“Validation,” she said aloud. Since she had no hard evidence to base it on, she’d not bothered to put it into words for Harry Ruick, or even more damning, into writing on any reports, but she had an overweening sense of bear, a bear padding through the incidents in Glacier. The obvious was the tearing apart of the camp. Less so was the flesh of the victim cached out of reach of a bear. A man digging the food of and dwelling in the den of a bear. The water bottle with teethmarks of a bear.
Nothing striking presented itself. The BIMS that were totally bogus, the lavender ink describing the bear juggling the hedgehog and the report of the dancing bear, Anna set aside. The rest, including the report of the attack on their camp, painted an active but not extraordinarily so, picture of bears being bears.
Shuffling the crazies back into the pile, Anna felt a sudden sympathy with the lavender ink. Things were not necessarily untrue simply because they were unbelievable.
She had done
what she could. Her ear was hot from being pressed to a phone all day. Her stomach was full of complaining gummi bears and the light was going from Joan’s window.
Anna went “home.” Home for so many years had been wherever she fed the cat. Walking through a rapidly cooling twilight enlivened by mosquitoes bent on fueling reproduction with her blood, Anna found herself terribly lonely for her critters, Piedmont’s comforting purr and even Taco’s three-legged bounding, leaping, licking, declaration of welcome that she’d come to expect whenever she opened the front door. Sheriff Davidson, Paul, the new man in her life, she missed as well but not with the same childish want. Davidson hadn’t seen her cry like Piedmont had, hadn’t saved her life like Taco had.
The next morning Anna slept in, then typed up the scraps and snippets of information she’d gleaned in a day’s calling and turned them in to Harry. He read them through carefully and, in the end, could find nothing more enlightening than she had.
“We’ll follow up on this Fetterman thing,” he said. “I’ll call Tampa and see if we can’t get the local police to make a few inquiries for us.”
He didn’t sound overly enthused. Anna didn’t blame him. If they could connect the name of Fetterman to Van Slyke, which they’d failed to do, it might be of some interest but probably wouldn’t go far toward solving their murder.
“We got the lab reports back,” Ruick said. “Rush job because I hinted it was part of the murder investigation but I think what you stumbled across on Cathedral Peak was an amateur entomologist with a dog off leash.” He pushed the folder across the desk and Anna read it without picking it up. The peanut was, near as they could tell, a peanut. The crust of biscuit she’d found was broken down: twenty-three percent protein, four percent fat, ten percent fiber, seven percent ash, a little calcium and a dash of phosphorus. The rest was dry matter and moisture.
“Dog food.” Being a responsible pet owner she’d read the backs of dog food bags to make sure Taco got a balanced diet.
They sat for a bit. Maryanne stuck her head in the office and reminded Harry that the fire management officer from Waterton was due in a few minutes.
“Well,” Harry said, “I hate to keep you tied up when there’s no point in it. Not to mention when I borrowed you, Glacier started paying your salary.” He smiled to let Anna know it was a joke. Anna smiled back politely, pretending she believed him. Budgets were counted out by nickels and dimes. Money was always tight. “You can either pack it in and go back to the Trace or go on up. Joan’s got another four days before this round of traps is completed. You can probably pick up enough about DNA testing to convince John Brown we didn’t waste your time completely.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Anna said. “See what he wants me to do.” The interview was over. She pushed up out of the chair.
“I’ll see an official letter of thanks gets into your personnel file,” Ruick said. He stood and shook hands with her. He was warm and friendly, but she could tell she was already sinking out of his sight. Chances were he’d barely remember her name when next they met. The chief ranger was moving on to the next crisis to threaten his park. Or his career.
“You can leave your gear with the receptionist any time today,” Maryanne told her as she left. A nice way of reminding her the radio needed to be checked in ASAP. Ponce had already gone back to the comfort of his paddock.
“Will do,” Anna said, feeling mildly miffed. In her mind she heard her tiny, mean, long-dead grandmother cackling: “
Think you’re so important? Put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how big a hole it leaves.
”
21
John Brown,
Anna’s chief ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway, was 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 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 switch-back 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 a scratchy 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 protégé, hearing the voices in pleasant counterpoint to the forest’s peace.