decided the old pattern had to be broken. Food and other bear attractants were cached high in a tree. A different one from where Rory's stepmother's corpse had hung.
The researchers were not in evidence. Anna watered Ponce at the little stream that cut through the clearing, found on her topo the place Joan had marked the next hair trap to be disassembled, then remounted and set out to find them. Ponce, erroneously thinking his day's work had been done, carried her with ill grace.
He was further discomfited when she found the others and it fell to him to carry the heavy rolls of barbed wire and the researchers' packs to the site of the next hair trap. Anna, leading Ponce, walked beside Joan. Rory chose to trail behind for reasons of his own. Buck walked with him but the two didn't speak. Anna was not offended at their choice. It wasn't that she disliked Rory; it was more that he carried about him an oppressive darkness, as if neurosis or deep injury had created in him a small black hole into which good cheer and rationality were sucked away.
A day's hard work in rough country had put Joan in a good mood. The cobwebs left by generating reports and packaging samples for the lab were burned away.
'This trap was pretty paltry pickin's,' she said. The heat from her face made her brow glisten and the top quarter of her glasses fog up. That and the alder leaves poking through her hair gave her a look of the cliched mad scientist. 'No scat. A few wisps of hair. But at least the love scent hadn't been torn down. This one must have been hung high enough.' Joan babbled on happily about barbed wire, lab reports and other resource- manager-type details. Anna half listened, enjoying companionship not content. After a quarter of an hour the going became rugged, the ground broken and the scrub dense. Conversation was replaced by heavy breathing and aggravated grunts. Ponce punished Anna for the arduous duty by pushing her in the middle of the back with his long bony face just infrequently enough she never expected it.
The new hair trap was to be strung up less than half a mile from the old. Wire taut, love scent high and inviting, rotten wood piled and doused with the irresistibly vile blood lure, they finished near six that evening. The work cleansed Anna's psyche as it had Joan's and she managed the trip back to camp restfully free of dark forebodings and acid contemplations. Off the beaten paths, they encountered no park visitors and Anna was glad. At peace, for the moment, in her own reality, she had no desire to be dragged into anyone else's.
In an unusual burst of intraspecies appreciation, she remembered the chipper fellow from Washington who had delighted her with his odd turn of phrase.
Anna decided to share. 'I heard something funny today. A guy'd seen a big bull elk and called him a 'Boone and Crockett' elk.' Joan and Buck looked blank. 'Like in Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett,' Anna explained. 'You know, bigger than life.' Still nothing. Gifts rebuffed, she was annoyed.
'Shall we tell her?' Buck asked.
'I think not,' Joan said. 'You don't know her like I do. She is exhibiting an uncharacteristic enjoyment in bipeds. It's a train of thought that would be a shame to derail so close to the station.'
'Tell me what?' Anna demanded.
'She insists,' Joan said.
' 'Boone and Crockett' are the ultimate word on trophy animals,' Buck told her. 'They have a whole rating system depending on the size of the animals. Well… the size of their heads. That's where the numbers come in.'
'My little guy was talking about the elk dead?' Anna was aghast.
'As he pictured him on the wall of his den,' Buck confirmed.
The creepiness that had been temporarily held at bay by the advent of real work returned. Even apparent innocents from the great state of Washington harbored deadly intentions.
It wasn't until they'd been back in camp for an hour or more and been revived by an internal application of hot drinks that she spoke again and then it was of the dark subjects that had been consuming her mind.
Summarily banishing Buck and Rory simply because she did not wish to feel the impact of a stranger in the first instance and an adolescent in the second, Anna fired up the hissing glare of a Coleman lantern, set it on the wide flat table of stone and spread out her gruesome evidence collection for Joan's scientific perusal.
'I don't know diddly about human forensic pathology,' Joan warned her as they knelt like aging White Rock fairies on the edge of the stone.
'All evil is not human,' Anna said apropos of nothing but the growing unease Glacier's backcountry had instilled in her.
'If not, it stems from humans,' Joan said, either exposing a cynical streak Anna hadn't suspected or infected with Anna's pervasive sense of dislocation.
Anna didn't argue with her. 'Look at the pieces left of the blue bag,' she said. 'See here where it's streaked with dust and this yellow pollen-like stuff? I can't remember seeing anything hereabouts that would leave residue like this. Not that I've been looking,' she admitted.
Joan shoved her glasses up on her head the better to see close up and, fabric pinched delicately between gloved fingers and thumbs, she examined it in the cold and noisy light from the Coleman. After a minute of two of this she stopped, retrieved a large Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass from her day pack, said, 'I wish I had my microscope,' and studied the torn fabric for several minutes more.
'In my book, dust is dust is dust,' she said at last and returned the navy stuff bag to Anna. 'This is fine, grayish green, could be from argillite-alpine talus. Up high. Way high. Like tops of mountains. Or it could have come from under the bookcase in my bedroom. Lab tests would tell you what it's made of and maybe what kind of rocks it came from but, contrary to public opinion, rocks are not stationary. They slide and tumble, fall, wash down creeks.
'The yellow dust is different. I can't be a hundred percent sure but I don't think it is pollen. It looks more like scales, the weensy feathery scales you'd find on the wings of moths or butterflies.'
Anna wasn't completely flummoxed. On Isle Royale, just outside the screen doors of most of the lean-tos, she'd seen butterflies crowd together en masse. They came to get the salts left behind by sleepy campers who, rather than stumble through the dark to the pit toilet, merely stood on the shelter step to urinate.
'Something in the bag attracted butterflies? A lot of butterflies?' As she said it, Anna knew it made little sense. Even if they'd been drawn to the bag in great numbers, when they beat their tiny wings, the scales didn't fall off.
'Not exactly. Above treeline we have incredible blooms of army cutworm moths June through September. The moths lay their eggs on the Great Plains and the caterpillars mature there. Then they migrate to the Rockies to feed. In the fall they go back. Lay eggs and die. There're not so many as there once were. They spray crops in Iowa, we lose moths in Montana. An argument for global environmental policies local politicians won't hear. Putting that together with the white dust, I'm guessing your bag was set down or dragged around somewhere above treeline on Mount Stimpson or Mount Cleveland or, oh, shoot, I don't know, one of them. We get aggregations of the cutworm moths from about twenty-one hundred meters in elevation up to about twenty-eight hundred meters. They like south and southwest faces.' Joan took in the dark jagged ring of mountains cutting into the night sky around Flattop.
Sick of man-made light and racket, Anna turned off the lantern. In the sudden and blessed balm of night's silence, the two of them sat without speaking, watching the mountain peaks from where the blue sack had purportedly traveled.
The moon was waning, but in the thin clear air over the Rockies, its light was strong. Trees inked black on the shoulders of the mountains. Above their reach slivers of glaciers and the pale, much shattered talus that spent a majority of its life beneath the snow, caught the moonlight. The longer Anna stared the brighter the peaks became until, in their glory, they kindled a healing awe within her. 'I wouldn't think there'd be much in that part of the world to attract people.'
Joan laughed. 'You sound so wistful. There's not much. Hardly anybody goes up there. Mountain goats.'
'Trails?' Anna asked.
'Not that high.'
