Drizzle turned to rain and back to drizzle half a dozen times. The three of them ran rivers of sweat. Rain gear was pulled off and stuffed in packs. Rain washed sweat away and water streamed off their faces and arms. The woods dripped, their silence moving from mysterious to oppressive. Ruick led them down ragged slopes toward McDonald Creek through thickets of alder ten and fifteen feet high and so dense they crawled on hands and knees till mud caked their undersides.
They found no trace of Rory Van Slyke or the bear.
Radio traffic from the other three quadrants, two east into the burn, the other northwest across West Flattop Trail, let them know the hunting had been no better for the other team members.
Just after six that evening, they took a break and ate the sandwiches the team had packed in on the horses. Ruick was as wet and dirty as Anna. And, bless his heart, had the grace to look every bit as tired. “One more hour,” he told them. “Then we’re getting into dark. One more hour and we’ll head back to your camp.” Anna lowered her eyes to her cheese sandwich so he wouldn’t see the relief in them.
Joan didn’t suffer Anna’s vanity. “Good,” she said. “My dogs are barking.” University of Minnesota, Anna remembered. Dogs were feet, barking was tired. Where that strange code fit in with lutefisk and Lutherans she’d never discovered.
Harry Ruick radioed the rest of the team with the quitting time, then they pushed themselves up for another hour of calling and crawling and swearing at the dogged weeping sky.
The last hour did not pass quickly. Time was slowed by a compulsion that had developed in Anna forcing her to look at her watch every few minutes. Finally Ruick said, “That’s enough,” and they turned back. The search technique he’d opted for was meticulous and labor intensive, the ground they covered rugged, rife with hiding places. As a result, they’d traveled less than three miles from the campsite.
When they were nearly to the clearing, the rain stopped. Clouds were thinning in the west, letting in a flood of orange light that lifted Anna’s spirits as much as the thought of dry clothes and hot cocoa.
Joan was not similarly cheered. She wasn’t sufficiently self-centered for rescue work, Anna decided as she watched her, head down, slogging along in Harry Ruick’s wake. If Anna had to guess, she would have said Joan wasn’t thinking of dry clothes and hot drinks, but of a boy who was facing a cold wet night without them. Or a boy who would never need them again.
“One-oh-two, two-one-four.” Joan and the chief ranger’s radios came to life in stereo. Two-one-four was Gary Bradley, one of the frontcountry bear-team guys. Anna had met him when they’d gathered before the search and come to know him by proxy, eavesdropping on their radio conversations. Gary was young and bearded and idealistic and interchangeable with a thousand other seasonals who gave up security and the American Dream for an intensely private dream of what the world could be.
Ruick drew his hand-held from its cordovan leather holster on his belt. Anna hadn’t noticed before, but the back of his hand was criss-crossed with scratches and jeweled with bright beads of blood where thorns had broken the skin. The sight of blood reminded her of her own wound, the groove dug in her shoulder by the grizzly bear. She half hoped it would leave a scar. The story would be well worth the disfigurement.
“Go ahead, Gary,” the chief ranger was saying into his radio.
“We got something here you better come look at.”
“What have you found?”
“We’re up near Kootnai Pass, off West Glacier Trail half a mile. How far away are you?”
“Maybe three miles. We can get there before dark.”
“I’ll have Vic wait on the trail.”
Ruick replaced the radio on his belt and picked up the pace.
Gary Bradley wouldn’t say what they’d found over the public air waves. The only thing that made people that circumspect was a corpse.
Anna sighed. So much for the cocoa.
5
According to Anna’s
internal hiking pedometer, it was approximately two miles from their camp to where the man called Vic was waiting for them: forty minutes walking. The sun had gone behind Nahsukin Mountain, but the snow on Trapper Peak still reflected molten fire. So far north, the twilight would linger.
Vic was another of Ruick’s seasonals, on four months, off eight. The image of these economic nomads was that of rootless college students collecting life experiences with the safety net of Mom and Dad’s income still stretched beneath them. That hadn’t been true for ten years or more. Certainly not since Anna had joined the service. Vic was in his late thirties. A gold band on his left hand proclaimed him a married man. Chances were good he had a kid or two to support while he waited for the park service to offer him a full-time job with benefits.
An ugly man, tubular and tight and pointy-headed, the seasonal began waving the minute they appeared on the trail. Both hands waved a welcome ratified by an accompanying shout. Given this gay greeting Anna began to think things weren’t as bad as they had feared.
Then they got close enough so that she could see him clearly. It wasn’t welcome that animated his tin-woodsman form but relief. He trotted up the trail babbling about times and distances and rockfalls, only half of which they could understand. Ignoring Anna and Joan, he stopped in front of the chief ranger. Though he hadn’t run more than twenty feet, he was panting, his long face with its tight little features had a grayish cast and he was sweating profusely. Anna could smell the unmistakable reek of vomit boiling off him with his body heat.
“Take it easy . . . Vic.” Ruick read the man’s name off the brass plate over his left front pocket. Harry Ruick had reached that rarified stratum of management where the names of the little people ran together.
The chief ranger might not know his seasonals’ names, but he knew his job. Keeping his voice light and confident, he said, “Anybody going to die in the next five minutes?”
“No,” Vic admitted, “but—”
“Then let’s slow down. I don’t know about these two,” he jerked his chin at Anna and Joan, “but I need to catch my breath.” The trail where Vic met them ran along the northern edge of the burn. To the south, sinking into an oblivion of inky darkness with the going of the sun, was charred land, burnt spikes of trees snagging the skyline. Tiring of its grim aspect, Anna looked north to where the mountain fell away in green and stone, tumbling steeply into the canyon cut by Kootnai Creek. In mist and blue velvet the Rockies rushed like water frozen in time across the Waterton Valley toward Canada. For the first time she had the sense she was on top of a mountain. Fragments of the rainstorm had settled beneath Flattop, clouds clinging to the sides of the far mountains. Sun-touched tops were pink, bottoms gray, leaching night up from the canyons.
Transfixed by this glimpse of paradise, she found herself standing alone. Harry had led Vic to a log, where he sat between the chief ranger and Joan, seeming to take comfort from the authority of the one and the mere presence of the other. Anna had nothing to offer so she remained where she was, acutely aware that the pleasure she took in this asymmetry of perfection would soon be blotted out by whatever nasty sorrow humans had brought upon themselves with their meddling.
That in Rory’s case she was one of the prime meddlers was not lost upon her. She would feel no guilt at the boy’s death, but she would not escape a heavy sense of wrongness, of not having fit seamlessly enough into the fabric of nature.
Ruick got up and came to where she stood. “Vic’s going to stay here with Joan. We won’t be doing much tonight. He’s pretty shook. You come with me.”
The bear team had marked where they were to leave West Flattop Trail with orange surveyor’s tape. According to the two scraps of tape, the path led down a scree-and-alder-choked side of a ravine cut through the rock of the mountain’s flank. Anna hoped Harry didn’t want her to come with him too far. She’d managed to trick her tired body into moving along at a respectable clip, but if she had to climb the hill she was now skidding down for any great distance, she was going to begin to show a definite strain. If Harry wanted her to carry any dead weight, she would be in trouble.
“The boys found a body.” Ruick talked as they went, sliding and clinging to spiny alders, his words flashing back with the whip of released branches. “From what Vic says, it’s torn up bad. Face pretty much gone.”
People live behind their faces. When rescuers had to deal with victims whose faces had been destroyed, it was immeasurably harder than dealing with severed or mangled limbs. Unfair as it was, facial mutilation turned the victim into a monster of the most unsettling kind: one to be feared and pitied at the same time.
Anna was glad Joan had been left behind to look after the seasonal ranger. Unless she was a whole lot harder than Anna took her for, she’d superimpose her son Luke under the mangled features and give herself nightmares for a year. Another terrific reason for not having children: it was so disturbing when animals ate them.
“Have you located Rory’s folks yet?” Anna asked, her mind running along parental lines.
“This is not our boy.”
They slid further into the night. Into dense brush, the kind favored by predators. Anna’s mind closed itself off so she would not think of the roars that had ripped them from the false sense of civilization they had enjoyed the night before. She concentrated on keeping her footing and keeping the tangle of low-growing branches from raking the flesh from her face.
“Bear! Hey, bear!” jerked Anna out of survival mode. A jolt of fear so strong she twitched with it brought her to a stop.
“It’s us, Gary,” the chief ranger called.
“Thank God,” came an answering voice.
“Thank God,” Anna echoed.
Moments later they broke through the brush into a clearing no bigger than a living room rug. Like a character in a horror movie, Gary Bradley stood over a body, his flashlight held in front of him.
The last of the light had retreated to the west. Anna fumbled her own flashlight from her pack and for a moment the three of them blinded each other, needing to reassure themselves that the faces ringed around the corpse were more or less human.
Gary was pale under the beard, his lips bloodless in the harsh light of the flash. At the sight of Harry Ruick, Anna could see the young man re-gathering his wits. Being alone in the creeping dusk with nothing for company but a dead body and whatever killed it would unnerve anyone. Bradley was glad not to be alone and gladder still to be able to hand over the reins of leadership.
“We were covering West Flattop,” he said. “Vic saw what looked to be drag marks going off the trail up there where he met you. We followed them down and found this. Her.”
Anna was standing back five or six feet from the crumpled form at Bradley’s feet, waiting for instructions. Ruick squatted down and she moved slightly, training her flashlight on the body to give him more light to see by.
The dead woman was lying on her side, knees drawn up as if she slept. Her right arm was thrown up, obscuring her face. Blond hair, shoulder-length, permed and dyed, frothed out from under a red-billed cap with the Coca-Cola logo on it. She wore an oversized man’s army jacket. Her legs were bare between the bottom of flared rayon skirtlike shorts and the tops of her hiking boots. Anna didn’t see much blood. What there was would have soaked into the ground.
Ruick settled into deep calm, his manner deliberate, his words measured. Anna had seen it a hundred times, done it herself at least that many, still she found comfort in it. Things were under control. Help had arrived.
Harry felt for a carotid.
“We checked first thing,” Gary said. “She’d been dead awhile, I’d guess. She was sort of cold. But that might have been the rain.”
“Any ID?”
“None that we could find.”
Ruick handed Anna his flashlight and she trained it along with hers on the corpse as he carefully turned it over.
As the body rolled onto its back, Gary looked away. He’d seen what was there and made the choice not to see it again. Anna looked from the seasonal ranger back to the body then wished she’d followed his lead, traded the sight of the woman’s face for the scrap of sky Gary studied.
“We just kind of started to roll her—you know, see if she was—then figured we’d better leave well enough alone. Bear’d been feeding on her,” Gary explained disjointedly, eyes still fixed on a place only the gods call home.
His words pattered meaninglessly. Anna and Harry were locked in their own horror show. Half of the woman’s face was gone. From just above her left eyebrow down to her jaw was a red ragged mass. Cheek-bone and teeth were exposed, bone and enamel crusted brown with dried blood. The eyeball was still in its socket, staring in cloudy malevolence, the flesh around it eaten away.
Eaten. Anna pushed closer, knelt beside Harry and shined both lights on the carnage. “Look at the edges of the wound. Here and here.” She pointed to the cut on the forehead and the vertical slash that had taken out half the woman’s nose. “Not eaten. This was done with a knife, a razor, an axe, something like that.”
Ruick stayed where he was, squatting on his heels, till Anna’s knees began to ache. Dutifully she held her post, keeping the lights steady.
“I’d rather it had been a bear,” Ruick said at last. “I’d whole hell of a lot rather it had been a bear.”
“A person killed her?” Gary said, and for the first time Anna heard outrage in his voice. A sentiment she shared. Working with wild animals one might never lose the sense of tragedy a deadly encounter brought down on both species, but it was a tragedy untainted by evil. Or at least that’s how Anna had felt before the bizarre sense that had pervaded her the night before, the feeling the beast was not merely wild but somehow intentionally malicious. People killing people was a different story. Always there was evil. Sometimes it was several times removed, as when soldiers fought to the death for someone else’s ideals. But it was always there.