John Brown, Anna's chief ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway, was I markedly grumpy about the disruption of her learning project, somewhat mollified by having had her off the payroll for over a week, and amenable to allowing her to remain four more days to finish up, or attempt to, her training on the use of DNA research in the management of park wildlife.
Dispatch notified Joan of Anna's return. Rather than try to give detailed directions that draggled off trail through rugged country, she kindly agreed to meet Anna at Fifty Mountain so she could walk with them to the next trap site. Buck had been cut loose from the project and was hiking out as Anna hiked in, though by a different trail. He had a girlfriend in Waterton, Canada.
Civilization, much as she'd looked forward to it, had proved a disappointment. The sense of order, safety and rationality she had fantasized 21 about had not been forthcoming. In place of safety she'd found dullness and isolation. Order and rationality had consisted of scribbling the crazy parts down on report forms and filing them, imposing not order, but an appearance of order. People so desperately needed an illusion of control to give them courage to get up in the morning.
Anna's illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she'd made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn't happen for the best. One can knock till one's knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened. Those who didn't know her well construed this to mean she was cynical or even bitter. Anna felt it allowed her to see past expectations to what was and freed her from the need to figure out what it meant.
Unfortunately, this cultivated mind-set was only half useful. It was good to see what was. But it was her job to figure out what it meant. She had failed at her job. That others had failed too was of little comfort.
Heading into the wilderness with thoughts such as these muting her senses, she found she was disappointed in the out-of-doors as well. The realization was so alarming she stopped walking and stood in the heat of the sun. She'd grown disenchanted with the natural world because it had been behaving in what seemed an unnatural manner, and disappointed with the world of people because it behaved precisely as she'd come to expect it would.
This way madness lies,she thought and took some time to realign her brain. For twenty minutes she stood sweating in the heat of the switchback noting only the breezes, the color of thimbleberry, the feather-light scratch of needles against the sky. Finally, having found her way back into her own skin, she walked on with a lighter load. Expectations abandoned, now whatever occurred, however strange, would be as nature intended. Everything would make sense. That she could not see the pattern was a fault within herself, not an aberration within the natural world.
Joan and Rory were waiting for her at Fifty Mountain Camp. They looked and smelled as if they'd been in the bush for three days and Anna was delighted. Joan's nose and forehead were sunburned and she had a scratch on one cheek from battling the shrubbery. Rory had grown brown and, to Anna's eye, taller, stronger and clearer since the death of his stepmother. Not being a Christian soul, Anna believed there were those who belonged on the Better Off Dead list. She didn't doubt that the toxic Carolyn Van Slyke was such a person. Next time she saw Lester, Anna would be disappointed if he, too, had not begun to flourish now that the influence of his violent wife was removed. Disappointed, not surprised. There was that about Lester that Anna suspected craved the violence, that he might seek out another wife who, if not actually prone to physical violence, would at least verbally and psychologically abuse him.
"Are you going to college, Rory?" she asked abruptly in the midst of their reunion.
"What? Yes, next year," he replied as the questions soaked in.
"University of Washington in Seattle?" she demanded.
"No. I'm going to school in Spokane. I got the grades to get in."
Anna was satisfied. He wouldn't be living at home. Lester Van Slyke would never be convicted of anything in a court of law. Lester was a victim and, as such, Anna supposed deserving of pity and understanding. That was fine on the surface but now and then victims, people who chose to be or to remain victims, did as much damage to the offspring of the union as the abusers did. Politically incorrect as the theory was, Anna'd kicked around long enough to know it was true.
"If Rory's future is settled to your satisfaction, perhaps we might go?" Joan said and smiled with her lovely crooked teeth. Her exceedingly round cheeks pushed her glasses up.
Anna laughed. "Lead on."
"I'm glad you're back," Joan said as Rory helped her on with her pack. "We've been needing a treat."
Anna was considered a treat. Things were looking up.
The previous day Joan and Rory had dismantled a hair trap beyond the burn area to the south at a confluence of two avalanche chutes. The barbed wire was rolled and the samples secured. Rory took the hard-sided case with the blood lure and the love potion. Joan had the samples from the last two traps. Flattered to be welcomed and glad, after so long spinning her proverbial wheels, to be of service, Anna lashed the heavy rolls of wire to the frame of her pack and rotated herself into it.
Enough daylight remained that they could hike to within striking distance of where the new hair trap was to be and set up camp. Joan in the lead, they set off northward across an expanse of glorious green meadow littered with immense squared boulders. Wildflowers, late blooming because winter had held on overlong, spangled the grasses and occasionally a rare pond, tiny, midnight blue and seemingly as deep as an ocean, gleamed darkly in the undulations left by a retreating glacier.
Rory, healed by the good mountain air or exposure to Joan Rand's idiosyncratic brand of sanity, followed Joan, chattering away like a healthy teenager.
Anna was happy to let the sound flow by with the staggering beauty of the scenery. Her own cure was at work, and normalcy was flowing back into the void murder and mayhem had carved out. Before long she added her own cheery sound pollution and whistled a tune her father had taught her, one that meandered and had no words.
Beyond the meadow the trail dropped off steeply, leading down into the valley that would eventually widen out to hold the splendor of Waterton Lake. The first mile was of switchbacks carved through rock. As it descended, the foliage thickened. Trees grew taller and mountainsides of ripe huckleberries slid away in old avalanche chutes above and below the trail.
"Great bear country this time of year," Joan hollered back. "They come for the huckleberries. So make a joyful noise. We don't want to startle anybody." Joan acted on her own direction by belting out the first line of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in ascratchy alto.
The light, gold with late afternoon, drenched hillsides shoulder-deep in wildflowers of every hue, pushing out from cracks in the rocks. They hiked and they sang and Anna realized balance had been restored. She was having a good time. More than that, she was having a good time with people. If that wasn't well balanced, sanity was highly overrated.
As they crossed a wide, flat shank of hill, the trail a narrow ribbon carved from the slope with pick and shovel, Joan pointed out where they would go in the morning to set up the next trap. There was no break in the ragged alder skirting. When they left the trail they would fight their way up an avalanche chute to where it converged with another, smaller chute on what Joan promised was a flattish spot.
To find a place suitable to camp, they hiked another couple of miles descending into the forest proper. So far north, with so much moisture to draw on, it came close to a forest primeval in Anna's eyes. The trees were huge, great piney boughs obscured the sky. Beneath, ferns grew tall, well overhead. There was a deep hush of needles and leaves underfoot. A crashing and a glimpse of brown through the green-cast shadows announced that they'd invaded the domain of a moose cow. Probably there was water nearby.
Anna laughed and pointed as if the others could have missed the cow's noisy departure. Anna liked moose. She'd fallen in love with them when she worked on Isle Royale in Michigan. The Bullwinkle Syndrome: though moose were immense, potentially dangerous, wild animals, their bulbous noses and shambling disjointed stride always made her want to play with them. Good sense and respect for their dignity had kept her in check.
"Moose," she said idiotically.
"There're a lot in this part of the park," Joan said.
"Cool," Rory put in.
Cool indeed.
Camp was deliciously sylvan. Doused with DEET, the mosquitoes were tolerable. The quiet was so deep it was tangible, a force that cradled the brain in soft folds. Civilized quiet of the same intensity made the ears ring. Here it made the soul expand. Anna breathed it in. The gentle chitchat of camp did nothing to injure the silence but dropped onto its surface like petals on a pond. Anna listened to Joan joking with her young protege, hearing the voices in pleasant counterpoint to the forest's peace.
"Story time," Joan said when supper had been eaten and the dishes- plastic sacks into which hot water was poured to reconstitute various carbohydrate substances- were cleared away and cached in a tree for the night. "What's been happening all these three days while we've been working for a living?"
In the hours since she'd realigned her brain and enjoyed the rejuvenating effects of Joan Rand and the wilderness, the murder investigation had retreated so far as to seem ancient history. Anna brought it to the fore without rancor, a puzzle only, valuable as entertainment around a single candle Joan always burned, her own private "campfire."
A look at Rory let Anna know the tale, though of his stepmother, held no real horrors for him. Early on, Anna knew he'd suspected his dad. It had been that, more than Carolyn's demise, that had tortured him. Anna guessed between pouring fish guts and blood and nailing barbed wire to trees, he'd had a significant amount of therapeutic conversation with Joan.
Leaning on her sleeping bag and pack, Anna told them about her phone calls, the name of Fetterman, the unclear connection between the truck and trailer abandoned on the northeast corner of the park and McCaskil's aliases. The only phone conversation she omitted was the one she'd had with Francine out of Carolyn's office. Maybe Rory'd not been as close to his stepmother as had first appeared but he didn't need to have her memory trashed.
No competition in the way of TV, radio, the Internet or floor shows, Anna had a good audience and found herself rambling on more than she intended. She told them about the night she spent hiding in the rocks on the shoulder of Cathedral Peak, how she'd dreamt of a bear padding around and woke to find her water bottle punctured by what could have been teeth, how she'd searched the den, finding it swept clean but for the peanut, the dime and the part of a biscuit.
"We're nothing if not thorough," Anna finished. "Harry even had the biscuit analyzed."
"Flour and water?" Rory ventured.
"Protein, fat, fiber, ash and a few other things," Anna told him. "Dog food was our guess."
Joan sat up, the look of passive interest sparked by something deeper. "How big was it?" she asked. "About the size of a charcoal briquette?"
"It was broken," Anna said. "But about that. Why?"
"Do you remember exactly what it was made of?"
Anna squeezed her eyes shut, trying to picture the sheet of paper. "No percentages. What I said maybe, plus calcium. The bulk, I remember, was dry matter. Sounded sinister to me."
"Omnivore food," Joan said.
Anna opened her eyes. "Omnivore food?"
"It's what we feed bears in captivity. A normal-sized bear will eat about six pounds of omnivore food and about that much in fruits and vegetables every day."
"Somebody's feeding the bears?" Rory said. "I mean, feeding them bear food?"
Anna laughed. Feeding bears intentionally or otherwise in the national parks was an ongoing problem, but Rory was right. Nobody fed them bear food. "Why would anybody do that?" she asked. "To lure the bears?"
"Bears eat it," Joan said. "Bears aren't finicky. But it's no great lure. We spent years developing lures. Omnivore chow isn't even in the top one hundred. The stuff hasn't got much of an odor. The scent not only doesn't broadcast, it's not all that alluring. You might feed bears with it but I doubt you could use it to attract them."
"You could habituate them," Rory said unexpectedly. "You know, always have food for them at the same time and the same place so they come there over and over."
Anna and Joan thought about that for a while. "You could," Anna said slowly. "But why?"
Between them they listed the obvious reasons: to shoot them, observe them, capture them, photograph them. All were possible, none practical. Glacier National Park was a place where bears were protected, monitored. Their numbers, habits and activities were scrutinized by rangers, researchers and an increasingly informed public. If a person wished to manipulate the bears in any of the suggested ways, there were thousands upon thousands of acres just to the north in British Columbia where, on private lands, it could be done either legally or with a much greater chance of remaining undetected.
"Boone and Crockett," Anna said, remembering the Washington man evilly ogling the elk. "A trophy-sized bear, one that could tempt a poacher?"
"Not in the lower forty-eight," Joan said. "Because of food, genetics, etcetera, our bears are on the small side. A big old male could weigh maybe five hundred pounds. Maybe. Four or four-fifty would be more like it. The trophy hunters do Canada up north, or Alaska."
"An idiot?" Anna suggested. "Wandering around like some demented Johnny Appleseed feeding bears?"
"There's always room for another idiot," Joan admitted.
Anna had her own tent this time out and she found she missed Joan's company. Through the cloth walls she could hear the other woman snoring in an unladylike fashion and found the noise soothing. Sleep was eluding Anna and it was good to know someone was resting.
The nerves and hyperawareness that had poisoned her last night in the backcountry had passed. She was not lying awake waiting for the clack of sticks and the onslaught of toothy beasts. The man who had rolled a stone down at her and fired off a round didn't concern her much, either. He had not stalked her. It was she who'd sought him out. If he'd not already finished whatever he'd been up to and left the park, he was probably staying as far away from anybody in green and gray as he could.
Telling her story to Joan and Rory had loosed the scraps and facts she'd managed to tuck away. Now they blew about till the inside of her skull looked like Fifth Avenue after a ticker-tape parade. Joan and Rory; the conversation had triggered something. Anna lay comfortable in her bag, fingers locked behind her head, eyes on the perfect darkness beyond the screen of her front door, waiting for the scrap that would fit to sort itself out from the others. Feeding the bears, trophy bears floated by, Boone and Crockett. That was it. Boone and Crockett, the last word on what was and was not a trophy animal and where it fit in the hierarchy of biggest and best based on skull measurements-taken after death, naturally.
In the pocket of the surplus army jacket Carolyn Van Slyke was caught dead in, the jacket they were pretty sure belonged to William McCaskil, was a piece of note paper. "B amp; C" was written at the top. Below was a list of numbers. Boone and Crockett and the measurements of a trophy animal, Anna was willing to bet. In the morning she would radio Ruick and get him to check it out.
What, if anything, it had to do with Van Slyke's murder, she couldn't fathom. Had Carolyn seen and photographed this animal and so been killed and mutilated, her film stolen? Glacier didn't have trophy-sized bears, but there were other creatures: moose, elk, mountain lion. That didn't account for the omnivore food. And who would kill and mutilate a photographer for taking a picture of the animal? How would one be caught in a compromising position with a trophy-sized animal? It was feasible the poacher could pack the kill out. They needn't take the whole animal. Just the head.
Now there was a grisly picture.
Anna shook her head in the dark. By dint of great mental strain, she'd solved one more small mystery: what the list in the army jacket meant. And nothing but nothing was cleared up.
"You asleep, Joan?" she whispered on impulse.
No answer from the neighboring tent.
"Goodnight then," she said and resolutely shut her brain off for the night.
Work was good: hard, hot, deerflies biting. Wretched scrambles through cutting brush with a heavy pack on was what Anna was good at. Like fighting wildland fire, it was deliciously mindless in that just staying on one's feet and doing one's job took total concentration. Joan Rand was an added blessing. When Anna had a boss she trusted, she found enormous relief and contentment in just following orders.
Shortly after two p.m. they had the DNA hair trap assembled. Rory predicted the pickings from this site would be slim. He expressed the opinion that the North American grizzly was too intelligent to work as hard as they had just to roll in essence of rotted fish and eat a few huckleberries.
Rory was showing signs of being a kid and not the scared, suspicious shadow of an adult that Anna'd seen when they'd first met. She was beginning to enjoy his company. Joan always had, but then when it came to adolescent boys she saw through the eyes of a mother. Anna's were more akin to those of a parole officer.
The eighty feet of barbed wire stapled in a rough circle around a place that was only flat in Joan's imagination, they began the butt-and-heels slide down to the trail.
The next site to be disassembled was back the direction they'd camped. A luxury-since they'd be several nights there, they didn't have to carry all their gear on their backs during the day.
With a minimum of cursing and scratches, they regained the trail. As they caught their breath, the radio crackled out Joan's call number. It was the chief ranger asking for Anna.
"You got a fax," Ruick said. "From some gal at the Tampa tourism office. Looks like a brochure for Fetterman's Adventure Trails. Nothing on it clicked with me. I'm guessing the alias was a fluke."
"Describe it for me." Anna waited while Harry marshaled his thoughts.
"Nothing out of the ordinary. It's a fax. The resolution isn't all that great. Fetterman's looks like a lot of those tourist trap places. Fun for the whole family sort of thing. There's a picture of what's probably an alligator. Let's see. Animal shows. Souvenirs. Looks like a kind of swamp tour thing with nutria being fed to gators. Kind of a mom and pop operation. There's a group picture on the back. Faces are a blur. Underneath. Let's see… 'Looking forward to new friends, George and Suzanne Fetterman, Carl Micou, Geoffrey Micou, Arthur Gray and Tunis Chick.'
"The gal who sent it has written in the margin, Adventure Trails was closed down after George Fetterman's death earlier this summer.' "
"How old is the brochure?" Anna asked. "Can you tell?"
"Hmm. Lemme see, lemme see. Here. Nineteen ninety-six. Old. I expect nothing much changed in Adventure Trails from year to year."
Anna gave the radio back to Joan. Harry had just called as a courtesy. The brochure held little interest and less information. Neither she nor he had any desire to waste airtime playing twenty questions to figure out what if anything a derelict roadside attraction in Florida had to do with a dead and mutilated Seattle divorce lawyer in Montana.
In fact, Anna's mental gears had been sufficiently shifted over to the DNA project that they had hiked two miles down the trail before she figured it out.
"Joan! Stop!"
Joan and Rory turned to look back at her. Anna had stalled in the middle of the trail.
"Tell me about that boy you've been e-mailing. The one making the map," she demanded of the researcher.