By one-thirty she was headed east away from Fifty Mountain. For the first mile or so, she walked Highline, an improved trail that followed the ridge east of Flattop Mountain, winding back to the Going to the Sun Road where the trailhead was. At about seventy-two hundred feet in elevation, where Highline dog-legged south, Anna turned north, traveling cross-country toward the glacial cirque below Cathedral Peak’s south-southwestern slope.
High as she was, even small changes in altitude marked the landscape dramatically. Soil grew rocky and rust-colored. In the distance, on the stern face of the mountain, she noticed small white specks: mountain goats feeding and rambling in their impossible places. Vegetation thinned till only the hardiest of pines still grew. A life of fighting showed in stunted and twisted limbs. Anna felt honored to be moving amid this stalwart troop of rebels battered by the elements but still alive. Much of the time, she traveled baboonlike on feet and hands, the slopes slippery with broken stone and a meager covering of shortened needles the pines let go. Periodically she stopped to rest and, braced against a gnarly trunk, looked westward across the emerald green meadows north of Fifty Mountain Camp to the blue-forested shanks of the mountains beyond. In this land of abundance, of water and game, other deserts thrust up: mountaintops like the one she hoped to gain where nothing grew and the life of rocks was visible to the naked eye.
Just after four p.m. she scaled the last stone massif, a forty-foot gray wall of crumbling argillite that showed its treachery in tens of millions of cracks and crevices, in the deep pile of shattered stone heaped at its base. Glacier was not a park favored by climbers. The rock formations that created its mountains were of soft stuff that would not hold pitons, ledges that could fall away at the merest hint of weight.
A half-mile’s scrambling through dwarf pines brought her to just beneath the dramatic upthrust of Cathedral Peak. There lay a classic cirque, a chunk of the mountain gouged out by glacial movement leaving a steep amphitheater two or three hundred yards across and half again that long. Its uppermost end was marked by another massif. From there up was the ever-more-vertical run to the mountain’s peak. A quarter of the cirque was still covered in snow. In midsummer, Anna knew it would be of the dry crusty variety of no use for melting and drinking. The rest of the cirque was floored in grayish-green alpine talus, flat loose stones ranging in size from teacups to tabletops.
At present the landscape was free of bears. Joan had told her the pattern of both grizzlies and black bears was to feed on the moths in the morning, rest nearby through the middle of the day, then feed again in the evening.
The long climb had tired Anna but it behooved her to make her explorations during the bears’ off time. Just because she couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t around. Wild animals seldom flopped down to nap in plain view. Even in a place they’d always known as safe they tended to hide themselves away. An area as apparently free of secrets as the cirque could easily have hollows beneath stones. Surrounding rocks might harbor caves or even dens, though the bears tended to den up slightly lower, below treeline.
At this altitude there was nearly always wind, often greater than sixty kilometers an hour. In summer it came mostly from the southwest, but with no protection, it blew cold, and as the sweat from the climb dried, Anna grew chilled. Zipping herself into her down vest she rallied her shaking legs and trudged up the incline to the bottom of the cirque. The aggregations of the cutworm moths, and so the feeding grounds of the bears, were usually at the head of the cirques below the massifs. As she picked her way upward over the talus, fatigue was replaced with the not completely unpleasant hyperawareness Daniel might have felt in the lions’ den.
Not every aggregation was fed on every day. Like everyone else, bears had their trends and preferences. This site had not been monitored since 1995. Glacier researchers prided themselves not only on the quality of their studies but on completing them in the least obtrusive manner. Joan had lectured Anna on the evils of disturbing the site with her presence, then made her promise to observe carefully and take accurate notes. Since she must defile this bit of habitat with her essence, she might as well come away with data.
The observation Anna was most interested in at the moment was that of beds. Habitually the bears fed from six a.m. till one p.m. then rested till around six in the evening. For their siestas they dug beds in the scree or the snow. From the air the sleeping beasts might be easily seen. At ground level it would be way too easy to stumble into the middle of somebody’s nap.
Having reached the headwall of the cirque unharmed, Anna found a perch atop a square chunk of argillite tumbled down from on high, and took out her binoculars. Her eyes would cause less disturbance than her feet. Not to mention they were not as tired. Mentally gridding the long crescent-shaped area, she searched the ground. There were many piles of scat; most looked old and dried-up, but a closer view would be needed to be sure. She spotted five of the oval-shaped excavations she’d been told to look for and was astounded once more at the sheer physical power of the grizzlies. In places, the digging went down a foot or more, and the volume of rock moved was in the tons.
Content she was alone and would not be providing anyone an afternoon snack, she put aside the glasses and slid off her rock. Fascinating as bears’ lives were, she had not spent the day scratching up a mountain in search of that, but of traces of a person carrying a navy-blue stuff sack. Tracking over a stone surface, even soft argillite, was not a promising prospect. She would have to hope for luck and, if the gods were smiling, litter.
Working slowly, her attention divided between the ground and a horizon that could suddenly bloom with bears, she moved along the base of the massif. There were abundant samples of bear scat but she found nothing that looked to be fresher than two or three days. The scats were thick with the tiny fragmented exoskeletons of the moths, the only part of the insect that provided no nutrients. Joan would be disappointed, but Anna chose not to take the time to collect any samples.
The excavated ovals had been licked clean but Anna did see a number of itinerant moths. The cutworms were unprepossessing little yellow creatures with powdery wings. Where the bug hunting had been particularly good the yellow scales left streaks on the pale talus. In a place like this, then, the blue sack must have been laid down or dragged. To what purpose, Anna could not imagine. The cirques were dry, windswept, dangerous and hard to get to. Who would wander here?
A thought surfaced, so ugly it stopped her in her tracks. Bear researchers would come here. Men or women with an overweening interest in
Ursus horribilis.
They would be able to move through the park unremarked. They would be the ones who would wish to remain in Glacier regardless of who they’d killed because the bears were here, their work was here.
Anna sat down abruptly, scarcely noticing the bite the angular stones tried to take out of her behind. Carolyn Van Slyke was the mother of a bear researcher—a temporary baby bear researcher, true, but it was a link. Carolyn was a photographer with no film, murdered, sliced up, bits of her put in a stuff sack smeared with dust and scales from an extremely out-of-the-way bear eatery.
Had she accidentally or otherwise been photographing a Glacier bear researcher doing something for, against or to a grizzly that they oughtn’t, and then was killed because of it and the telltale film stolen?
The train of thought, rattling along the track at breakneck speed, derailed suddenly, upset by the same old questions: Killed her with what? Carved her face why? And what could a researcher be doing that was so vile that an observer must die lest she tell? People could harass the bears but it was the harassers that came out the worse for wear. For a chilling moment Anna was jerked back into the tent in the dark, the bear destroying the camp. The shallow, almost healed scratch on her shoulder began to itch.
Murder by bear? Could someone who knew what he was about creep into a camp at night and salt it with love scent or blood lure in hopes of enticing disaster?
Sure.
Could Rory have done it?
Easily.
Joan Rand, huddled in the night, matching Anna scream for scream, was blessedly free of suspicion. She had the only genuinely ironclad alibi: she’d been with the investigating officer at the time of the incident.
A bear could be attracted in that manner. It wasn’t guaranteed but definitely possible. That the bear would kill anybody was a long shot, and that it would kill a specific target so long as to be preposterous. It followed, then, that if the bear had been intentionally attracted to their camp and if the individual responsible for it was sane, the bear had been meant only to frighten or, with luck, injure one of them. If universal malice was ruled out as a motive, the only things left were revenge on Anna, Joan or, maybe, Rory—if he wasn’t the perpetrator—or a desire to frighten them off from what they were doing.
Because in doing what they were doing they would discover what
he
was doing.
Anna laughed out loud, startling herself with the sudden noise. “What the hell were we doing?” she asked the rocks and bugs. “Collecting information on bears,” she answered herself.
Like Carolyn Van Slyke was with her camera?
Like Anna appeared to be doing right now?
The wind grew a little colder, the cirque a little more isolated. Anna waited for a cloud to pass over the sun to complete the picture, but the clear summer sky wouldn’t cooperate. Breathing deeply of air so cool and thin and pure it seemed to negate the possibility of deceit in any who breathed it, she stared down the talus-raddled cirque and across the green and black summit of Flattop. What on earth could a bear researcher need so desperately to hide?
The puzzle she’d been so assiduously working on began to deconstruct. How, if at all, did Bill McCaskil with his borrowed coat and his history of financial fraud fit into the picture? There was money in research. Where there was money there could be con men trying to get it. Those sorts of evils transpired in offices over phone lines. The perpetrators didn’t actually go into the woods where the work was being done. There was no money at that end of the stick.
Thinking was getting her nowhere, and sitting motionless in the wind, she was getting cold. Anna returned to her task. The rocks were soft enough that in many places marks had been left on their surfaces by the claws of the grizzlies. Of the bear family, the grizzly was one of the most perfectly adapted to digging. The four-inch claws were virtually unbreakable and the characteristic hump on the shoulders, a silhouette that struck fear into the human observer rather like that of a shark’s fin cutting through the water, was a lump of muscles that provided the bears with tremendous power in their forelegs. The better for digging up moths.
Anna saw residue of that power in the claw-scored argillite and the upheaval of tons of rock in the width of the cirque. Of the habits of the bears, she learned a great deal over the next couple of hours. Of the person who had visited an aggregation in the last few days she found nothing, not so much as a gum wrapper.
The magic hour was approaching. Bears siesta’d from thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred hours, Joan had said. Anna knew the numbers were approximate, varying, one would assume, from bear to bear. Still, as the minute hand on her watch closed the gap between five-thirty and six o’clock, she grew increasingly nervous.
Earlier, from her elevated perch, she had spotted five oval excavation areas. She’d inspected three. Alert for signs of returning diners, she hurried toward the fourth. She never got there. Halfway between the third and fourth was a bear dig of a very different aspect. It was linear, the rocks turned over in neat rows and not as deep, six to eight inches at most.
Things natural tended to eschew straight lines. Lines were a mathematical construct taught to the disordered minds of children until, in adulthood, people favored them, writing, digging, planting and, when possible, walking in them.
On hands and knees, Anna crawled along the linear upset of talus. Rocks had not been dug per se, but pried loose and overturned. On closer inspection she could see marks in the stone; not the evenly spaced scrape of claws but sharp, angular scratches that had to have been made with a shovel or Pulaski. A person, most probably the person Anna sought, had been to the cirque for the same reason as the bears: to dig up army cutworm moths.
Sitting on her heels, eyes roaming the edges of the depression for interlopers of any species, she thought about the strange young man, Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. The day they’d seen him, before the grizzly had come to their camp, they had passed a field of glacier lilies, another preferred food of the Glacier bear population. Someone with a spade had been digging them up. Most likely the obvious choice: Geoffrey Whoever. At the time it seemed of little importance. Illegal certainly, but one man with a shovel and a backpack was not going to dig the lilies to extinction.
There was nothing to indicate the digger of moths was the same person as the digger of lilies except that people pilfering the natural food of bears was an oddity. Rare to catch one doing it; statistically improbable to find two. The young man with the lovely smile and the suspicious habits was not a bear researcher; Joan would have known him. At least he wasn’t a bear researcher in Glacier.
Could an adolescent rogue researcher be murderously messing about with Glacier’s grizzlies? The concept was absurd but Anna didn’t throw it out entirely. She merely consigned it to the heap in her brain where other absurdities connected with this case lay.
Because it was cold and she was tired and the sun was going to be down in a couple of hours, she thought of werewolves. As a rational westerner, Anna didn’t believe in the existence of the mythical monsters. As the sister of an eminent psychiatrist, she knew there were nutcases wandering the moonlit streets who sincerely believed they were werewolves. People suffering from lycanthropy. On rare but recorded occasions these individuals lived out their psychosis to the point of killing, ripping out throats and drinking blood as they believed they must in their wolflike state. Was it possible a person could believe himself a grizzly? Why not? People believed they were Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, the reincarnation of Michelangelo. In Mississippi, Anna’d dealt with a woman who believed herself to be the mother of eight children, all penguins.