He rounded a curve. A rangers’ carith a light bar-now flashing-had pulled over the SUV. The guy behind the wheel looked righteously pissed off. Colin chortled. “Tough luck, sucker,” he said.

You could still see what the big fires of 1988 had done to the park. Some dead tree trunks went on standing tall. Some lay scattered across the meadows that had replaced some of the old lodgepole-pine forests. And the lodgepoles that had sprouted since the fires ranged from the size of coffee-table Christmas trees up to twenty or twenty-five feet tall: about half the size of the burned ones.

When the road finally forked, you swung left to go to Old Faithful and the swarm of famous geysers near it. Colin had done that the day before, his first day in the park. He supposed everybody did. They were Yellowstone’s number one attraction, and he had to admit Old Faithful lived up to its billing.

If you swung right instead, you went to West Thumb, an arm of Yellowstone Lake. There was a geyser basin there, too, and an information station with a bookstore. And there were restrooms. With quite a bit of Bubba’s coffee sloshing around inside him, that mattered to Colin. West Thumb Basin it was.

He pulled into the parking lot at half past nine. Not many cars in it yet. He’d beaten the rush to Old Faithful, too, but he suspected there was no enormous rush to beat here. The potholes scarring the lot argued that way. Had more people come, they would have kept things in better repair.

A round hot pool threw up clouds of steam by the entrance to the lot. It didn’t have a sign or anything-just a wooden warning rail around it to keep idiot tourists from cooking themselves. He found a spot near the start of the boardwalk that let visitors go by the geothermal features in reasonable safety-no, the parking lot wasn’t crowded. After he killed the lights and motor, he got out. Locking the car door as soon as he closed it was as automatic as breathing.