“I know,” she said agreeably.
“So I was out there awhile and I kept hearing things, getting real nervous like, you know? But I hadn’t finished my, uh, my business. My insides—”
“What kind of things did you hear?” Anna interrupted, having no desire to learn about Rory Van Slyke’s insides.
For a moment he didn’t answer. He just watched her wrap the blood pressure cuff around his upper arm with an expression of contentment on his face. Anna guessed he was comforted by the trappings of modern medicine, civilization. The things that he’d been raised to believe would keep him safe from the monsters.
She pumped up the cuff and he looked away, suddenly squeamish, as if she were sticking a needle in his vein. “What did you hear?” she asked again.
“Animals, I think. You know, maybe just little ones, though they could have been something else. Maybe mice or rabbits or coyotes or something. I know you’re supposed to make a lot of noise when you go out into the woods like that, to scare the bears off. Joan told me that. It wasn’t that I forgot, but you guys being asleep and all—”
“That’s okay,” Anna said. “Right around camp nobody makes noises. Usually just the fact we’re there and stinking like humans’ll make the bears give us a wide berth.”
“Anyway, I don’t think that stuff I first heard was the bear. Maybe it was but I don’t think so. Then I heard what sounded like footsteps. It scared me pretty bad. I was, uh, done then . . .”
Anna bet he was. Probably every sphincter in his body slammed shut when he heard a grizzly bear headed his way.
“Maybe I should have shouted,” he said. “Maybe it would have scared him away.”
Maybe it would have. Before Anna could be judgmental, she remembered that neither she nor Joan had done any shouting once the attack began. Perhaps if they’d screamed their bloody heads off, the bear would have run away. Instinct had taken over and they’d cowered in silence, gripped by the surety that the only safety lay in being invisible, playing dead.
“Footsteps?” Anna asked. The word seemed inappropriate for the sounds a large omnivore would make lumbering through thick ferns.
“No, it
sounded
like footsteps,” Rory amended. “At first. But then it broke something, a stick or something, and I heard it growl. I’ve been to zoos and all and I saw that movie
The Bear,
but I thought they’d mixed things to get that noise—lions or trains or whatever, like they mixed noises to get Tarzan’s yodel to come out big enough. That’s why little kids can’t do it right.”
Anna turned away on the pretense of tucking the blood pressure cuff back in its plastic case so he wouldn’t see her smiling at the image of a scrawny little Rory Van Slyke pounding on his bony chest and calling to herds of imaginary backyard elephants.
“I guess they didn’t have to fake anything,” he concluded. “That roar was about the most awful sound. That bear was immense. I could hear it ripping into the tents. That’s when I figured I’d better get help.”
The scene played out in Anna’s mind’s eye: a terrified boy in sweats and slippers, alone in the night as every horror he’d nursed for two days in the wilderness—and for who knew how many before he arrived—took form from the darkness. Nightmare made real in fur and teeth and claws and “most awful sound.” Rory had panicked, blindly, brainlessly turned and ran into the trees, Anna would have bet on it. She didn’t blame him. That might very well have been the course she would have adopted had she been given any choices. If he was able to sell himself on the fiction he’d gone for help, he’d be okay. If not, this wretched indication of cowardice would scar him. Anna wasn’t sure she could help, but she’d talk to Joan about it. Being a mother of boys, she might have accrued some wisdom along those lines.
“You’re in fairly good shape for a man who’s been without food or shelter for thirty-six hours,” she told him.
“The hikers gave me fruit and granola bars,” he said. “They’d’ve let me eat everything in their packs—and I could have—but it didn’t seem polite.”
“We’ll see about replenishing their stores,” Anna promised. “And get you some serious food. Let me see your feet.” She squatted in front of where he was seated on the stump and he lifted his foot like a compliant child on a trip to the shoe store.
The Chinese cloth slippers had held up remarkably well. Though they had been pulled and squashed and pounded till they resembled third base after an eleven inning game more than they did shoes, the seams had held. The flat rubber soles, pierced through in several places, had not split.
“You sure got your four-ninety-five’s worth out of these things,” she remarked as she unbuckled the Mary Jane strap on the right shoe and slipped it off. His feet were coal-black from his dusty tramp through the burn. Until he had washed, there was no telling what was bruising and what was dirt. She found one cut on his heel that lined up with a tear in the slipper’s sole, and no blisters.
Gently she palpated the right foot, then the left. “What happened after you went for help?” she asked. “You still owe me thirty-five hours’ worth of story.”
“Not much,” he said vaguely. Anna couldn’t tell if he was being evasive or if the hours’ had run together in his mind. “Just walked, you know. Got lost. Then came out on this trail and ran into the hikers.” His voice was drifty and soft.
“Did you take any falls? Hit your head or anything?”
“No. Like I said, I’m fine.”
Head trauma, then, did not account for this sudden fog. Evasive, Anna decided. If, after some distance had been put between him and bear, the panic had not subsided, and come morning he’d neither tried to find help nor returned to camp to see if Anna and Joan were injured, if he’d holed up, cowering somewhere, the evasiveness made sense. Shame was as great a fogger of memory as a blow to the skull.
The faceless face of the dead woman flashed behind Anna’s eyes and another reason for evasiveness came to mind. Maybe Rory didn’t want her to know precisely what had transpired during the day and a half he’d gone missing because it was something he’d rather keep secret. Like murder.
She snorted abruptly, an aborted laugh gone up her nose. Rory had run off in his slippers and pj’s, pursued, at least in his own mind, by a bear. Then he meets a stranger by accident, kills her for no reason, stashes her pack, finds an edged weapon, drags her into the undergrowth and cuts her face off, all without getting a drop of blood on his person. Even for Anna, suspicion had to have at least a rudiment of logic to buoy it up.
“You go barefoot a lot?” she asked. The calluses on the bottoms of Rory’s feet were thick and hard. He’d suffered less from his overland ordeal than most would.
“A fair amount,” he replied. “Lots of times I run cross-country bare-footed. It drives Coach out of his mind. I only do it in practice. Never at a meet.”
Anna put some lidocaine on his sunburn to help with the pain and, though the day had warmed to the mid-eighties, advised him to put a shirt on so the sun wouldn’t do any more damage.
“I lost my sweatshirt,” he said, sounding as if he was telling a lie.
Anna looked at him sharply. It was his sweatshirt. Nobody cared whether he’d lost it, burned it or given it to a passing elk. Why lie about it? Because he’d twitched, Anna was compelled to pounce. “How did you lose it?”
“I guess I must have dropped it or left it behind or something.”
Vague again. Lying again? Maybe not. Maybe he didn’t know how he’d lost his shirt and that lapse was scaring him. Maybe.
“It happens,” she said neutrally.
“I guess.”
The chief ranger came over to their outdoor clinic. “So. He going to live?”
“For a while,” Anna said and gave Ruick a brief rundown of Rory’s minor complaints.
“We need to figure out the best way down,” Ruick said when she’d finished. “No packaging’s called for. I can send the backboard down on the helicopter. We can either get him to the nearest good landing site for airlift or have Gary or Vic bring the pack horses over and ride on down the south side. From a medical standpoint, do you think it matters a whole hill of beans?”
“Half of one, six dozen of the other,” Anna said.
Rory sat on his stump looking back and forth at them, apparently accustomed to being discussed in the third person when he was in the room. He came to life when Harry said, “We’ll airlift you out, Rory. We’ve got the helicopter till sundown. May as well use it.”
“I don’t need to go down,” Rory said, sounding alarmed at the prospect.
Ruick looked at him, cleared the irritation off his face and changed gears from logistics to public relations. Hunkering on his heels so he wouldn’t be talking down, he explained, “You’ve been out a long time, Rory. Thirty-six hours up here is nothing to sneeze at. Your feet are battered, you’ve gone without food, bad sunburn, dehydrated—”
“I had water,” Rory said defensively. Picking up the high-tech water bottle with the filtering system built in, the one Anna’d admired the first time she’d seen it, he shook it to prove his point.
“You still need to get checked out,” Ruick said reasonably. “Your feet—”
“I only got that one cut and Anna says it’s no big deal. I’ve run thirteen-K races with worse cuts than that. It’s nothing.” Rory was becoming agitated. His reaction struck Anna as excessive for the threat he faced: a free ride in a helicopter and a night or two in a comfortable bed.
Irritation revisited Ruick’s face. He was not used to being thwarted. Probably he had no children. Anna had none but she’d spent the first spring in Mississippi embroiled with the students of Clinton High School. “Thwarted” was putting it mildly.
“You have to go down, son,” Ruick said, striving for fatherly kindness and almost making it.
“No I don’t,” Rory returned. Anna was amazed that someone who could face down a chief ranger would be given the megrims by a mere grizzly bear. It wasn’t that Rory had no fear of Ruick. He did. She could see it in the nervous flick of the eyes and a slight quiver at the corners of his mouth. She could also see that he had no intention of backing down.
She doesn’t take shit off anybody.
Anna remembered him saying that of his stepmother as if it was the highest praise he could bestow. Rory was more afraid of “taking shit,” as he perceived it, than he was of what the chief ranger could do to him if he chose. Which was considerable, up to and including having him removed from the DNA project and the park if he deemed him a danger to himself, others or the resource.
What would make a boy so afraid of taking shit—Anna couldn’t think of a less crude phrase that captured the essence of the phenomenon with such accuracy—off a grown man, and an authority figure to boot? Kids spent the first twenty years of their lives “taking shit” in the form of instruction, correction, insult, advice, manipulation, education and abuse by their elders. By sixteen most were past masters at the art of passive aggression. Anna wondered what Rory’s parents, particularly his father to whom he referred scornfully as “Les,” had done to circumvent the natural flow.
Ruick sighed, stood up and gazed around for a moment. His eyes lit on Anna and he made an executive decision. “You handle this,” he said and stalked off.
Anna and Rory watched him go. Feeling suddenly weary, she sat down on a log next to the boy. “What have you got against going down, getting checked and resting up a bit?” she asked.
Rory took a few seconds to downgrade from obstinate to sullen. “I’m not hurt,” he said. “There’s nothing the matter with me. I’m here to do that bear thing. We got more traps to set, don’t we? I don’t see why I’ve got to go down and be messed with because I got lost. He just wants to cover his ass in case I decide I got some big injury and sue, which I’m not going to do, and make like him calling out the troops and the helicopter and everything was a good idea. Why should I be punished because I accidentally got lost?”
Punished. A kid’s word. Still, Anna could see the logic and had to admit she was impressed that a boy so green in years grasped the CYA mentality a pathologically litigious society had forced upon government agencies.
“That bear tore up our tents,” she tried. “Shredded them like confetti.”
“They were government issue. Don’t tell me they don’t have more tents.”
Anna didn’t. As a matter of fact, they’d already been replaced. The bear team had packed in two spares. They’d been left at Anna and Joan’s camp.
“I’ll sleep on the ground if I have to,” Rory said.
His hands were clasped together in his lap, gripped so tightly the knuckles showed white. Rory’d been terrified of bears. Then a particularly aggressive member of that club had ratified his fears. If he was willing to face another night in the open despite that, more power to him. Maybe that was it, maybe he had to prove to himself he wasn’t a coward.
“Okay,” Anna said. “You stay. I’ll tell Harry.”
Harry was not pleased but he was practical. Legally he could not force Rory to accept medical transport, since the boy was neither mentally incompetent nor unconscious. Technically he was underage, but since his parents were close at hand and he clearly had no life-threatening emergencies, it would be inexcusably heavy-handed to play the minor card. Ruick also struck Anna as fair. She doubted he would mess with Rory’s Earthwatch status on the DNA project.
“You’re going to have to walk back to Fifty Mountain in those things,” Harry warned, pointing to Van Slyke’s disreputable footwear.
“I can do that, sir,” Rory said, all good manners and boyish deference now that he’d gotten his way.
“You got a shirt or something you can put on over that sunburn?”
“Anna put sunscreen on me, sir.”
The “sirs” were put to good effect. Ruick was sufficiently mollified to lose interest. “Lets go, then,” he said. “I expect your parents at least will be glad to see you.”
At Harry’s suggestion the hikers who’d found Rory had gone on ahead. Ruick led, setting a pace that was geared to Van Slyke’s sore feet, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. Rory was in the middle and Anna last.