Anna looked at him sharply. It was his sweatshirt. Nobody cared whether he'd lost it, burned it or given it to a passing elk. Why lie about it? Because he'd twitched, Anna was compelled to pounce. 'How did you lose it?'
'I guess I must have dropped it or left it behind or something.'
Vague again. Lying again?Maybe not. Maybe he didn't know how he'd lost his shirt and that lapse was scaring him. Maybe.
'It happens,' she said neutrally.
'I guess.'
The chief ranger came over to their outdoor clinic. 'So. He going to live?'
'For a while,' Anna said and gave Ruick a brief rundown of Rory's minor complaints.
'We need to figure out the best way down,' Ruick said when she'd finished. 'No packaging's called for. I can send the backboard down on the helicopter. We can either get him to the nearest good landing site for airlift or have Gary or Vic bring the pack horses over and ride on down the south side. From a medical standpoint, do you think it matters a whole hill of beans?'
'Half of one, six dozen of the other,' Anna said.
Rory sat on his stump looking back and forth at them, apparently accustomed to being discussed in the third person when he was in the room. He came to life when Harry said, 'We'll airlift you out, Rory. We've got the helicopter till sundown. May as well use it.'
'I don't need to go down,' Rory said, sounding alarmed at the prospect.
Ruick looked at him, cleared the irritation off his face and changed gears from logistics to public relations. Hunkering on his heels so he wouldn't be talking down, he explained, 'You've been out a long time, Rory. Thirty-six hours up here is nothing to sneeze at. Your feet are battered, you've gone without food, bad sunburn, dehydrated-'
'I had water,' Rory said defensively. Picking up the high-tech water bottle with the filtering system built in, the one Anna'd admired the first time she'd seen it, he shook it to prove his point.
'You still need to get checked out,' Ruick said reasonably. 'Your feet-'
'I only got that one cut and Anna says it's no big deal. I've run thirteen-K races with worse cuts than that. It's nothing.' Rory was becoming agitated. His reaction struck Anna as excessive for the threat he faced: a free ride in a helicopter and a night or two in a comfortable bed.
Irritation revisited Ruick's face. He was not used to being thwarted. Probably he had no children. Anna had none but she'd spent the first spring in Mississippi embroiled with the students of Clinton High School. 'Thwarted' was putting it mildly.
'You have to go down, son,' Ruick said, striving for fatherly kindness and almost making it.
'No I don't,' Rory returned. Anna was amazed that someone who could face down a chief ranger would be given the megrims by a mere grizzly bear. It wasn't that Rory had no fear of Ruick. He did. She could see it in the nervous flick of the eyes and a slight quiver at the corners of his mouth. She could also see that he had no intention of backing down.
She doesn't take shit off anybody. Anna remembered him saying that of his stepmother as if it was the highest praise he could bestow. Rory was more afraid of 'taking shit,' as he perceived it, than he was of what the chief ranger could do to him if he chose. Which was considerable, up to and including having him removed from the DNA project and the park if he deemed him a danger to himself, others or the resource.
What would make a boy so afraid of taking shit-Anna couldn't think of a less crude phrase that captured the essence of the phenomenon with such accuracy-off a grown man, and an authority figure to boot? Kids spent the first twenty years of their lives 'taking shit' in the form of instruction, correction, insult, advice, manipulation, education and abuse by their elders. By sixteen most were past masters at the art of passive aggression. Anna wondered what Rory's parents, particularly his father to whom he referred scornfully as 'Les,' had done to circumvent the natural flow.
Ruick sighed, stood up and gazed around for a moment. His eyes lit on Anna and he made an executive decision. 'You handle this,' he said and stalked off.
Anna and Rory watched him go. Feeling suddenly weary, she sat down on a log next to the boy. 'What have you got against going down, getting checked and resting up a bit?' she asked.
Rory took a few seconds to downgrade from obstinate to sullen. 'I'm not hurt,' he said. 'There's nothing the matter with me. I'm here to do that bear thing. We got more traps to set, don't we? I don't see why I've got to go down and be messed with because I got lost. He just wants to cover his ass in case I decide I got some big injury and sue, which I'm not going to do, and make like him calling out the troops and the helicopter and everything was a good idea. Why should I be punished because I accidentally got lost?'
Punished. A kid's word. Still, Anna could see the logic and had to admit she was impressed that a boy so green in years grasped the CYA mentality a pathologically litigious society had forced upon government agencies.
'That bear tore up our tents,' she tried. 'Shredded them like confetti.'
'They were government issue. Don't tell me they don't have more tents.'
Anna didn't. As a matter of fact, they'd already been replaced. The bear team had packed in two spares. They'd been left at Anna and Joan's camp.
'I'll sleep on the ground if I have to,' Rory said.
His hands were clasped together in his lap, gripped so tightly the knuckles showed white. Rory'd been terrified of bears. Then a particularly aggressive member of that club had ratified his fears. If he was willing to face another night in the open despite that, more power to him. Maybe that was it, maybe he had to prove to himself he wasn't a coward.
'Okay,' Anna said. 'You stay. I'll tell Harry.'
Harry was not pleased but he was practical. Legally he could not force Rory to accept medical transport, since the boy was neither mentally incompetent nor unconscious. Technically he was underage, but since his parents were close at hand and he clearly had no life-threatening emergencies, it would be inexcusably heavy- handed to play the minor card. Ruick also struck Anna as fair. She doubted he would mess with Rory's Earthwatch status on the DNA project.
'You're going to have to walk back to Fifty Mountain in those things,' Harry warned, pointing to Van Slyke's disreputable footwear.
'I can do that, sir,' Rory said, all good manners and boyish deference now that he'd gotten his way.
'You got a shirt or something you can put on over that sunburn?'
'Anna put sunscreen on me, sir.'
The 'sirs' were put to good effect. Ruick was sufficiently mollified to lose interest. 'Lets go, then,' he said. 'I expect your parents at least will be glad to see you.'
At Harry's suggestion the hikers who'd found Rory had gone on ahead. Ruick led, setting a pace that was geared to Van Slyke's sore feet, though he wouldn't have admitted it. Rory was in the middle and Anna last.
As she walked behind them it occurred to her that Rory had not asked if his parents were worried. Harry had told him up front that somebody had been sent to tell them he'd been found. Even so, it seemed peculiar. Had Anna been missing in the wilderness for thirty-six hours at his age, one of her chief concerns would have been how much hot water she was going to be in when she got home and her parents' intense relief had time to transform into anger the way it invariably did.
Fifty Mountain Camp was on the northernmost edge of the old burn scar. Trees were charred snags and tents were pitched on black soil. Forty yards further on, the fire had finally exhausted itself. Beyond were green rolling hills, meadows painted with wildflowers. Rich as velvet, the meadows lay between stones the size of houses and cars that had tumbled down from the ridge; a strange Stonehenge rolling away seemingly to the edge of the world.
Fifty Mountain had five sites, all of them full. Orange, blue and green bubbles of tents poked up between the coal black spires like poisonous toadstools. Backpacks leaned against stumps, and the inevitable laundry of backpackers, socks and old towels, hung limply from spindly branches.
