The Yellowstone Conundrum Read Online Free Page A

why she didn’t ask him about the stupid camera before leaving the cabin, Nadine would have replied “Because that would spoil my fun.” Then she wouldn’t have anything to rag him over. But, Randy was in luck. Panting, out of breath because of his entrance into Old Age a few years back, along with the 8,000-foot elevation of the village, Randy pulled out a point-and-click Nikon.
      The problem with technology was that every generation of virtually anything was smaller than the previous generation. Cell phones were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, even a credit card. Randy had been OK with technology until the mid 00s when telephones became smarter than his trusty computer; smarter being relative, of course. Now his fingers couldn’t mash the right button, and he never got the hang of texting. It was simply too frustrating. Besides, watching movies and playing games should be done in the living room, not on the road.
      Ten minutes passed. Randy stomped around on the frozen ground, trying to get his legs warm. His legs and feet were freezing.
      In the near distance on the other side of the geyser’s wash, over toward the huge asphalted, yellow-striped parking lot—now covered in four feet of snow, a massive flock of black birds took off from the forest, seemingly in a choreographed movement. There were thousands of the birds. In what would be a meadow of lush green grass and endless flowers in eight weeks, now covered with snow, a herd of buffalo, startled by something, began to run for dear life away from the stream they were drinking, running toward the forest—only to be joined in the strange dance by a hundred elk.
      “That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” muttered Randy. “What do you make of that?” He asked Nadine, turning to her.
      “Take a picture,” she replied, her nose beet red, bundled round as a mound, looking like to be the curmudgeon she was, or perhaps the mother of Santa’s elves.
      Randy raised his camera to point and click. It had taken him so long to figure out that you no longer had to put your eye into the viewfinder to see the shot, instead all you had to do was hold the camera like you were, well, pointing to the object. A good portion of Randy’s shots, however, had a clear shot of his left pinkie finger in the upper left portion of the picture, again a victim of the shrinkage of technology.
      In this case, one second Randy was standing and in the next he and Nadine were dancing out of control, as if in slow motion, arms pin-wheeling, not exactly Air Guitar, more like Whoa Jesus We’re Doin’ the Backstroke . Down to earth they fell in unison in a double lump. Meanwhile, in the distance the buffalo and elk continued to run, the black birds overhead refused to find refuge.
      Then the sound of a freight train; no, make that several trains; no, a hundred angry trains; like the sound a tornado makes when it drops from the sky and is headed your way. Flat on his back Randy could feel the vibration of the Earth like a tuning fork, wwwhhaaaaaannng ! His eyes couldn’t focus but he could see a portion of the unoccupied Old Faithful Inn’s roof, the nearest building, begin to break apart, a jagged line now drawn across the steepest portion the roof’s pitch, immediately followed by the sound of the roof detaching itself along with six gables on the geyser side of the building, sliding in slow motion to the ground in a single swoosh. Then glass breaking like someone was plunking windows with an automatic rifle.
      Saucer-eyed, Randy saw a crack forming in the snow-covered parking lot, and then two snowmobiles disappeared into a new crevasse, swallowed in an instant. The crack in the parking lot got bigger; its jagged opening advancing quickly toward the geyser’s viewing area toward them!
      “Shit!” he shouted.
      They were two stumblebums in a tumble, unable to think about standing. The split in the earth headed straight for them, eating a small gathering