“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.”
16
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’t
done 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 forklifts 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 sub-adult 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.