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its junction with the Missouri River outside the park.
    The fifty-mile-wide Yellowstone caldera, the national park’s seething heart, bounded the plateau. The first reports of European fur traders who witnessed the caldera’s erupting geysers, steaming hot springs, and bubbling mud pots had been met with disbelief and derision in the East. Not until members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition explored and provided official reports on the region did Americans accept the truth about the land of fire and brimstone that had come into their possession as a result of the Louisiana Purchase.
    The road broke from the forest into the open. Prairie-like Hayden Valley stretched to the south and west, its grasslands interspersed with stands of lodgepole pines. The valley’s lush, early summer grasses glowed emerald green in the morning sun.
    â€œWow,” Janelle said.
    Chuck goosed the truck, preparing to pass the camper on the open straightaway. He fell back when he spotted cars and RVs lining both sides of the road half a mile ahead, at a bridge over Elk Antler Creek, a tributary of the Hayden River.
    Chuck caught the girls’ eyes in the rearview mirror. “Bear jam,” he announced.
    Carmelita sat up, her sleepiness disappearing. “Really?”
    Rosie punched the air with her pudgy fist. “Yes!” she hollered.
    Janelle studied the line of vehicles. “You really think it might be a bear this time?”
    â€œThey’re parked at a stream,” Chuck said. “Maybe it’s a moose.”
    Janelle’s mouth turned down. “Or more ducks.”
    They’d come upon three so-called bear jams—lines of cars and campers halted along the park’s roads—during their drive north through the park to Canyon Village the day before. Each time, they’d parked and joined the tourists thronged outside their vehicles, some peering through spotting scopes attached to tripods set up on the shoulders of the roads. The first group of tourists was fixated on a mallard duck and chicks nibbling shoreline grasses along the edge of a roadside stream. The second group ogled an osprey nest in a treetop several hundred yards from the road, with no ospreys in sight. The third admired a bison herd in a meadow nearly a mile away, the grazing bison little more than brown specks in the distance.
    The recreational vehicle pulled to the side of the road behind the last of the parked vehicles, a hundred feet shy of the bridge.
    Chuck parked behind the RV and turned to the girls. “Might be another mama duck and her chicks. That’d still be okay, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œSure,” Carmelita said.
    â€œYou betcha,” Rosie agreed.
    They made their way along the edge of the road past the line of cars. The vehicles’ occupants, more than two dozen in all, stood together where the bridge crossed the stream. They looked northward from the road’s raised shoulder. Children held the hands of their parents. Elderly couples in matching jackets stood close beside each other. A pair of heavyset, middle-aged men were positioned at the front of the group, their eyes to head-high spotting scopes.
    Chuck stopped at the edge of the gathered tourists. “What have we got?” he asked a woman in loose slacks and thick-soled walking shoes, her gray hair twisted into a bun.
    â€œI’m not sure.” She stood next to an elderly man in a navy overcoat. “We just got here.”
    One of the men in front turned from his scope and addressed the group. “Bear,” he said, pointing past his tripod at a thick stand of willows sprouting at the side of the stream thirty yards from the road.
    Carmelita pressed herself against Chuck’s side. He put an arm around her shoulders.
    â€œAre you sure?” the elderly man asked. He raised his hand to his brow, shielding the morning sun. “I don’t see anything.”
    â€œWe were the first ones here,” the man at