The canyon they labored so hard to climb out of was no exception. A ribbon of white water, now falls, now rapids, now fishing holes, appeared and disappeared as the mountain’s magic act unfolded.
Between sweating, faking fitness, and mentally promising Amy, her aerobics teacher back home, that she would attend classes religiously if she survived this hike, Anna was dimly aware they pushed through an array of wildflowers that she should be appreciating.
By noon they reached the top. Sheered off by glacial movement, Flattop was a peculiarity among its steep-sided neighbors. To the east, the argillite cliffs of Mount Kipp in the Lewis Range rose over alpine meadows. Six miles north, the planed top of Flattop Mountain dropped away, wrinkling down into the Waterton River Valley and on to Canada.
Once on Flattop they left the comforts of the trail and struck west through the burn, heading toward Trapper Peak. Between Flattop and Trapper’s imposing flanks was a deep cut, much like the one they’d followed during their ascent, where Continental Creek carved its way down three thousand feet to McDonald Creek to empty its glacial melt. The first of the hair traps was located in a small avalanche chute above the gorge, a place made as attractive as its grander competition by several springs that ran even in the driest years.
The fire of 1998 had burned slowly and exceedingly fine, consuming everything in its path. Blue-black snags clawed at the sky. Without shade, without greenery or moisture, the sun weighed as heavily on Anna’s back as her pack. With every step, cinders crunched under her boots. Black dust boiled up to stick in the sweat and DEET sprayed on her legs. Despite the insecticide, horseflies, deerflies and mosquitoes followed. With only a brief window of opportunity in which to slake their thirst, they were fearless.
Despite the ash and grit, she blessed the fire that had torched ten thousand acres of America’s crown jewel, taxed the Glacier superindent’s courage, not to mention the Waterton superintendent’s faith in the good sense of the U.S. superintendent as he watched the NPS “let burn” policy crackle toward the Canadian half of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. Waterton-Glacier was a unique and highly successful experiment. The only park of its kind, one half was in Canada, the other in the United States, with major environmental decisions and park regulations worked out jointly between the two countries.
The Canadian superintendent was less optimistic than the American superintendent when it came to letting nature burn where she would, but Glacier’s superintendent stood firm. The fire had been left to burn itself out and Anna was glad. She was no great devotee of trees; they blocked one’s view of the forest. And fire cleaned out the deadwood, exposed the soil to light and air, making possible the riot of life that followed fire’s necessary cleansing and renewal.
Against the scorched earth, with the liquid gold of the lowering sun, a carpet of glacier lilies glowed with an electric green so intense she could remember seeing it only in the altered states of consciousness of the late sixties and the paintings of Andy Warhol.
Glacier lilies were fragile yellow blooms, smaller than a half-dollar, that hung pointed and curling petals in graceful skirts around red stamens heavy with pollen. Their leaves grew from the base, sharpened green blades as tall as the blooms. Under this glamorous show, according to Joan, they hid bulbs rich in starch. The bulbs were routinely dug by the grizzlies in late summer and early fall as they followed the huckleberries into the higher elevations. At the height of the season great swatches would be dug up, leaving areas that looked as if they’d been rototilled.
This year, the flowers were spectacular. Glacier had gotten nearly twice its normal snowfall. Snows hadn’t melted above six thousand feet until July. Spring, summer and fall were happening simultaneously as plants, so lately released from their winter sleep, rushed through the stages of life to reseed before the first cold nights in September.
“Hey,” Joan said, “we’ve got company.”
Anna dragged her eyes up from where they frolicked in fields of green and gold.
On a low ridge to the north, black as everything was black from a fire that had burned hot, fast and to the bone, stood a lone hiker. Behind him was a wall of exposed stone, probably once fawn-colored but now the gray-brown of rotting teeth where the rains had imperfectly washed it free of soot and char.
It wasn’t against park rules to hike off trail. Or camp off trail for that matter, though that required a special permit. It was unusual. For a man alone it was also foolish. Bears were the least of the dangers of hiking by oneself in the backcountry. The greatest were carelessness and stupidity. A slip, a fall, a badly sprained ankle or shattered kneecap, and one could die of exposure or thirst before anybody thought to begin a search.
Rory, sensing a social—and so, static—occasion, was quick to drop his pack and dig out his water bottle, a state-of-the-art model with the filter built in. Anna allowed herself a fleeting moment of envy.
“Hello,” Joan called cheerily, because she was that kind of person.
A happy “hello” from a small middle-aged lady was scarcely the stuff of nightmares, but even at twenty yards, Anna could swear she saw the hiker flinch, cast a glance over his shoulder as if deciding whether or not to make a run for it. Like a hound that hears the clarion call, fatigue fell away and Anna’s mind grew sharp.
“Wonder what in hell he’s been up to.” She wasn’t aware she’d spoken out loud till she noticed Joan and Rory staring at her. “What?” she demanded.
Joan just chuckled. Few people chuckled anymore, that low burbling sound free of cynicism or judgement that ran under the surface of mirth.
Anna’s attention went back to the hiker. He was walking toward them. Reluctantly, she thought. This time she kept her suspicious nature under wraps. At first she’d resented the heightened awareness that law enforcement duties forced upon her. But somewhere along the line she’d come to enjoy it, as if looking for trouble was a desirable end in itself.
The interloper was in his teens at a guess, though maybe older. His beard was nonexistent, but an accumulation of grime aged him around the mouth. He’d been in the backcountry awhile. Hazel eyes, startling under beautifully shaped brown brows and shaded by a ball cap with a dolphin embroidered above the brim, moved nervously from place to place, as if he looked beyond their tiny band to see if there were reinforcements hiding, waiting to ambush him. The pack he carried was big, too heavy for day hiking but not packed for overnight. Judging from the way the ripstop nylon bagged inward it contained neither sleeping bag nor tent. He was camped out somewhere. So why carry the frame pack? And why the haunted look?
“You’re a ways from anywhere,” Joan said and stuck out her hand.
After the briefest pause, he took it. Workman’s hands, Anna noted, callused and scarred, the nails broken and rimed with dirt from too long between baths. Odd for a boy so young. His shirt was streaked with soot and he wore a chain wrapped twice around his waist.
“You all just out camping or what?” he asked. The question didn’t seem particularly neighborly to Anna but didn’t bother Joan in the least. She launched into an explanation of the Greater Glacier Bear DNA research project, the wording geared for the ears of laymen. Anna set her pack down and freed her water from a mesh side pocket. Joan was proselytizing, converting the masses to greater respect of bears. Anna tried to figure out where the boy’s accent was from. Henry Higgins aside, few people could place others by their dialect, except within the broadest of areas. Americans made it more difficult by swimming around the melting pot: kindergarten in Milwaukee, third grade in San Diego, high school in Saint Louis. The south was as close as Anna could place him, anywhere from Virginia to Texas.
Out of long habit she committed his physical description to memory. He was a big kid, though not tall, around five-foot-eight, chunky without being fat. The kind of body that’s a good deal stronger than one would think. Shoulders sloped away from a round handsome neck. What hair she could see poking from beneath the ball cap was silky brown with a natural wave. One day soon his face would be chiseled into classic good looks. Anna could see it in the aquiline nose and the rounded prominent chin.
She took another drink. Sat on a rock.
The boy never loosed his pack, made none of the comfortable settling-in gestures she and Rory engaged in. When Joan had done with her sales pitch, he asked her where they were going for their traps. Obligingly Joan began showing him on the topo. Anna found herself wishing she wouldn’t. His interest was overly specific, having nothing to do with the project and all to do with where the three of them were going to be at any given time.
“I’m Anna Pigeon,” she interrupted none too subtly. “This is Joan Rand, Rory Van Slyke.” Stepping up to him, she thrust her hand out much as Joan had done. No better way to get the feel of somebody literally as well as figuratively. Despite the afternoon’s heat, his palm was clammy. He was scared or had serious problems with circulation. A rank odor came off him. Not just the accumulation of unwashed body odors but something muskier, almost an animal smell. “What’s your name?”
Again the flinch. “Geoffrey . . . uh . . . Mic-Mickleson.”
“Nicholson?” Joan asked helpfully.
“Nicholson.”
Now Anna knew he was up to something. “Where are you from, Geoffrey?” Had she been on the Trace, in uniform, she would have had this boy out of his car, his driver’s license in her hand quicker than a swallow can change directions in flight.
“Oh. You know. All over. I’d better be going. It’s a ways back to camp.” He smiled for the first time and Anna resisted the temptation to be charmed. Not only was it pretty—his straight, white teeth probably the cleanest part of him—but sparked with a hint of apology and an innocence that bordered on goodness. The smile was at odds with the rest of the package. Anna chose to ignore it.
“Be seeing you around,” she said as he turned and walked back the way he had come. It sounded more like: “We’ll be keeping an eye on you.” Anna meant it to. Some people bore watching. She was sure this fellow was among them. She was just as sure they wouldn’t be seeing him. Not if he saw them first.
Burbling notes drew her back into the present. Joan was smiling, her eyes full of altogether too much fun. “I do declare, in another minute or two you were going to frisk that boy and read him his rights. Frisking I could understand. A smile to make you lie right down and die.”
Rory found a lump of charred wood to fix his attention on, evidently uncomfortable with women his mother’s age—or older—having impure thoughts.
“He was so fishy I thought he was going to sprout gills and swim away,” Anna defended herself.
“Aw, he was just shy.”
“He was carrying a half-empty frame pack.”
“Maybe he lost his day pack.”
“It was too full for a day hike.”
“Maybe he’s a photographer, carrying cameras, tripods, film.”
“Maybe,” Anna said, but she didn’t think so. “Why the big interest in where we were going, where we were camping?”
“Because he’s a
nice
young man and
nice
young men pretend to be interested in what their elders and betters are saying. Isn’t that right, Rory?”
“That’s true,” Rory said with such sincerity Anna wanted to laugh but didn’t for fear of alienating him.
“See? Proof,” Joan said.
Anna didn’t say anything. She was getting entirely too crabby over the whole thing. “Are we almost there?” she asked plaintively.
3
By the time
they reached the vicinity of the first hair trap, too little light and too little strength remained for anything but setting up camp.
With the departure of the sun, the mountain grew cold. The thin, dry air did not retain heat. Horseflies and deerflies took themselves off to wherever it was they went during the dark hours but the mosquitoes remained, a cloud of mindless hunger hovering over the camp.
Despite their carnivorous attendance, Anna hauled water from a startlingly beautiful creek, a ribbon of green that cut through the burn scar, sparked by a joyous multitude of mountain wildflowers. Staying clean in the backcountry was an arduous undertaking, results obtained for effort put forth seldom satisfying, but for Anna, it was a necessary if she was to maintain anything close to good cheer. Tonight’s ablutions were brief as every square inch of flesh was assaulted by flying proboscises the moment it was exposed.
Too tired for culinary frills or witty conversation, the three of them ate their freeze-dried lasagna, then crawled into their sleeping bags. Rory was restless and noisy in the tent beside theirs; Anna lay next to Joan, scratching insect bites and wondering if all earthly paradises had been infiltrated by something wretched, all ointments incomplete without the requisite fly. Yet she was uniquely happy. From time and use, cloth walls and hard ground had come to symbolize a freedom that loosed her mind and soothed her soul in a way she’d never been able to duplicate between cotton sheets.
Sleep curled down and she went willingly into freefall.
The trap they
tended in the morning was in as awkward a locale as nature and researchers could devise. Glacier National Park was slashed with avalanche chutes. These cuts were scoured year after year when snow grew unstable in springtime and was carried by its own prodigious weight down these natural passages. Because snow and ice cleared the chutes of larger vegetation, the rocky soil had little to bond it to the steep-sided gorges. When rain followed snow, mudslides followed avalanches.
The only plants that could survive these inhospitable conditions were fast-growing, supple and ever-renewing. From a distance the chutes appeared as paler green pleats in a mountain-green robe: nearly barren, at best knee-deep in ground cover. Up close they were head-high in a riot of color: red paintbrush, lavender fleabane, hot-pink fireweed, white cow parsnip, lacy green false hellebore, the flashy red of chokecherries, white pearls of baneberry, rich purple huckleberries, fierce yellows of butterweed and arnica. Of these, the bears enjoyed all the berries, hellebore and cow parsnip. A veritable salad bar and a perfect place for the trap.