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 skirt-like 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. Cheekbone 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.
'Looks that way,' Harry said. 'Did you check the rest of the body?'
'No, sir, just the face.' Clearly that had been enough for Gary.
Ruick rocked back on his heels. In the spill of light from the flashlights, he studied first Gary then Anna and made a decision.
'Anna, hand Gary the lights and help me with this. Gary, keep us lit here. I don't suppose anybody's got a tape recorder? Pen and paper?' Anna did have that in the form of the small yellow pocket notebook with the ten standard firefighting orders printed on the inside cover. While Ruick rooted around in his pack, she and the seasonal waited, wishing they had more to do, some positive action to take. Having found what he sought, a 35-mm camera, Harry clicked off half a dozen pictures. The flash burned the photos into Anna's brain as they did into the film. Scene recorded, Ruick began his work on the dead woman.
Gary held the lights as best he could while keeping his eyes off the ruin of the corpse's face. Anna took notes. Ruick opened the army jacket. The dead woman was built along apple-on-a-stick lines. The bulk of her weight was carried between pubic bone and collar bone: big breasts, thick waist, meaty hips ending abruptly in skinny and shapely legs. There wasn't much to write about. Except for the butchered face, she appeared unharmed.
