Anna seriously wanted to get the hell out of there. Each and every idyllic day in this most beautiful of places had shown an underside that suggested God's Country was under siege from His traditional nemesis. To Anna's mind the most hellish of weapons had been unloosed: fear. Fear was the root of all evil. The others could be tracked to it. Greed was fear of want in pathological form. Lies, fear of being discovered for who one was, punished for what one had done.
The unnatural actions of the bear, Rory's bizarre disappearance, needless murder, now this abomination; fear poured into Anna's mind. In the midst of the very things that brought her comfort, she was being drowned in it. For a moment she clung to the branch fighting a desperate need to run from the wilderness, from sunlight, from solitude and hide in a closed, dark room full of familiar faces.
"Goddamn it," she muttered. Over her forty-odd years the fates had robbed her of her husband and taken a good shot at her only sister. She would not be robbed of that which made all else endurable, the peace and perfection of the natural world.
Anger helped but did not heal. Her rage was manufactured from two parts self-pity and one part need. It lacked the self-propelling white-hot burn of righteously earned ire. She kept it alive long enough to scorch away at least the core of her panic. She could trust herself to function, not to topple from the tree or dash madly down the trails shrieking.
When her breathing evened out, she knew she could stay and do her work, but peace of mind, joy, freedom, those gifts of the wild country had been stolen away. "Fuck," she whispered, then she prayed a jolly little prayer: "Dear Lord, please let me find a gun in my pack when I climb down. Love, Anna."
Backup was hours away, but she radioed Ruick to tell him of her find. Mostly, she admitted to herself, to report her location. Should she go missing, Ponce would alert them to where she'd gone off trail but who would think to seek as far as the bush-locked pine?
Harry was in a meeting. Maryanne wrote down the message and Anna was left with no choice but to break contact.
Flinching at every sound, freezing at every change in the shadow pattern, she made several trips up and down the desecrated pine taking photographs of and collecting the shredded bags. The meat they'd held was long gone. Whatever bird or beast had worried it out of its packaging had carried it away and undoubtedly eaten it. Too bad,Anna thought. Unless the killer was of the Hannibal Lecter School of Fine Cuisine, he may have removed the flesh not to eat it but to take away a clue to his identity.
But why string the stuff up if he'd merely been covering his tracks? Surely one would want the telltale flesh eaten or buried or at least exposed so that it might decay more quickly. If something is cached it's because someone means to return for it.
No birds stirred the leaves, no shadows moved with the wind, still Anna stopped breathing, listened, cursed the gods for ignoring her prayer for firearms. Moving as quickly as she could, she labeled each item as she packed it in a paper evidence bag to better preserve the blood samples. The navy stuff sack was old, several years at least, made by REI and common as cotton underpants. The same went for the baggies and the torn scrap of poncho: generic, easily obtained, ubiquitous in the backcountry. The strips that had been tied together to form the line used to swing the cache into the branches were what appeared to be shirting. The cloth was equally unremarkable, probably J. C. Penney or Sears, cotton-polyester sold in bulk. However, if the shirt they had been torn from had once covered the back of the killer, they could prove important.
Regardless of value or lack thereof Anna spent no time studying the evidence. With ingrained care she packaged and stowed. Mind, ears and eyes were occupied patrolling the perimeter around the tree for cannibals, bears, axe murderers and other manifestations of impending violence.
At last the job was completed, everything tucked in her pack. With the possibility of flight nearer, Anna found her unease growing. "Get a grip," she ordered herself unsympathetically. Before she could make her escape, she needed to canvass the clearing one more time in case she had missed anything.
Out from the tree at a north-northwesterly heading, five-feet-four-and-a-half-inches as measured by the carpenter's tape she carried for just such a purpose, she found a pile of what could only be bear scat. Whether grizzly or black, she couldn't tell. This time of year, both had about the same diet. The sheer size of the sample would suggest a male grizzly but black bears grew nearly as large at the upper end of their scale. For unscientific reasons, Anna felt certain it was not only grizzly scat but that of her own personal grizzly.
Given its half-melted then dried consistency, the scat had been left before the rain but not too long before. If it had been deposited much before the storm, it would have dried more completely. The downpour would have reduced it to its component parts, not merely smoothed it over.
An educated guess put the age of this sample at five or six days, seven at the outside. Around the time of Mrs. Van Slyke's death not twenty yards away, around the time the flesh cut from her face had been cached in the tree.
The killer had been here. Thebear-or a bear-had been here. It was conceivable the smell of the meat in the plastic bags overhead had attracted a passing animal. Their noses were exceptionally keen. But Anna could find no indication this bear made any effort to retrieve his prize: no claw marks on the trunk or lower branches, no disturbed leaf litter or soil around the tree as might be expected from a frustrated three-hundred-pound scavenger.
It appeared as if the bear had simply come to this minuscule clearing, quietly relieved himself and went on. No law against that. Anna thought of the old joke "Where does a bear shit in the woods?" and smiled in spite of herself.
Too much coincidence, though. Bears, grizzly and otherwise, were high-profile inhabitants of Glacier National Park, but given the park's forty-one hundred square kilometers, there weren't all that many of them. According to Resource Management statistics, less than three hundred. One of the things the DNA study would do was give a more accurate count. Wishing she'd thought to pack one of Joan's handy scat sample bottles, Anna made do with another evidence bag-plastic this time-and procured a spoonful for the bear researcher. Anna noted a few of the standard bear leavings: berry seeds, twigs, grasses, most in mint condition. The bulk of this scat sample was made up of a dull brown-gray grainy matter that looked to be closer to digested dirt than plant matter. Another mystery for Joan. As long as there weren't buttons or buckles or human fingerbones, Anna couldn't get too excited.
She was glad to leave the pine clearing, scared to reenter the thick of the brush. It was an act of will to move up the side of the mountain through the obscuring undergrowth at a sensible pace. The urge to claw her way frantically out of the shrubbery didn't abate till she was not only in the open sunny world of West Flattop Trail but upon Ponce's broad back. Cowboys were braver on horseback. It was a little known codicil to the code of the west.
For no reason more logical than a bad case of the willies, Anna put a couple of miles between her and the flesh-eating pine tree. At a bend in the trail, a hillside of broken stones created a thousand unique, earth-bearing planters displaying such a breathtaking show of yellows, blues and reds that Anna wondered how human gardeners could bear to enter the competition. She tethered Ponce to a downed tree deep in tasty grasses and emptied her pack: water, lunch, map, evidence packets. Lunch first, she decided. Scrambling up and down the tree had given her the insistent appetite of an active child.
A peanut butter and honey sandwich under her belt, she was better able to concentrate on her find. Donning a new pair of latex gloves, she examined the torn bags, all that was left of the macabre food cache. The blood, she had little doubt, would turn out to be that of Carolyn Van Slyke. As she'd discerned in the tree, other than these sinister smears, the plastic baggies had nothing to tell her. With its sophisticated equipment, the lab might do better.
The blue sack was slightly more forthcoming. Gray-green dust and a pale yellow residue of a delicate almost glittering nature, like pollen but more reflective, streaked the fabric. Whatever the substance was, it had been scuffed onto the sack recently. Perhaps the lab could use it to tell where in the park the bag had been before it was shanghaied into service as a ditty bag for the deceased. In a civilized environment, that information might lead to the killer. Here, time was a deciding factor. The days it would take to get the bag down to West Glacier, then to the lab and back, would be too long. The killer would no longer be "living" in the same place.
Having returned the evidence to storage and divested herself of the surgical gloves, she unwrapped her second sandwich. Her fingers smelled of the talc used in the gloves and tainted her enjoyment of the peanut butter. Ignoring that and the busy ticklings of flies, she leaned against the log where Ponce was tied and listened to the reassuring tearing sounds as he went on with his picnic.
The killer was still in the park. Either that or Anna's intuition had finally slipped over into paranoia. That was a distinct possibility. Sitting in the sun, in a world where she had felt comfortable and whole much of her adult life, she was unpleasantly aware that she gasped and started at every noise. Her eyes never ceased scanning the horizon, alert for danger.
Though the most obvious, the wilderness wasn't the only thing she was at odds with. With the possible exception of Joan Rand, Anna had not had anything even resembling a genuine connection with another human being since she'd come to Glacier.
She thought of Sheriff Paul Davidson, her-her what? Her boyfriend? Her sweetheart? Or merely her lover? Paul was a good man and once, a long, long time ago in mind, two weeks ago by the calendar, she'd fancied herself falling in love with him. Since her adventures began in Glacier he'd scarcely crossed her mind. She'd not even called Molly though she'd told herself she would. There was something about this case that was causing her to isolate.
Anna snorted. Sensing an equine conversation in the offing, Ponce snorted back. "Isolate myself more than usual," Anna said to him. Ponce lost interest once she reverted to the human tongue. He returned to his grazing.
Humans were tribal creatures. Isolation was a form of punishment so extreme even in prisons it was only used for serious breaches of conduct. Those who isolated themselves usually suffered as a consequence. Anna'd long been aware of the tiny cracks in what passed for normalcy when she'd purposely been too long alone, locked inside the ivory tower of bone that served as skull.
Shifting position, her back to the trail so her ever-vigilant eyes could keep watch on the woods, she considered her slow withdrawal. The unseen scratchings of a small woodland beast sent her pulse rate up and she realized what it was. She had been dispossessed, made homeless. Not removed from her house and cat and dog in Mississippi-the park housing she enjoyed on the Natchez Trace Parkway was simply one in a chain of way stations. Her home, where she felt safe and centered, had always been the wild country. Towns, streets, houses, dumpsters, PTA meetings- that was where evil lurked. In the backcountry was only the often pitiless but never malicious work of the gods.
In Glacier that amoral purity was gone. A wrongness stalked. Had it been only the warped and hostile actions of people, Anna would not have felt the same. But it wasn't. Nature herself was being unnatural. The bear that had torn up their camp was behaving in a creepy, unbear-like way. When human beings were evil they were merely, if the Christian teaching was to be believed, exercising their God-given right to free will. When nature got personal, then whatever passed for Satan was surely afoot.
No wonder she'd bonded so completely with Joan Rand, Anna thought. The researcher was the only person she could talk to about their bear. Joan had been there. Joan felt it. To others, even Molly or Paul, she would seem just another scared tourist anthropomorphizing and exaggerating, the sort who submit reports in lilac ink of grizzlies juggling hedgehogs.
The next hour was spent riding back to Fifty Mountain in hopes Bill McCaskil would have returned. But for a brief interlude with two visitors from Washington State, an incredibly chirpy middle-aged man hiking with a serene and homely woman Anna presumed was his wife, she spoke with no one. The Washingtonian had been afire with the news that there was a "Boone and Crockett elk" a mile down the trail that Anna must see. The animal had moved on by the time she and Ponce came to where it was sighted and she was mildly disappointed. She'd never heard a creature referred to as a "Boone and Crockett" but given Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett's legendary stature, it must have been a grand old bull.
Bill McCaskil had gone the way of the elk. His campsite was empty, pack gone from the tree in front of his tent. What Anna had intended to ask him she wasn't sure but she needed to do something with her time. And though it was so uncharacteristic she didn't recognize the motivation, she wanted to do something around other people.
Against the wishes of both his son and Chief Ranger Ruick, Lester Van Slyke had hiked back to Flattop. He was taking up residence in his abandoned camp when Anna walked down from McCaskil's site.
Les was gray with the effort the twelve-mile walk had cost him-a coronary wandering around in shiny new boots. He carried an NPS radio, probably at the insistence of Harry Ruick. Other than that he seemed as ill-prepared for the rigors of camping as ever. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want to explain his persistence in remaining in the backcountry, didn't want to discuss his former wife's violent behavior. After a quarter of an hour she was glad to leave him in peace and start back the way she'd come, returning to the tiny meadow where she, Joan and Rory had first set up camp.
It was as it had been before the bear attack. New tents were pitched, not where the old had been, but on the far side of the flat rock as if Joan, or more likely Rory, had suffered an attack of superstition and decided the old pattern had to be broken. Food and other bear attractants were cached high in a tree. A different one from where Rory's stepmother's corpse had hung.
The researchers were not in evidence. Anna watered Ponce at the little stream that cut through the clearing, found on her topo the place Joan had marked the next hair trap to be disassembled, then remounted and set out to find them. Ponce, erroneously thinking his day's work had been done, carried her with ill grace.
He was further discomfited when she found the others and it fell to him to carry the heavy rolls of barbed wire and the researchers' packs to the site of the next hair trap. Anna, leading Ponce, walked beside Joan. Rory chose to trail behind for reasons of his own. Buck walked with him but the two didn't speak. Anna was not offended at their choice. It wasn't that she disliked Rory; it was more that he carried about him an oppressive darkness, as if neurosis or deep injury had created in him a small black hole into which good cheer and rationality were sucked away.
A day's hard work in rough country had put Joan in a good mood. The cobwebs left by generating reports and packaging samples for the lab were burned away.
"This trap was pretty paltry pickin's," she said. The heat from her face made her brow glisten and the top quarter of her glasses fog up. That and the alder leaves poking through her hair gave her a look of the clichéd mad scientist. "No scat. A few wisps of hair. But at least the love scent hadn't been torn down. This one must have been hung high enough." Joan babbled on happily about barbed wire, lab reports and other resource-manager-type details. Anna half listened, enjoying companionship not content. After a quarter of an hour the going became rugged, the ground broken and the scrub dense. Conversation was replaced by heavy breathing and aggravated grunts. Ponce punished Anna for the arduous duty by pushing her in the middle of the back with his long bony face just infrequently enough she never expected it.
The new hair trap was to be strung up less than half a mile from the old. Wire taut, love scent high and inviting, rotten wood piled and doused with the irresistibly vile blood lure, they finished near six that evening. The work cleansed Anna's psyche as it had Joan's and she managed the trip back to camp restfully free of dark forebodings and acid contemplations. Off the beaten paths, they encountered no park visitors and Anna was glad. At peace, for the moment, in her own reality, she had no desire to be dragged into anyone else's.
In an unusual burst of intraspecies appreciation, she remembered the chipper fellow from Washington who had delighted her with his odd turn of phrase.
Anna decided to share. "I heard something funny today. A guy'd seen a big bull elk and called him a 'Boone and Crockett' elk." Joan and Buck looked blank. "Like in Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett," Anna explained. "You know, bigger than life." Still nothing. Gifts rebuffed, she was annoyed.
"Shall we tell her?" Buck asked.
"I think not," Joan said. "You don't know her like I do. She is exhibiting an uncharacteristic enjoyment in bipeds. It's a train of thought that would be a shame to derail so close to the station."
"Tell me what?" Anna demanded.
"She insists," Joan said.
" 'Boone and Crockett' are the ultimate word on trophy animals," Buck told her. "They have a whole rating system depending on the size of the animals. Well… the size of their heads. That's where the numbers come in."
"My little guy was talking about the elk dead?" Anna was aghast.
"As he pictured him on the wall of his den," Buck confirmed.
The creepiness that had been temporarily held at bay by the advent of real work returned. Even apparent innocents from the great state of Washington harbored deadly intentions.
It wasn't until they'd been back in camp for an hour or more and been revived by an internal application of hot drinks that she spoke again and then it was of the dark subjects that had been consuming her mind.
Summarily banishing Buck and Rory simply because she did not wish to feel the impact of a stranger in the first instance and an adolescent in the second, Anna fired up the hissing glare of a Coleman lantern, set it on the wide flat table of stone and spread out her gruesome evidence collection for Joan's scientific perusal.
"I don't know diddly about human forensic pathology," Joan warned her as they knelt like aging White Rock fairies on the edge of the stone.
"All evil is not human," Anna said apropos of nothing but the growing unease Glacier's backcountry had instilled in her.
"If not, it stems from humans," Joan said, either exposing a cynical streak Anna hadn't suspected or infected with Anna's pervasive sense of dislocation.
Anna didn't argue with her. "Look at the pieces left of the blue bag," she said. "See here where it's streaked with dust and this yellow pollen-like stuff? I can't remember seeing anything hereabouts that would leave residue like this. Not that I've been looking," she admitted.
Joan shoved her glasses up on her head the better to see close up and, fabric pinched delicately between gloved fingers and thumbs, she examined it in the cold and noisy light from the Coleman. After a minute of two of this she stopped, retrieved a large Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass from her day pack, said, "I wish I had my microscope," and studied the torn fabric for several minutes more.
"In my book, dust is dust is dust," she said at last and returned the navy stuff bag to Anna. "This is fine, grayish green, could be from argillite-alpine talus. Up high. Way high. Like tops of mountains. Or it could have come from under the bookcase in my bedroom. Lab tests would tell you what it's made of and maybe what kind of rocks it came from but, contrary to public opinion, rocks are not stationary. They slide and tumble, fall, wash down creeks.
"The yellow dust is different. I can't be a hundred percent sure but I don't think it is pollen. It looks more like scales, the weensy feathery scales you'd find on the wings of moths or butterflies."
Anna wasn't completely flummoxed. On Isle Royale, just outside the screen doors of most of the lean-tos, she'd seen butterflies crowd together en masse. They came to get the salts left behind by sleepy campers who, rather than stumble through the dark to the pit toilet, merely stood on the shelter step to urinate.
"Something in the bag attracted butterflies? A lot of butterflies?" As she said it, Anna knew it made little sense. Even if they'd been drawn to the bag in great numbers, when they beat their tiny wings, the scales didn't fall off.
"Not exactly. Above treeline we have incredible blooms of army cutworm moths June through September. The moths lay their eggs on the Great Plains and the caterpillars mature there. Then they migrate to the Rockies to feed. In the fall they go back. Lay eggs and die. There're not so many as there once were. They spray crops in Iowa, we lose moths in Montana. An argument for global environmental policies local politicians won't hear. Putting that together with the white dust, I'm guessing your bag was set down or dragged around somewhere above treeline on Mount Stimpson or Mount Cleveland or, oh, shoot, I don't know, one of them. We get aggregations of the cutworm moths from about twenty-one hundred meters in elevation up to about twenty-eight hundred meters. They like south and southwest faces." Joan took in the dark jagged ring of mountains cutting into the night sky around Flattop.
Sick of man-made light and racket, Anna turned off the lantern. In the sudden and blessed balm of night's silence, the two of them sat without speaking, watching the mountain peaks from where the blue sack had purportedly traveled.
The moon was waning, but in the thin clear air over the Rockies, its light was strong. Trees inked black on the shoulders of the mountains. Above their reach slivers of glaciers and the pale, much shattered talus that spent a majority of its life beneath the snow, caught the moonlight. The longer Anna stared the brighter the peaks became until, in their glory, they kindled a healing awe within her. "I wouldn't think there'd be much in that part of the world to attract people."
Joan laughed. "You sound so wistful. There's not much. Hardly anybody goes up there. Mountain goats."
"Trails?" Anna asked.
"Not that high."
"Just goats? I thought the bears denned at the higher elevations."
"Higher. Not that high. They do go up there in summer, though. The moths are a major source of protein for the grizzlies. They tear up whole hillsides of alpine talus, turning over the rocks and licking up the moths. See? Global. Spray wheat in Minnesota, starve a grizzly in the Rockies. Who'd know?"
"They know now," Anna pointed out. Neither bothered to add, "Who'd care?" Just a small circle of friends, as the old song went.
"Our butcher went up there for some reason," Anna said after a while. "Since he apparently isn't in the park to enjoy nature-at least not as we like to think of it-he must have had a pressing reason to travel so far off the beaten path. Ponce will not be pleased when I tell him tomorrow's itinerary."
Anna's radio ended further speculation.
"Your hunch paid off," Ruick said after they'd exchanged the requisite call numbers. "The prints on the second topo found in the army coat match those Bill McCaskil put on file when he was arrested for fraud. Looks like the victim was wearing his coat when she was killed."