You probably know Yellowstone, at least the front country. It's ruled by human law. Yellowstone's got a back country, too, where natural law rules. Maybe you call it Dark Nature. I call it the Green World.

That night last August in Yellowstone when Melody Applegate began dying, she and her husband went tent camping in the Green World. Maybe you�ve been there too. The dirt you walk on feels cherry, like no one's ever walked there but you. There you can be you, your most natural self.

So can the grizzly bears. Grizzly Bear Number 88�Ol' 88�didn't do anything unnatural. Neither did the people.

As Yellowstone Park's chief criminal investigator, this is my report of what happened that night last August, and then what happened next. It's a mental reenactment of crime, what I do in my job (solve the crime and apprehend the perp). It's also a backtracking, starting at the end and following the bread crumbs to the beginning, what I do as a tracker (of humans and bears).

This crime's end started with Ol' 88. Sounds like a railroad steam engine or something. No kind of name for a grizzly. But they all do that�no respect�the Park Service, the scientists.

They even call it a control number. Maybe they could control their fear that way. Numbers don't stick four-inch claws clean through your neck and tear your head off, like the hunting mags claim.

Wild Eye is his name.

Three summers back, down on the Yellowstone Loop Road, Wild Eye'd been gulping handouts when that mechanical wolf, a delivery truck, stopped too close. This four-hundred-fifty pound papa bear busted all the glass out of the seven-thousand pound truck, ripped up the sheet metal like it was tissue paper, and left a big, hairy scat before disappearing into the mountains.

I tracked this same bear then, too. Got a tranquilizer dart in him when he stopped to soak a pad cut when he demolished the Chevy truck. God, how easy it had been. Blood trail to follow. Came up from downwind, the noise at the creek and the wind for cover�got within a hundred feet�popped him right in the gluteus maximus.

How different it was the second time I tracked him. Wild Eye had been, according to Yellowstone superintendent Bix Beiderke, a cold-blooded menace to Chevrolets. But this second time Beiderke called Wild Eye "a deranged, yet very cunning Cherokee killer." Because Wild Eye came bustin' through the winter-den snow cover real early the last couple of springs. A male bear pregnant with a killing rage. He tore hell out of an Airstream's bumper, and last spring he really did it. Senator Fergus was doin' a tour with some Park Service bigwigs and stopped to look at a bear like some damned tourist. Wild Eye turned a brand new white Jeep Grand Cherokee into $30,000 of scrap metal, then disappeared for a month with the whole world looking for him. Wonder nobody got hurt. He could have mauled somebody then�just luck he didn't.

Now, after the well publicized Melody Applegate mauling, I had to track Wild Eye a third and final time. It's somehow strange that when people and bears go to hurtin' each other, it's always the bear's fault�no matter what. Then you kill the bear and everything's all right. Some kind of blood sacrifice that absolves all parties. Unless, as with Melody Applegate, there's a human crime involved.

But here's my take on Wild Eye and grizzly bears. They're like us: playful, smart, good mothers, killers. Like us, their predatory killing seems inborn. Whereas evil, writes a book type, is "fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world." My take on evil? It's unique to man.

Note to you: wolves didn't suckle me nor Salish teach me to track. I make mistakes. I'm telling this story, but maybe I've got those bugaboos: unstable head-case, bias, lack of facts, or maybe I'm making a deliberate attempt to fuzz things up. But here goes.

It was here in Yellowstone's Green World�the back country Rudyard Kipling described as "the mysterious Hoodoo Region where all the devils not employed in the geysers live and kill the wandering bear and elk, so that the scared hunter finds in Death Gulch piled carcasses of the dead whom no man has ever smitten"�that the crime or crimes below took place.

Some bears you can't find. Some mysteries are unsolvable. You can't know all that happened when Melody Applegate began dying last August in Yellowstone. For instance, what was she thinking, feeling? I've always tracked with a mental image of the animal that had moved over the terrain at some point in time. My ability to concentrate on that mental image erases�no, compresses the time that's passed since the track was made. And I actually see and hear whatever or whoever made the track I'm following. Over the years it got easier with practice. I'm only a few steps behind in my mind. My senses are dedicated to the evidence from a creature's passing�that I can "see" my quarry making.

And what I saw, tracking Melody Applegate, was betrayal. Betrayal is the way of the snake. It leaves a thin track, followed by nothing. A real toad, as Marianne Moore wrote, in an imaginary garden.

Along with betrayal, I used the sciences of criminology and of tracking to conclude what happened that night in Yellowstone when Melody Applegate began dying. Below is the pivotal event, which I reenact now. Stay with me, you'll find the reenactment brief.

-from Chapter One