Given its half-melted then dried consistency, the scat had been left before the rain but not too long before. If it had been deposited much before the storm, it would have dried more completely. The downpour would have reduced it to its component parts, not merely smoothed it over
An educated guess put the age of this sample at five or six days, seven at the outside. Around the time of Mrs. Van Slyke’s death not twenty yards away, around the time the flesh cut from her face had been cached in the tree.
The killer had been here.
The
bear—or a bear—had been here. It was conceivable the smell of the meat in the plastic bags overhead had attracted a passing animal. Their noses were exceptionally keen. But Anna could find no indication this bear made any effort to retrieve his prize: no claw marks on the trunk or lower branches, no disturbed leaf litter or soil around the tree as might be expected from a frustrated three-hundred-pound scavenger.
It appeared as if the bear had simply come to this minuscule clearing, quietly relieved himself and went on. No law against that. Anna thought of the old joke “Where does a bear shit in the woods?” and smiled in spite of herself.
Too much coincidence, though. Bears, grizzly and otherwise, were high-profile inhabitants of Glacier National Park, but given the park’s forty-one hundred square kilometers, there weren’t all that many of them. According to Resource Management statistics, less than three hundred. One of the things the DNA study would do was give a more accurate count. Wishing she’d thought to pack one of Joan’s handy scat sample bottles, Anna made do with another evidence bag—plastic this time—and procured a spoonful for the bear researcher. Anna noted a few of the standard bear leavings: berry seeds, twigs, grasses, most in mint condition. The bulk of this scat sample was made up of a dull brown-gray grainy matter that looked to be closer to digested dirt than plant matter. Another mystery for Joan. As long as there weren’t buttons or buckles or human fingerbones, Anna couldn’t get too excited.
She was glad
to leave the pine clearing, scared to reenter the thick of the brush. It was an act of will to move up the side of the mountain through the obscuring undergrowth at a sensible pace. The urge to claw her way frantically out of the shrubbery didn’t abate till she was not only in the open sunny world of West Flattop Trail but upon Ponce’s broad back. Cowboys were braver on horseback. It was a little known codicil to the code of the west.
For no reason more logical than a bad case of the willies, Anna put a couple of miles between her and the flesh-eating pine tree. At a bend in the trail, a hillside of broken stones created a thousand unique, earth-bearing planters displaying such a breathtaking show of yellows, blues and reds that Anna wondered how human gardeners could bear to enter the competition. She tethered Ponce to a downed tree deep in tasty grasses and emptied her pack: water, lunch, map, evidence packets. Lunch first, she decided. Scrambling up and down the tree had given her the insistent appetite of an active child.
A peanut butter and honey sandwich under her belt, she was better able to concentrate on her find. Donning a new pair of latex gloves, she examined the torn bags, all that was left of the macabre food cache. The blood, she had little doubt, would turn out to be that of Carolyn Van Slyke. As she’d discerned in the tree, other than these sinister smears, the plastic baggies had nothing to tell her. With its sophisticated equipment, the lab might do better.
The blue sack was slightly more forthcoming. Gray-green dust and a pale yellow residue of a delicate almost glittering nature, like pollen but more reflective, streaked the fabric. Whatever the substance was, it had been scuffed onto the sack recently. Perhaps the lab could use it to tell where in the park the bag had been before it was shanghaied into service as a ditty bag for the deceased. In a civilized environment, that information might lead to the killer. Here, time was a deciding factor. The days it would take to get the bag down to West Glacier, then to the lab and back, would be too long. The killer would no longer be “living” in the same place.
Having returned the evidence to storage and divested herself of the surgical gloves, she unwrapped her second sandwich. Her fingers smelled of the talc used in the gloves and tainted her enjoyment of the peanut butter. Ignoring that and the busy ticklings of flies, she leaned against the log where Ponce was tied and listened to the reassuring tearing sounds as he went on with his picnic.
The killer was still in the park. Either that or Anna’s intuition had finally slipped over into paranoia. That was a distinct possibility. Sitting in the sun, in a world where she had felt comfortable and whole much of her adult life, she was unpleasantly aware that she gasped and started at every noise. Her eyes never ceased scanning the horizon, alert for danger.
Though the most obvious, the wilderness wasn’t the only thing she was at odds with. With the possible exception of Joan Rand, Anna had not had anything even resembling a genuine connection with another human being since she’d come to Glacier.
She thought of Sheriff Paul Davidson, her—her what? Her boyfriend? Her sweetheart? Or merely her lover? Paul was a good man and once, a long, long time ago in mind, two weeks ago by the calendar, she’d fancied herself falling in love with him. Since her adventures began in Glacier he’d scarcely crossed her mind. She’d not even called Molly though she’d told herself she would. There was something about this case that was causing her to isolate.
Anna snorted. Sensing an equine conversation in the offing, Ponce snorted back. “Isolate myself more than usual,” Anna said to him. Ponce lost interest once she reverted to the human tongue. He returned to his grazing.
Humans were tribal creatures. Isolation was a form of punishment so extreme even in prisons it was only used for serious breaches of conduct. Those who isolated themselves usually suffered as a consequence. Anna’d long been aware of the tiny cracks in what passed for normalcy when she’d purposely been too long alone, locked inside the ivory tower of bone that served as skull.
Shifting position, her back to the trail so her ever-vigilant eyes could keep watch on the woods, she considered her slow withdrawal. The unseen scratchings of a small woodland beast sent her pulse rate up and she realized what it was. She had been dispossessed, made homeless. Not removed from her house and cat and dog in Mississippi—the park housing she enjoyed on the Natchez Trace Parkway was simply one in a chain of way stations. Her home, where she felt safe and centered, had always been the wild country. Towns, streets, houses, dumpsters, PTA meetings—that was where evil lurked. In the backcountry was only the often pitiless but never malicious work of the gods.
In Glacier that amoral purity was gone. A wrongness stalked. Had it been only the warped and hostile actions of people, Anna would not have felt the same. But it wasn’t. Nature herself was being unnatural. The bear that had torn up their camp was behaving in a creepy, unbearlike way. When human beings were evil they were merely, if the Christian teaching was to be believed, exercising their God-given right to free will. When nature got personal, then whatever passed for Satan was surely afoot.
No wonder she’d bonded so completely with Joan Rand, Anna thought. The researcher was the only person she could talk to about their bear. Joan had been there. Joan felt it. To others, even Molly or Paul, she would seem just another scared tourist anthropomorphizing and exaggerating, the sort who submit reports in lilac ink of grizzlies juggling hedgehogs.
The next hour
was spent riding back to Fifty Mountain in hopes Bill McCaskil would have returned. But for a brief interlude with two visitors from Washington State, an incredibly chirpy middle-aged man hiking with a serene and homely woman Anna presumed was his wife, she spoke with no one. The Washingtonian had been afire with the news that there was a “Boone and Crockett elk” a mile down the trail that Anna must see. The animal had moved on by the time she and Ponce came to where it was sighted and she was mildly disappointed. She’d never heard a creature referred to as a “Boone and Crockett” but given Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett’s legendary stature, it must have been a grand old bull.
Bill McCaskil had gone the way of the elk. His campsite was empty, pack gone from the tree in front of his tent. What Anna had intended to ask him she wasn’t sure but she needed to do something with her time. And though it was so uncharacteristic she didn’t recognize the motivation, she wanted to do something around other people.
Against the wishes of both his son and Chief Ranger Ruick, Lester Van Slyke had hiked back to Flattop. He was taking up residence in his abandoned camp when Anna walked down from McCaskil’s site.
Les was gray with the effort the twelve-mile walk had cost him—a coronary wandering around in shiny new boots. He carried an NPS radio, probably at the insistence of Harry Ruick. Other than that he seemed as ill-prepared for the rigors of camping as ever. He didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to explain his persistence in remaining in the backcountry, didn’t want to discuss his former wife’s violent behavior. After a quarter of an hour she was glad to leave him in peace and start back the way she’d come, returning to the tiny meadow where she, Joan and Rory had first set up camp.
It was as it had been before the bear attack. New tents were pitched, not where the old had been, but on the far side of the flat rock as if Joan, or more likely Rory, had suffered an attack of superstition and decided the old pattern had to be broken. Food and other bear attractants were cached high in a tree. A different one from where Rory’s stepmother’s corpse had hung.
The researchers were not in evidence. Anna watered Ponce at the little stream that cut through the clearing, found on her topo the place Joan had marked the next hair trap to be disassembled, then remounted and set out to find them. Ponce, erroneously thinking his day’s work had been done, carried her with ill grace.
He was further discomfited when she found the others and it fell to him to carry the heavy rolls of barbed wire and the researchers’ packs to the site of the next hair trap. Anna, leading Ponce, walked beside Joan. Rory chose to trail behind for reasons of his own. Buck walked with him but the two didn’t speak. Anna was not offended at their choice. It wasn’t that she disliked Rory; it was more that he carried about him an oppressive darkness, as if neurosis or deep injury had created in him a small black hole into which good cheer and rationality were sucked away.
A day’s hard work in rough country had put Joan in a good mood. The cobwebs left by generating reports and packaging samples for the lab were burned away.
“This trap was pretty paltry pickin’s,” she said. The heat from her face made her brow glisten and the top quarter of her glasses fog up. That and the alder leaves poking through her hair gave her a look of the clichéd mad scientist. “No scat. A few wisps of hair. But at least the love scent hadn’t been torn down. This one must have been hung high enough.” Joan babbled on happily about barbed wire, lab reports and other resource-manager-type details. Anna half listened, enjoying companionship not content. After a quarter of an hour the going became rugged, the ground broken and the scrub dense. Conversation was replaced by heavy breathing and aggravated grunts. Ponce punished Anna for the arduous duty by pushing her in the middle of the back with his long bony face just infrequently enough she never expected it.
The new hair trap was to be strung up less than half a mile from the old. Wire taut, love scent high and inviting, rotten wood piled and doused with the irresistibly vile blood lure, they finished near six that evening. The work cleansed Anna’s psyche as it had Joan’s and she managed the trip back to camp restfully free of dark forebodings and acid contemplations. Off the beaten paths, they encountered no park visitors and Anna was glad. At peace, for the moment, in her own reality, she had no desire to be dragged into anyone else’s.
In an unusual burst of intraspecies appreciation, she remembered the chipper fellow from Washington who had delighted her with his odd turn of phrase.
Anna decided to share. “I heard something funny today. A guy’d seen a big bull elk and called him a ‘Boone and Crockett’ elk.” Joan and Buck looked blank. “Like in Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett,” Anna explained. “You know, bigger than life.” Still nothing. Gifts rebuffed, she was annoyed.
“Shall we tell her?” Buck asked.
“I think not,” Joan said. “You don’t know her like I do. She is exhibiting an uncharacteristic enjoyment in bipeds. It’s a train of thought that would be a shame to derail so close to the station.”
“Tell me what?” Anna demanded.
“She insists,” Joan said.
“‘Boone and Crockett’ are the ultimate word on trophy animals,” Buck told her. “They have a whole rating system depending on the size of the animals. Well . . . the size of their heads. That’s where the numbers come in.”
“My little guy was talking about the elk
dead?
” Anna was aghast.
“As he pictured him on the wall of his den,” Buck confirmed.
The creepiness that had been temporarily held at bay by the advent of real work returned. Even apparent innocents from the great state of Washington harbored deadly intentions.
It wasn’t until they’d been back in camp for an hour or more and been revived by an internal application of hot drinks that she spoke again and then it was of the dark subjects that had been consuming her mind.
Summarily banishing Buck and Rory simply because she did not wish to feel the impact of a stranger in the first instance and an adolescent in the second, Anna fired up the hissing glare of a Coleman lantern, set it on the wide flat table of stone and spread out her gruesome evidence collection for Joan’s scientific perusal.
“I don’t know diddly about human forensic pathology,” Joan warned her as they knelt like aging White Rock fairies on the edge of the stone.