Anna did not ride to Fifty Mountain at first light. She was under strict orders from Harry to delay until the cavalry arrived in the person of four law enforcement rangers from down in the valley. Camp in the ill-fated meadow with its altar rock was broken. Joan and Rory, alone by necessity and Joan's choice now that Buck and Anna were needed elsewhere, left to service the next hair trap on Joan's list. This one was on the far eastern edge of Flattop Mountain near the confluence of Mineral and Cattle King creeks. After they'd gone, Anna packed her gear on Ponce not knowing when she would be rejoining the bear DNA research project as a productive member.
Far from chafing at the delay, she was glad to saunter over with Buck around noon. Several broken bones and knife wounds ago she'd lost her taste for facing unsavory types on equal terms. No right-thinking law enforcement officer wanted a fair fight.
When they arrived, the chief ranger and four others whom Anna didn't recognize were sitting in the food preparation area with Lester Van Slyke, talking in low voices. Ruick came over to where Anna tethered Ponce to the hitching rail.
"Our bird has flown the coop," he said, leaning on the rail, a water bottle held easily in one hand. Ruick seemed at home, in control everywhere Anna had an opportunity to observe him. "Les said he was here last night, saw him go to the outhouse once. He didn't use the food prep area or speak to anybody as far as Les noticed. Then Les sees him all packed up and heading out in the dark."
"What time?" Anna asked.
"Around eight, eight-thirty." Their eyes met. Anna hadn't out-thought him. "He knew we were coming to have a word."
"Les has a radio," Anna said.
"That's crossed my mind. You think Les told him? Some kind of conspiracy? Hired assassin?" Ruick laughed and Anna found herself laughing with him. Outside the confines of a movie theater the phrases sounded absurd. Lester Van Slyke from Seattle, Washington, hiring a con man with no history of doing hits for pay to murder his abusive wife in the Montana wilderness.
"People have their own twisted logic," Anna said, responding as much to her thoughts as Ruick's words. "There's too many ties for there not to be some kind of a connection." She leaned on the rail, elbow close to Ponce's nose. Occasionally she felt the flick of his tail on her backside and was content to let him keep the flies off the both of them. "Maybe we've been going at the connection from the wrong side," she said, the theory forming as she spoke. "Because it was Mrs. Van Slyke who was killed I've been trying to connect her with McCaskil as an enemy. McCaskil in the role of killer: come on purpose to kill her for his own reasons, a chance psychotic episode in which he kills her, or hired by the abused husband to do the deed. What if Mrs. Van Slyke and McCaskil were pals, in league for something more natural to a divorce lawyer and a fraud? She was wearing his coat when she was killed. Or at least a coat with his topographical map in the pocket. What if they were hatching some scheme that went sour? Mrs. Van Slyke dies. McCaskil stays in the park to finish his business? He sure doesn't fit the profile of a nature-lover and backwoodsman."
"Where does that leave our murderer?"
"I don't know. Maybe a falling out among thieves?"
"Or we're back to Les. If he weren't so…" Ruick glanced over his shoulder at the group on the hill behind them. "… so damned ineffectual, I'd have found some reason to arrest him by now."
Ruick squirted water into his mouth and swooshed it around more to entertain himself than to quench any real thirst. "What kind of fraud could a city-bred con man pull up here? Glacier's got nothing in the way of gold, silver, precious stones, gas, oil. One of the reasons it's been left alone is nobody ever figured out how to make any money out of it."
"Timber?"
Ruick looked at her. Not only was the terrain too rugged to log, cutting and stealing timber wasn't exactly a subtle crime. In a park where helicopter tours flew over on a daily basis, even a small-scale operation would be shut down less than twenty-four hours after it started.
"Right," Anna said. "Rare plants?"
Harry shook his head.
"Poaching?"
"Sure, some. But why bother? There are ranches just over the hill in British Columbia where you can legally shoot elk, bear, you name it. And since they're hand-raised, you can get ' em trophy-sized. They don't count that way, not with the big-league hunters. They insist the prey be 'wild.' But there's probably ways around that."
Ruick had pretty much shot down any ideas Anna had, so she said nothing. She couldn't figure out if this particular murder had too many clues and too many suspects, or too few. Why carve the face but not enough to confuse identification? What was easily obtained or carried into the backcountry that could deliver a blow powerful enough to sever the spinal cord yet soft enough not to crush or crack the skull? Why was the victim wearing a stranger's coat? Why didn't everybody leave right away? McCaskil, Lester, Rory-they had to know they were or could be suspects. If they'd done it, why stay? If they hadn'tdone it, why stay?
"We'll ask the s.o.b. when we find him," Ruick said philosophically.
Anna'd told him in greater detail about the macabre tree ornament she'd found near where Carolyn's body had been dumped. As she filled the chief ranger in on the details, she wished she'd never mentioned it over the radio. Too many listeners.
Ruick took possession of the ripped and bloody bags, forming the next link in the chain of evidence. He and his rangers had come to Flattop on horseback. One man would be sent back down to take Anna's find to the lab. The remaining three and Harry would track down McCaskil if they could.
Decisions to disturb the wilderness aspect of a national park were not made lightly. Helicopters, bulldozers, chainsaws, even tracking dogs were not brought in at the first whimpering of human discomfort. In Anna's years of watching park politics, some of the most courageous choices she'd seen upper management make were those made not to pour technology on a problem, not to bring in guns and dogs and fork-lifts and borate bombers, but to fight nature on nature's terms. Or, more courageous still, not to fight at all, to let the fire burn, the river change course, the historic crumble without replacement.
Often enough to make it an act of bravery, these administrators lost their careers. The public hated nature when she wasn't in their control. Ruick had chosen to hunt William McCaskil on foot and horseback. The body recovery of Carolyn Van Slyke had already invaded the sanctity of the park experience enough. If Ruick was wrong, if he didn't catch McCaskil and McCaskil turned out to be Van Slyke's killer and killed another visitor, Ruick would pay the price. He'd probably end his days as a chief ranger at some Civil War battlefield two acres across.
Anna respected him for it. Someday she'd have to tell him so. For today she had ground to cover. She was not to take part in the manhunt but to head above treeline to where the moths came to breed and die, where the stones were bleached, where the navy-blue stuff sack had traveled.
The night before, Joan had given Anna a crash course on the grizzly and the army cutworm moth. There were nine identified moth aggregation sites in Glacier that were known to be used by the bears. All were above twenty-one hundred meters in elevation, all on south- or west-facing slopes. The moths aggregated in glacial cirques on talus right below steeper headwalls.
Joan had ended the lesson with strongly voiced disapproval of Anna's venturing into any of the aggregation sites. As a researcher she did not like the impact on the bears that was inevitable when human beings- even one so small and light-footed as Anna-penetrated areas where the animals traditionally roamed undisturbed. As a good-hearted woman she was opposed to Anna's venturing into feeding grounds used predominantly by females with cubs and subadult bears during the peak of their use season.
"You're just making yourself an attractive nuisance," Joan summed up. "A recipe for disaster."
"No pun intended," Buck added, stone-faced.
"Ranger-on-a-stick," Rory said.
Warnings and disclaimers given, Joan had begrudgingly gone over the map, pointing out the sites closest to Flattop Mountain.
Anna took out the topo Joan had marked and showed it to Harry. Logic, a commodity to all appearances singularly lacking in the individual they pursued, suggested the aggregation site Joan had circled on the southern slope of Cathedral Peak. Cathedral, over seventy-six hundred feet high, was the only army cutworm moth site within easy- using the term loosely-commuting distance from Flattop, where the moth-dusted bag had been found. Given the amounts of both moth-wing powder and the grayish-green Joan guessed were traces of argillite remaining on the fabric, the bag had not traveled too far or too long between its dust collecting days and its incarnation as a receptacle for human flesh.
The country Anna was headed into was rugged and steep and dry. Too much for the shamble-footed Ponce. He would have the night off and Anna would walk. Much of the time she would be scrambling. There were no trails, no lakes, no creeks. Only seep springs, and that only if they still had water. Though the cirque she sought was not far in miles, it was a long way in time and energy. Probably she would need to spend the night on the mountain. There would be no trees in which to cache food and, if this aggregation site was being used, grizzlies, mostly females with cubs, would be in attendance. Toothpaste, insect repellent lip balm, and soap remained at Fifty Mountain. Anna ate as much food as she could and packed just enough for one more meal. There would be no breakfast the following morning. Because of the steepness of the terrain she traveled light: no tent, no stove, just camera, tarp, down vest, sleeping bag, water and filter. Even a seep spring could produce enough to refill canteens if one was patient. Or thirsty.
By one-thirty she was headed east away from Fifty Mountain. For the first mile or so, she walked Highline, an improved trail that followed the ridge east of Flattop Mountain, winding back to the Going to the Sun Road where the trail-head was. At about seventy-two hundred feet in elevation, where Highline dog-legged south, Anna turned north, traveling cross-country toward the glacial cirque below Cathedral Peak's south-southwestern slope.
High as she was, even small changes in altitude marked the landscape dramatically. Soil grew rocky and rust-colored. In the distance, on the stern face of the mountain, she noticed small white specks: mountain goats feeding and rambling in their impossible places. Vegetation thinned till only the hardiest of pines still grew. A life of fighting showed in stunted and twisted limbs. Anna felt honored to be moving amid this stalwart troop of rebels battered by the elements but still alive. Much of the time, she traveled baboon-like on feet and hands, the slopes slippery with broken stone and a meager covering of shortened needles the pines let go. Periodically she stopped to rest and, braced against a gnarly trunk, looked westward across the emerald green meadows north of Fifty Mountain Camp to the blue-forested shanks of the mountains beyond. In this land of abundance, of water and game, other deserts thrust up: mountaintops like the one she hoped to gain where nothing grew and the life of rocks was visible to the naked eye.
Just after four p.m. she scaled the last stone massif, a forty-foot gray wall of crumbling argillite that showed its treachery in tens of millions of cracks and crevices, in the deep pile of shattered stone heaped at its base. Glacier was not a park favored by climbers. The rock formations that created its mountains were of soft stuff that would not hold pitons, ledges that could fall away at the merest hint of weight.
A half-mile's scrambling through dwarf pines brought her to just beneath the dramatic upthrust of Cathedral Peak. There lay a classic cirque, a chunk of the mountain gouged out by glacial movement leaving a steep amphitheater two or three hundred yards across and half again that long. Its uppermost end was marked by another massif. From there up was the ever-more-vertical run to the mountain's peak. A quarter of the cirque was still covered in snow. In midsummer, Anna knew it would be of the dry crusty variety of no use for melting and drinking. The rest of the cirque was floored in grayish-green alpine talus, flat loose stones ranging in size from teacups to tabletops.
At present the landscape was free of bears. Joan had told her the pattern of both grizzlies and black bears was to feed on the moths in the morning, rest nearby through the middle of the day, then feed again in the evening.
The long climb had tired Anna but it behooved her to make her explorations during the bears' off time. Just because she couldn't see them didn't mean they weren't around. Wild animals seldom flopped down to nap in plain view. Even in a place they'd always known as safe they tended to hide themselves away. An area as apparently free of secrets as the cirque could easily have hollows beneath stones. Surrounding rocks might harbor caves or even dens, though the bears tended to den up slightly lower, below treeline.
At this altitude there was nearly always wind, often greater than sixty kilometers an hour. In summer it came mostly from the southwest, but with no protection, it blew cold, and as the sweat from the climb dried, Anna grew chilled. Zipping herself into her down vest she rallied her shaking legs and trudged up the incline to the bottom of the cirque. The aggregations of the cutworm moths, and so the feeding grounds of the bears, were usually at the head of the cirques below the massifs. As she picked her way upward over the talus, fatigue was replaced with the not completely unpleasant hyperawareness Daniel might have felt in the lions' den.
Not every aggregation was fed on every day. Like everyone else, bears had their trends and preferences. This site had not been monitored since 1995. Glacier researchers prided themselves not only on the quality of their studies but on completing them in the least obtrusive manner. Joan had lectured Anna on the evils of disturbing the site with her presence, then made her promise to observe carefully and take accurate notes. Since she must defile this bit of habitat with her essence, she might as well come away with data.
The observation Anna was most interested in at the moment was that of beds. Habitually the bears fed from six a.m. till one p.m. then rested till around six in the evening. For their siestas they dug beds in the scree or the snow. From the air the sleeping beasts might be easily seen. At ground level it would be way too easy to stumble into the middle of somebody's nap.
Having reached the headwall of the cirque unharmed, Anna found a perch atop a square chunk of argillite tumbled down from on high, and took out her binoculars. Her eyes would cause less disturbance than her feet. Not to mention they were not as tired. Mentally gridding the long crescent-shaped area, she searched the ground. There were many piles of scat; most looked old and dried-up, but a closer view would be needed to be sure. She spotted five of the oval-shaped excavations she'd been told to look for and was astounded once more at the sheer physical power of the grizzlies. In places, the digging went down a foot or more, and the volume of rock moved was in the tons.
Content she was alone and would not be providing anyone an afternoon snack, she put aside the glasses and slid off her rock. Fascinating as bears' lives were, she had not spent the day scratching up a mountain in search of that, but of traces of a person carrying a navy-blue stuff sack. Tracking over a stone surface, even soft argillite, was not a promising prospect. She would have to hope for luck and, if the gods were smiling, litter.
Working slowly, her attention divided between the ground and a horizon that could suddenly bloom with bears, she moved along the base of the massif. There were abundant samples of bear scat but she found nothing that looked to be fresher than two or three days. The scats were thick with the tiny fragmented exoskeletons of the moths, the only part of the insect that provided no nutrients. Joan would be disappointed, but Anna chose not to take the time to collect any samples.
The excavated ovals had been licked clean but Anna did see a number of itinerant moths. The cutworms were unprepossessing little yellow creatures with powdery wings. Where the bug hunting had been particularly good the yellow scales left streaks on the pale talus. In a place like this, then, the blue sack must have been laid down or dragged. To what purpose, Anna could not imagine. The cirques were dry, windswept, dangerous and hard to get to. Who would wander here?
A thought surfaced, so ugly it stopped her in her tracks. Bear researchers would come here. Men or women with an overweening interest in Ursus horribilis.They would be able to move through the park unremarked. They would be the ones who would wish to remain in Glacier regardless of who they'd killed because the bears were here, their work was here.
Anna sat down abruptly, scarcely noticing the bite the angular stones tried to take out of her behind. Carolyn Van Slyke was the mother of a bear researcher-a temporary baby bear researcher, true, but it was a link. Carolyn was a photographer with no film, murdered, sliced up, bits of her put in a stuff sack smeared with dust and scales from an extremely out-of-the-way bear eatery.
Had she accidentally or otherwise been photographing a Glacier bear researcher doing something for, against or to a grizzly that they oughtn't, and then was killed because of it and the telltale film stolen?
The train of thought, rattling along the track at breakneck speed, derailed suddenly, upset by the same old questions: Killed her with what? Carved her face why? And what could a researcher be doing that was so vile that an observer must die lest she tell? People could harass the bears but it was the harassers that came out the worse for wear. For a chilling moment Anna was jerked back into the tent in the dark, the bear destroying the camp. The shallow, almost healed scratch on her shoulder began to itch.
Murder by bear? Could someone who knew what he was about creep into a camp at night and salt it with love scent or blood lure in hopes of enticing disaster?
Sure.
Could Rory have done it?
Easily.
Joan Rand, huddled in the night, matching Anna scream for scream, was blessedly free of suspicion. She had the only genuinely ironclad alibi: she'd been with the investigating officer at the time of the incident.
A bear could be attracted in that manner. It wasn't guaranteed but definitely possible. That the bear would kill anybody was a long shot, and that it would kill a specific target so long as to be preposterous. It followed, then, that if the bear had been intentionally attracted to their camp and if the individual responsible for it was sane, the bear had been meant only to frighten or, with luck, injure one of them. If universal malice was ruled out as a motive, the only things left were revenge on Anna, Joan or, maybe, Rory-if he wasn't the perpetrator-or a desire to frighten them off from what they were doing.
Because in doing what they were doing they would discover what hewas doing.
Anna laughed out loud, startling herself with the sudden noise. "What the hell were we doing?" she asked the rocks and bugs. "Collecting information on bears," she answered herself.
Like Carolyn Van Slyke was with her camera?
Like Anna appeared to be doing right now?
The wind grew a little colder, the cirque a little more isolated. Anna waited for a cloud to pass over the sun to complete the picture, but the clear summer sky wouldn't cooperate. Breathing deeply of air so cool and thin and pure it seemed to negate the possibility of deceit in any who breathed it, she stared down the talus-raddled cirque and across the green and black summit of Flattop. What on earth could a bear researcher need so desperately to hide?
The puzzle she'd been so assiduously working on began to deconstruct. How, if at all, did Bill McCaskil with his borrowed coat and his history of financial fraud fit into the picture? There was money in research. Where there was money there could be con men trying to get it. Those sorts of evils transpired in offices over phone lines. The perpetrators didn't actually go into the woods where the work was being done. There was no money at that end of the stick.
Thinking was getting her nowhere, and sitting motionless in the wind, she was getting cold. Anna returned to her task. The rocks were soft enough that in many places marks had been left on their surfaces by the claws of the grizzlies. Of the bear family, the grizzly was one of the most perfectly adapted to digging. The four-inch claws were virtually unbreakable and the characteristic hump on the shoulders, a silhouette that struck fear into the human observer rather like that of a shark's fin cutting through the water, was a lump of muscles that provided the bears with tremendous power in their forelegs. The better for digging up moths.
Anna saw residue of that power in the claw-scored argillite and the upheaval of tons of rock in the width of the cirque. Of the habits of the bears, she learned a great deal over the next couple of hours. Of the person who had visited an aggregation in the last few days she found nothing, not so much as a gum wrapper.
The magic hour was approaching. Bears sicsta'd from thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred hours, Joan had said. Anna knew the numbers were approximate, varying, one would assume, from bear to bear. Still, as the minute hand on her watch closed the gap between five-thirty and six o'clock, she grew increasingly nervous.
Earlier, from her elevated perch, she had spotted five oval excavation areas. She'd inspected three. Alert for signs of returning diners, she hurried toward the fourth. She never got there. Halfway between the third and fourth was a bear dig of a very different aspect. It was linear, the rocks turned over in neat rows and not as deep, six to eight inches at most.
Things natural tended to eschew straight lines. Lines were a mathematical construct taught to the disordered minds of children until, in adulthood, people favored them, writing, digging, planting and, when possible, walking in them.
On hands and knees, Anna crawled along the linear upset of talus. Rocks had not been dug per se, but pried loose and overturned. On closer inspection she could see marks in the stone; not the evenly spaced scrape of claws but sharp, angular scratches that had to have been made with a shovel or Pulaski. A person, most probably the person Anna sought, had been to the cirque for the same reason as the bears: to dig up army cutworm moths.
Sitting on her heels, eyes roaming the edges of the depression for interlopers of any species, she thought about the strange young man, Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. The day they'd seen him, before the grizzly had come to their camp, they had passed a field of glacier lilies, another preferred food of the Glacier bear population. Someone with a spade had been digging them up. Most likely the obvious choice: Geoffrey Whoever. At the time it seemed of little importance. Illegal certainly, but one man with a shovel and a backpack was not going to dig the lilies to extinction.
There was nothing to indicate the digger of moths was the same person as the digger of lilies except that people pilfering the natural food of bears was an oddity. Rare to catch one doing it; statistically improbable to find two. The young man with the lovely smile and the suspicious habits was not a bear researcher; Joan would have known him. At least he wasn't a bear researcher in Glacier.
Could an adolescent rogue researcher be murderously messing about with Glacier's grizzlies? The concept was absurd but Anna didn't throw it out entirely. She merely consigned it to the heap in her brain where other absurdities connected with this case lay.
Because it was cold and she was tired and the sun was going to be down in a couple of hours, she thought of werewolves. As a rational westerner, Anna didn't believe in the existence of the mythical monsters. As the sister of an eminent psychiatrist, she knew there were nutcases wandering the moonlit streets who sincerely believed they were werewolves. People suffering from lycanthropy. On rare but recorded occasions these individuals lived out their psychosis to the point of killing, ripping out throats and drinking blood as they believed they must in their wolf-like state. Was it possible a person could believe himself a grizzly? Why not? People believed they were Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, the reincarnation of Michelangelo. In Mississippi, Anna'd dealt with a woman who believed herself to be the mother of eight children, all penguins.
Why not a bear?
Like those suffering from lycanthropy, could the psychosis go so far as to drive the sufferer to seek to live as a bear would live, eat as a bear would eat and kill as a bear would kill?
Anna thought back on the night she and Joan had been visited. Neither of them had seen an animal, merely heard what they believed to be an animal. They had only Rory's word for it that there'd been a bear and Rory was not exactly the poster boy for mental stability.
A deep and rotten core of fear opened in Anna, making her nauseated. She and Buck had been siphoned off to assist Ruick. Joan was alone in an isolated camp with Rory Van Slyke, an excellent candidate for the Bear Boy.
"Wait, wait, wait," Anna said, calming herself. Rory could have done many things but he couldn't have come to the cirque with a navy stuff bag, and it had not been he who had been digging lilies. The altitude, the solitude, a long day's work were scrambling her thoughts.
Creating a trance-like state induced by self-hypnosis that allows the fears and wish-images of the subconscious mind to be accessed by the conscious mind. Anna'd heard Molly say that in a lecture at Yale once ten years before. Then, she'd thought it a wonderfully phrased crock of shit. Now she wasn't so sure.
"Werebears," she said out loud to mock herself out of the heebie-jeebies.
It didn't work. The missing flesh so carefully cut from the face of Mrs. Van Slyke-a person using a knife rather than teeth and claws to pull the edible flesh from the prey? An absorbing if macabre theory. Much that was known didn't fit with the werebear tale: the specificity and tidiness of the flesh removal, caching the flesh, stealing film, moving and hiding the body.
Anna put it from her mind and concentrated on trying to track the individual with the shovel. Shovel: that was a reassuring indicator of sanity. A person so far gone with mental illness as to imagine himself a bear by night would surely dig with his hands.
Six o'clock; time was up but Anna was not finished.
Clearing her mind of everything that was not visible on the ground, she slid easily into the tracker's zone, a quiet place where one could wait for as long as need be for the minutest sign to come clear. The shovel dig was fresh, not more than twenty-four hours old.
The fine layer of silt on the bottoms of the overturned stones was dry on the surface but, when scratched, still retained vestiges of moisture beneath. Overturning the stones carefully, she saw that the moths licked up by real bears had here been scraped off by human hands. The trail the fingers left during the harvest was clear. The navy bag had told Anna the gatherer of moths had visited this site. Had he used the bag to store his moths to cat later? Did he cat the moths, as the bears did, al fresco, one rockful at a time?
There was no way to tell which end of the linear dig was the beginning and which was the end. Anna stood a moment choosing the most logical direction from which the digger might have come. The same way she had, south from Highline Trail. She began with the opposite end of the line of disturbed talus, the end from which he had most likely departed. Squatting on her heels, she focused loosely on the ground and waited.
The low angle of the sun was perfect for tracking. And besides herself and bears, the digger was probably the only human who'd walked here for maybe years. Had conditions been otherwise she would not have been able to track over such an inhospitable surface.
A tread mark in the dust half obliterated by what must be the print from an enormous padded paw. A scuff, straight and smooth that could be made only by the side of a shoe- leather or rubber. Four yards farther on a veritable signpost: a single slab of talus overturned by the edged tool. Why that one, Anna couldn't guess. It must have looked particularly mothy to the guy.
A puffing, like a small steam engine straining uphill, broke her concentration. Before she looked she knew what it was. She'd heard it the night of the bear visitation. Fear, sudden, new, remembered, washed down from throat to belly to bowels.
The bears had come to feed.