The foot was large—size fourteen, it turned out. How many trappers out of the handful in Cooke City had feet that big? There had been other disturbing incursions. Outside of Mammoth, along Lava Creek, an enforcement ranger named Jim Lefevre had his tires slashed. Farther upstream, in plain view of the road, a nesting osprey had been blasted with a shotgun. A growing sense of organized harassment had begun to percolate slowly up the park’s chain of command; but the chain of command did not at all like making a decision, especially one that carried a smidgen of political risk.
