviot.

His camp work is finished. His e-mails are finished. They must drive out and get to work. With the dogs feeding down below, Bennington begins the climb back up. He must stuff his laptop, and instruments, and notebook into a backpack. Then he will read in the center tent, for the remainder of Claire’s promised hour.

As he climbs, over the sound of his own huffing breath, he thinks he hears her twice.

Jim! She finally shouts.

Bennington snaps around, instantly alarmed. She never calls him by his first name. Claire has her back to him. He sees Claire up off her log, digging her knees into the wet stream bank, putting her weight into it. Her pick-hammer is on the ground. She is wrestling with something in front of her, torquing her shoulders back and forth. Bennington trots downhill to the stream.

What is it? He asks urgently. The dogs briefly look up from their bowls. In answer, Claire rotates aside on one knee, and turns her head to radiate a look of smiling disbelief.

My god! Bennington gasps, seeing it. Easy, C.C., easy does it.

Extending out from the gravelly stream bank is a blood-red nodule of crystal cubes, each with perfect cleavage. The blood of the Inca kings, Bennington marvels, as he kneels.

Let’s work slowly, C.C. We don’t even have it out yet, and already it’s larger than the Alma King. He kneels beside her, lifting Claire’s pick-hammer.

Alma King? She asks.

The world’s largest Rhodochrosite. It was found in Alma, Colorado at the Sweet Home Mine.

They work together, teaming instinctively. One picks at one side of the nodule, while the other one brushes away loose gravel and breccias. In this way, they alternate, working the pick-hammer back and forth between them.

Bennington cannot resist lapsing into a lecture. This is within the grain of the man, deep within the fault structure overlaid by the sediments of his years.

"This lovely gift of mother nature was formed, my dear, inside a gas bubble, possibly inside basalt, but more likely granite and then moved by erosion and sedimentation into this basalt formation. Granite and basalt work side by side around here, like workmen of different trades cooperating on the same project.

Originally, this mineral was deposited by steady accretion inside that ancient gas bubble by geyser water, by geothermal ground water. Basalt is usually not viscous enough to hold gas. Granite is. That’s why the big explosions are from magma chambers holding granite.

Professor, you’re describing Yellowstone. So, why don’t we find more of these here?

Because you’re not allowed to do what we are doing, my dear—digging! My god! He exclaimed again, when they freed it at last. This must be ten-inches across!

Is it valuable?

"Valuable? Hundreds of thousands, millions? I really can’t say. But this should not wind up in a glass case at the visitor’s center. This should be Purdue’s. My god, Purdue is just a much a public institution as the National Park Service, is it not? It is training the nation’s engineers and scientists, is it not?

These people here can no more appreciate this lovely mineral than I can appreciate a Picasso. But at Purdue, it would grow the department, and it would attract funding—so we could pay our PhD students a living wage, finally.

Then let’s hide it, Claire says, enthusiastically.

Miss Cheviot! Bennington exhales happily. I am delighted to find that you have a vein of larceny in you. Yes, we must hide this. Then we must get this out of here and back to West Lafayette.

Claire tucks the Rhodochrosite under her sweatshirt and follows Bennington back up to camp. Claire steps with him into the center tent. Bennington pulls a blanket and spreads it over the picnic table. Together, they wrap the nodule with it and tie it with twine.

Claire sees that Bennington has become deadly serious. She listens carefully to him, nodding her understanding.

C.C., I want you to take the truck into Grant Village. We need a crate, a solid crate—not one with slats. Then I want you to drive this Rhodochrosite out of the park, across the state line, and into West Yellowstone. There is a Federal Express office there. Ship this back to campus, to my office. Mark it, Hold for Dr. Bennington. Be sure to lock the truck and take your keys. We have to be careful from now on."

He trots after her as she runs down the hill toward the truck. He calls after her, And take one of the dogs. The bears are bad around the village this time of year. It is because the trout are spawning and five streams run through Grant.

Amy! Claire shouts. One of the dogs detaches from the others and runs to her.

Put her in back, into the cage, C.C., Bennington says, catching up to her. "Bear dogs are tricky creatures. You do not want one to ride up front with you.

The village is technically closed until next month, but you’ll find maintenance and administrative people there. If they ask, just tell them I must Fedex my computer back to the university. Here, take my Visa card. Tip, bribe, pay whatever you have to. Just get that mineral back to Purdue. Our toolbox is still in the truck.

Claire lowers the tailgate, and rolls a fire extinguisher out of the way. The Bear Dog leaps aboard and scampers by habit into the large cage next to the cab. Claire raises the tailgate and then places the bundled mineral behind the passenger seat, after sliding it forward.

As he watches her drive off, Bennington walks over to the rocky outcrop. He stoops for Claire’s fallen hammer. He draws the log closer and sits in front of the stream bank, and as he raises her hammer to the rocks, he whispers to it, Tell me your story, mother earth. As he chips, Bennington thinks: Far below you work your mines, Plouton, ruler of the underworld and giver of wealth.

West Thumb is one of many younger volcanoes within the Yellowstone Caldera, but there are even younger ones nearby. Nature repairs what she damages. She has filled the West Thumb caldera with 400 feet of water, connecting it to the larger Yellowstone Lake. Grant Village is on the south shore. They had driven that way only yesterday.

Claire remembers that the professor is always saying that every deep lake in the park is a collapsed volcano, a caldera. Is the Yellowstone danger today many volcanoes, or is it a single supervolcano? Will it blow piecemeal, one-by-one, or all at once? What did it look like, east on the ancient prairies of Nebraska, when the smoke cleared that first time, two million years ago, while the herds of huge, ancient, Pleistocene mammals were suffocating in the ash cloud settling to earth?

And, what does the shape of their hill tell them, she wonders? How is it that this mineral is found in sedimentary rock, when it could only have formed in a magma chamber? Explanations crowd her mind, forcing her to admit, once again, that they always are just guessing. Yellowstone is a complex amalgam. Mankind pictures these differing systems cooperating according to laws not his own. Mankind learns by induction. We infer. We visualize without seeing. All is far below. Everything is concealed.

Despite Bennington’s urgency, the black and yellow Purdue pickup truck slowly rounds the mountainsides. There is a boilermaker logo on the driver’s side door. Yellowstone is spectacular. Bennington has summered here for years. Claire has been here only thirteen days. The two-lane road crosses back and forth along the great divide. Finally, it will straighten, as it tees into the road circuiting the big lake. Geysers and hot springs crowd the west shore of West Thumb. The scene is always worth slowing down for. But Claire will not see these wonders again until tomorrow.

Around nearly every curve, Claire sees an eroded mountainside slide into view. These cliff faces are each chapters in the story of the planet.

She has traveled four miles from the campsite and is still seven miles from the big lake when she sees the smoke.

Through a break in the trees, a meadow is on fire. At first, she decides that she will not stop. This is why they have fire lookouts and the park service. But she cannot turn away.

God damned, campers! She curses as she pulls the truck off the road. The Bear dog pokes its head out the cage.

Stay, Claire says, firmly. The dog does not flinch, yet obeys. Bennington has them well trained. She hoists the fire extinguisher onto her shoulder, climbs over the guardrail, and takes off through the trees to do her good deed for the day.

The bear dog watches her intently, occasionally raising its nose into the air, to squeeze it around scents, alert for trouble. At one hundred and fifty yards out, the dog sees Claire slow, and then stop. Claire is staring. She drops the fire extinguisher and begins to run back toward the truck. The bear dog, now out of its cage, lifts its front paws to the top of the side of the truck. It stares keenly at her running figure.

Returning, Claire drops the tailgate. Stay, she commands again.

Claire rummages through the burlap sacks and boxes finally finding a spare saucepan. Then she pulls a spare tent pole up from the clutter. After looking for long seconds at the confusion in the truck, Claire lifts one of her boots onto the tailgate and removes its rawhide laces. She ties the handle of the saucepan to the end of the tent pole and pulls strongly on the knot.

Then Claire raises the tailgate, and calmly crosses the guardrail once again, to walk back toward the smoke. She limps a little, favoring her right foot so that her boot will not come off.

The bear dog continues watching. Finally, she sees Claire creep forward, toward the smoke, leaning her head back, turning her face aside. She kneels and pushes the tent pole as far away as she can. After working with it, she pulls it toward her and steps back to look at what she has collected. Then, she slowly walks back, lifting the fire extinguisher with her other hand.

"Two discoveries in a single morning, C.C.?" Bennington, the scientist, is enforcing a calm, a lightheartedness as if the professor knew all along that that these things were here, waiting for them—on the verge of being discovered. He stifles his surprise.

Bennington is casual, Did you happen to record the elevation while you were there, C.C.?

8,500 feet.

Flashing through his mind, he thinks that if they have only a few weeks to live, they may as well try to enjoy them. He knows that he is incapable of turning away from this.

Fine. Good job. That’s just what we need to know. That is seven hundred feet higher than the lakeshore. The absence of groundwater is one reason that it simply oozed out. Another reason might be the height at which it left the magma chamber.

Suddenly, he saddens, thinking of Claire and what a bad break this is for her. He should send her back. Yes, he must