to the precipitous descent into McDonald Creek. As often as not, park higher-ups went soft. Some went down this road out of laziness; even more did so because in their mountain-climbing, water-rafting youth, they'd trashed knee and ankle joints. Like aging football players, they found themselves stove in and going to fat in their middling years. By midafternoon Anna was wishing one of those fates had befallen Harry Ruick. He was no wunderkindrocketed up to the exalted rank of chief while still a lad; Anna put him in his early fifties. His dark hair was grizzled, and through the open neck of his uniform shirt, it looked as if the thick pelt on his chest had gone completely white. He wasn't a tall man, but built, as Anna's father might have said when waxing uncouth, like a brick shit house: squat, thick and rock-hard.
Ruick set a brutal pace and showed Anna and Joan the compliment of never doubting they could match it. Unencumbered by weight-they carried little but their own drinking water-they did.
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 crisscrossed 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.
Chapter 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
