She hadn’t the strength to run any farther. It was too dark to climb safely down the treacherous wall of argillite. She had nothing to defend herself with but sticks and rocks. Taking a lesson from bunnies, ducklings and others of nature’s most helpless creatures, Anna stayed hidden. Her breathing returned to normal. Knees and shoulders wedged against the sides of the crevice, head cocked, she listened through the crying of the wind.
Nothing. Nothing proved nothing. She settled herself in as best she could. Haste, not comfort, had dictated her choice of hiding places. The crack into which she wedged herself was hardly large enough to hold all her parts. Definitely not large enough to hold them in any configuration that wasn’t torturous. Still, she was grateful to have it and in no great hurry to venture back into the woods in search of better.
Darkness wove its imperfect cover. South-facing, the cliff collected heat from the day and, though Anna was cold, she would not die of exposure. Pointed chunks jabbed at her left buttock and pried under her right shoulder blade, but she could move a little and that kept her legs and feet from going to sleep.
She listened. She dozed. She felt sorry for herself and angry by turns. She dozed again. A crack, a snap, two pieces of wood banged together or the dream memory of a gunshot woke her. Listening only made her ears ache. She drifted. In a dream, she heard the soft padding of a huge bear outside her temporary tomb, dreamed it so close she could hear the questing whuff-whuff and smell its breath.
Dog breath,
she dreamed, foul and familiar.
Thirst became an overriding factor around three a.m. She’d fled without water. The run had cost her. Here and there throughout her career, Anna’d suffered the usual discomforts of dwelling outside civilization: heat, cold, hunger, high altitude, sore feet, insect bites and stinging plants. The most insistent of these was thirst. The body knew it would survive the stings and itches, pain and even, for a while, hunger. Water it had to have.
Determined to stay in hiding till first light, she passed the hours wiggling fingers and toes and resolutely not thinking about liquids in any form. Near five o’clock the quality of darkness at the mouth of her hidey-hole began to change. Despite the dire misgivings she’d had, the sun was going to rise again and she was going to be around to see it.
Fumblingly, she found her feet and pushed to a standing position, head and shoulders above the lip of the ledge. From this rabbit’s-eye viewpoint she took stock of the black and gray predawn world. No gun-men lounged nearby waiting to blow her head off. For once the wind wasn’t blowing. The silence of the morning was so absolute that, had it not been for the cracking of her joints as she unfolded, she would have suspected she’d gone deaf overnight.
Nowhere was the sound of birds waking, water running, squirrels doing whatever it was squirrels did at this hour of the morning. Slowly she became aware of a slight smacking sound intruding on the perfect peace. It was her tongue as it tried to drum up enough saliva to wet her throat.
As she realized again her thirst, a water bottle materialized. It had been there all along but in the grainy morning light she’d not noticed it. Like a mirage in the desert it stood alone and upright not ten feet from where her head stuck up out of the cliff’s top. By itself, sitting on a slab of rock the wind had swept free of needles, it looked like bait in a clumsily laid trap.
She’d carried no water on her helter-skelter run down the mountain. She’d neither dropped it nor, in her haste, forgotten. While she’d slept, someone had crept close to where she was hiding and put it there. Something had visited her. Who would try and crush her with a boulder, take a shot at her, then track her to her lair to leave water? Before fear could take over, it was gone. Anyone, anything, who brought water must be a benevolent spirit. Unless the water was poisoned. Absurd. Surely it would be infinitely easier to smash her skull with a chunk of argillite while she slept than to poison water and leave it for her to find.
Having visually searched the still-empty area along the cliff top she looked again at the bottle. It was hers, taken from the pack she’d abandoned. Near the top, written in red nail polish, the most indelible of all marking substances, PIGEON was printed in block letters.
A sense of unreality swept over her. It was so strong her vision blurred and she reeled in her cramped space, her pelvic bones rapping painfully against the stone. Like a bad comic, she did a double take then rubbed her eyes with her fists. But when she looked again the apparition was still there, bizarre in its homely mundane form.
Thinking of the Lost Boys and the poisoned cake, Hansel and Gretel and gingerbread, Anna eased from the crack in the rock one stiff, chilled inch at a time, emerging like a lizard too long out of the sun. The crevice she’d squished herself into was no more than a shallow vertical chink in the rocky drop where a rectangular piece of argillite had fallen away. She crawled on hands and knees to the water. Resisting the temptation to snatch it up and pour it down her throat, she studied the plastic bottle. White with blue lettering, she’d gotten it free when she’d joined the health club in Clinton, Mississippi, the previous spring. The bottle was as she remembered it but for two puncture marks about a quarter of the way down from the mouth. One dented the plastic. The other pierced it through. Had it not been set carefully upright, the water would have leaked away.
Teethmarks. Anna remembered her dream of padding paws and dog breath. A bear then, not a dream. A bear had brought her water to drink. Savoring the fairy-tale image while the unreality of it made her head swim, Anna watched her hand reach for the water, her fingers curl around the cold plastic. She popped open the nipple and drank.
If it was poisoned, so be it. She wouldn’t have missed the spurious magic of the moment for the promise of ten lifetimes.
18
Because she was
truly thirsty, Anna could follow the water down her throat, feel it spread out in her stomach, soak through the walls, thin her blood and plump up her skin. Not a trace of poison anywhere. No one, nothing, sprang from the woods to strike her down as she drank. The water was a gift, not a trap, and she was as grateful as she was mystified.
The body satisfied, the mind was able to expand its focus past where the next drink was coming from. Carrying the bottle, empty now but far too interesting with its puncture marks to be left behind, she moved partly to get the blood flowing and because, gift or no gift, she did not want to linger in a place she’d been found out.
Walking slowly into the trees, where morning’s light had not yet cleared away the shadows, she put together a rudimentary plan. Had the water not made its miraculous appearance, she would have headed down toward camps and creeks immediately. Given a short reprieve, she needed to go back to where she’d left her pack. Not to find, capture or confront evil-doers, she promised herself, but to look without being seen and to get her stuff back, including the 35-mm camera with film containing pictures of her attacker’s bootprints. Or Gunga Din’s bootprints. Could the roller of the rock and the bringer of water be one and the same? It made even less sense than Anna’s image of a beneficent bruin carrying her water bottle in its kindly jaws.
Taking her time, moving with an ear to her own footfalls and an eye to keeping trees or rocks between her and the ridge where the pack had been left, she walked in a long ellipse so she would come upon the place from the north and above. This time she would be the stalker.
Movement and the return of the sun restored her equilibrium. Hunger, burning lightly in her middle, was a pleasant companion, reminding her she was alive and had much to look forward to. Within thirty minutes she had wended her surreptitious way back to where her reckless sprint had begun the evening before. Above and to the right of the den’s—if it was in fact a den—entrance she made herself comfortable, her back to a green and gold boulder rapidly warming in the sun. The branches of two pines, tangled like ancient lovers fighting, created a pierced screen between her and the world.
A woman in purdah, Anna watched in security. She even began to enjoy herself as befitted a person given a front-row seat in a crown jewel park. Her pack was not where she’d dumped it, but ten or fifteen feet away. The sleeping bag had been pulled off, unrolled and thrown aside. The pack itself was open and the contents spilled out. From this distance she couldn’t tell what was missing. It occurred to her that the camera—or at least the exposed film—would be taken or destroyed. Probably her radio would have suffered a like fate. She hoped her notes had been overlooked.
The boulder that had been pushed down toward her had come to rest below the pack, maybe six yards. Beneath its bulk poked the crushed arms of a small tree. From her elevated vantage point it wasn’t hard to see the tree branches as the scaly withered arms and legs of a flattened witch. Anna let the Wizard of Oz take over and, in her imagination, saw the witch’s legs shrivel and vanish beneath the fallen house.
The mind game shifted and she saw herself beneath the rock. Her own life crushed, her own legs and arms made sere and dry. That, after all, was what had been intended. She thought about that for a while. It hurt her feelings and offended her delicate sensibilities but, sequestered in the warmth of the sun, safe from prying eyes, she wasn’t afraid. The rock and the tree milked for all the drama they had to offer, her thoughts moved on.
The brush that had been banked against the bottom of the rocky outcrop, partially obscuring the slot in the stones, had been dragged away. The opening was considerably larger than she’d imagined, several feet high and eight or ten feet wide, tapering down at either end. A nice place to pass the winter or hide out from the law.
Since it was not near denning time Anna had given little thought to disturbing a bear inside. Now she thought of the mother and cubs she’d seen the day before and wished she knew more about the habits of the grizzly. Did they use their dens in summer? Take naps there? Water the plants? Dust? She seemed to remember that, given the choice, a bear would return to the same place to den winter after winter but adapted fairly easily if the den were made uninhabitable by some natural disaster: flood, avalanche, ski resort.
Snug on her hillside, the thought of bears in residence did little more than delay her slide and scramble down a few minutes more. Her long watch was for two-legged animals. An hour passed. Anna neither heard, saw, smelled nor sensed anything to suggest that she was not alone.
One of the items tumbled from her abandoned pack was a one-liter wide-mouth plastic water bottle. With the mountainside warming, Anna took a greater and greater interest in it.
She was too old or too crusty to pass for Snow White or Rose Red. She could not expect a bear to bring her a beverage a second time.
Shortly after nine-thirty, convinced there was no one near and grown significantly thirsty again, she left her secluded niche and worked her way as quietly as she could on the sliding scree to the gash beneath the rocky overhang. There she waited once more. No sounds from within. No cool exhalation that she’d come to expect out of the mouths of big caves. This, then, was what it looked like; a shallow grotto beneath the rock. Still, she skirted it respectfully, careful her shadow did not fall across the mouth, and went to her pack.
The camera was there, though the film, both exposed and unused, was gone. The NPS radio Ruick had issued her was gone. Her flashlight had been smashed. The greatest disappointment was the water bottle she’d packed in. It was undamaged but the contents had been poured out. Her portable water filter was missing. All the evidence envelopes were gone. Her notebook had been left but the pages with writing on them had been ripped out and taken. Near as she could tell, everything else had been ignored: map, underwear, socks, pens remained.
Whoever had messed with it had cared only that she go away and go away with no record of the things she’d seen. The items taken or destroyed decreed she must hike out and soon.
Why empty this water bottle, steal the filter, then go to the trouble of tracking her down to leave a gift of water outside her hiding place? Why try to kill her with rock and gun, then let her sleep unharmed through the night? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Or, like the werewolf, kind and humane by day, ravening beast by night?
Moving quickly, not allowing herself to mourn the loss of the water, she stuffed the goods, including the sleeping bag, willy-nilly into the main compartment of the pack.
Having finished, she turned her attention to the den. During her musings and stuffings she’d never once turned her back on it. Without the flashlight, she was even less anxious to go poking into its shadows than she had been before. But there was nothing for it. Either she looked as best she could or the inspection was put off a minimum of twenty-four hours while she hiked out and made her report.
Approaching the gash from the side, she went down on one knee in the runner’s starting position in case a tactical retreat became suddenly necessary. In her right hand she held the can of bear spray she wore at her belt. The stuff was made mostly of pepper. She knew for a fact it worked on people. She had only the manufacturer’s word that it worked on bears.
The sun was not yet overhead. Far from shining helpfully into the cave’s mouth, it cast a black shadow there. Anna scooched down slightly and thrust her face in under the overhang, listening, sniffing, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. Her nose processed the most information. The smells were many, mixed and strange. Underlying them was the familiar smell of rock and damp in otherwise dry country. Probably one or more seep springs had gone into the making of the cave, though Anna knew better than to hope for any open water. The lesser smells, the newer smells, were what intrigued her. A trace of gas was in the air. Butane maybe. Kerosene, wax, maybe. Perhaps she smelled not the gas itself but the odors left from heated metal, extinguished wicks. Someone had been staying here for a night or more. Someone who’d been willing to smash her to defend his territory.