'If Rory's future is settled to your satisfaction, perhaps we might go?' Joan said and smiled with her lovely crooked teeth. Her exceedingly round cheeks pushed her glasses up.
Anna laughed. 'Lead on.'
'I'm glad you're back,' Joan said as Rory helped her on with her pack. 'We've been needing a treat.'
Anna was considered a treat. Things were looking up.
The previous day Joan and Rory had dismantled a hair trap beyond the burn area to the south at a confluence of two avalanche chutes. The barbed wire was rolled and the samples secured. Rory took the hard- sided case with the blood lure and the love potion. Joan had the samples from the last two traps. Flattered to be welcomed and glad, after so long spinning her proverbial wheels, to be of service, Anna lashed the heavy rolls of wire to the frame of her pack and rotated herself into it.
Enough daylight remained that they could hike to within striking distance of where the new hair trap was to be and set up camp. Joan in the lead, they set off northward across an expanse of glorious green meadow littered with immense squared boulders. Wildflowers, late blooming because winter had held on overlong, spangled the grasses and occasionally a rare pond, tiny, midnight blue and seemingly as deep as an ocean, gleamed darkly in the undulations left by a retreating glacier.
Rory, healed by the good mountain air or exposure to Joan Rand's idiosyncratic brand of sanity, followed Joan, chattering away like a healthy teenager.
Anna was happy to let the sound flow by with the staggering beauty of the scenery. Her own cure was at work, and normalcy was flowing back into the void murder and mayhem had carved out. Before long she added her own cheery sound pollution and whistled a tune her father had taught her, one that meandered and had no words.
Beyond the meadow the trail dropped off steeply, leading down into the valley that would eventually widen out to hold the splendor of Waterton Lake. The first mile was of switchbacks carved through rock. As it descended, the foliage thickened. Trees grew taller and mountainsides of ripe huckleberries slid away in old avalanche chutes above and below the trail.
'Great bear country this time of year,' Joan hollered back. 'They come for the huckleberries. So make a joyful noise. We don't want to startle anybody.' Joan acted on her own direction by belting out the first line of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' in ascratchy alto.
The light, gold with late afternoon, drenched hillsides shoulder-deep in wildflowers of every hue, pushing out from cracks in the rocks. They hiked and they sang and Anna realized balance had been restored. She was having a good time. More than that, she was having a good time with people. If that wasn't well balanced, sanity was highly overrated.
As they crossed a wide, flat shank of hill, the trail a narrow ribbon carved from the slope with pick and shovel, Joan pointed out where they would go in the morning to set up the next trap. There was no break in the ragged alder skirting. When they left the trail they would fight their way up an avalanche chute to where it converged with another, smaller chute on what Joan promised was a flattish spot.
To find a place suitable to camp, they hiked another couple of miles descending into the forest proper. So far north, with so much moisture to draw on, it came close to a forest primeval in Anna's eyes. The trees were huge, great piney boughs obscured the sky. Beneath, ferns grew tall, well overhead. There was a deep hush of needles and leaves underfoot. A crashing and a glimpse of brown through the green-cast shadows announced that they'd invaded the domain of a moose cow. Probably there was water nearby.
Anna laughed and pointed as if the others could have missed the cow's noisy departure. Anna liked moose. She'd fallen in love with them when she worked on Isle Royale in Michigan. The Bullwinkle Syndrome: though moose were immense, potentially dangerous, wild animals, their bulbous noses and shambling disjointed stride always made her want to play with them. Good sense and respect for their dignity had kept her in check.
'Moose,' she said idiotically.
'There're a lot in this part of the park,' Joan said.
'Cool,' Rory put in.
Cool indeed.
Camp was deliciously sylvan. Doused with DEET, the mosquitoes were tolerable. The quiet was so deep it was tangible, a force that cradled the brain in soft folds. Civilized quiet of the same intensity made the ears ring. Here it made the soul expand. Anna breathed it in. The gentle chitchat of camp did nothing to injure the silence but dropped onto its surface like petals on a pond. Anna listened to Joan joking with her young protege, hearing the voices in pleasant counterpoint to the forest's peace.
'Story time,' Joan said when supper had been eaten and the dishes- plastic sacks into which hot water was poured to reconstitute various carbohydrate substances- were cleared away and cached in a tree for the night. 'What's been happening all these three days while we've been working for a living?'
In the hours since she'd realigned her brain and enjoyed the rejuvenating effects of Joan Rand and the wilderness, the murder investigation had retreated so far as to seem ancient history. Anna brought it to the fore without rancor, a puzzle only, valuable as entertainment around a single candle Joan always burned, her own private 'campfire.'
A look at Rory let Anna know the tale, though of his stepmother, held no real horrors for him. Early on, Anna knew he'd suspected his dad. It had been that, more than Carolyn's demise, that had tortured him. Anna guessed between pouring fish guts and blood and nailing barbed wire to trees, he'd had a significant amount of therapeutic conversation with Joan.
Leaning on her sleeping bag and pack, Anna told them about her phone calls, the name of Fetterman, the unclear connection between the truck and trailer abandoned on the northeast corner of the park and McCaskil's aliases. The only phone conversation she omitted was the one she'd had with Francine out of Carolyn's office. Maybe Rory'd not been as close to his stepmother as had first appeared but he didn't need to have her memory trashed.
No competition in the way of TV, radio, the Internet or floor shows, Anna had a good audience and found herself rambling on more than she intended. She told them about the night she spent hiding in the rocks on the shoulder of Cathedral Peak, how she'd dreamt of a bear padding around and woke to find her water bottle punctured by what could have been teeth, how she'd searched the den, finding it swept clean but for the peanut, the dime and the part of a biscuit.
'We're nothing if not thorough,' Anna finished. 'Harry even had the biscuit analyzed.'
'Flour and water?' Rory ventured.
'Protein, fat, fiber, ash and a few other things,' Anna told him. 'Dog food was our guess.'
Joan sat up, the look of passive interest sparked by something deeper. 'How big was it?' she asked. 'About the size of a charcoal briquette?'
'It was broken,' Anna said. 'But about that. Why?'
'Do you remember exactly what it was made of?'
Anna squeezed her eyes shut, trying to picture the sheet of paper. 'No percentages. What I said maybe, plus calcium. The bulk, I remember, was dry matter. Sounded sinister to me.'
'Omnivore food,' Joan said.
Anna opened her eyes. 'Omnivore food?'
'It's what we feed bears in captivity. A normal-sized bear will eat about six pounds of omnivore food and about that much in fruits and vegetables every day.'
'Somebody's feeding the bears?' Rory said. 'I mean, feeding them bear food?'
Anna laughed. Feeding bears intentionally or otherwise in the national parks was an ongoing problem, but Rory was right. Nobody fed them bear food. 'Why would anybody do that?' she asked. 'To lure the bears?'
'Bears eat it,' Joan said. 'Bears aren't finicky. But it's no great lure. We spent years developing lures. Omnivore chow isn't even in the top one hundred. The stuff hasn't got much of an odor. The scent not only doesn't broadcast, it's not all that alluring. You might feed bears with it but I doubt you could use it to attract them.'
'You could habituate them,' Rory said unexpectedly. 'You know, always have food for them at
