their shaking then let go suddenly as if afraid the taint on them would spread to his equipment. 'No big deal,' he said, the need to hide his fear as great as the fear itself. 'I just thought if I got that smell on me… well, you know.'
Anna could think of no way to deal with Rory's obvious terror of wild animals. She realized some of what Joan had taken for orneriness earlier had been her knee-jerk attempt to kid him out of it. At a loss, she let her sight turn inward. A picture came to mind. She had been very small. A rotten boy, Daryl Spanks, a boy terminally infected with cooties, had put them all over her tuna sandwich at the end-of-year school picnic.
Mrs. White, her first grade teacher, had not told her how silly she was being. Instead, she had taken the sandwich and painstakingly picked every single cootie off of it.
'Let's have a sniff,' Anna said and shrugged out of her pack.
Rory put out his hands palms up in the universal pose of inspection. Anna sniffed both arms carefully up to the elbow. 'I don't think you got any on you,' she said finally. His eyes had lost their panicked glaze but he was still wound too tight for comfort.
'Just to be sure,' Anna said. She dug her liquid soap from her pack, doused his arms with her drinking water and made him lather and rinse twice. Fear was a killer. Anna had seen people die of it when their wounds weren't anywhere near mortal. Rory wasn't in that kind of trouble, but fear distracted. That in itself was a danger with off-trail travel.
The second rinse completed, she conducted another sniff test. 'If there was any residue, that got it. Smell.'
Rory smelled his arms. The cooties were gone.
'What are you guys doing?' Joan called. She'd turned around, discovered she was alone and backtracked.
Alarm returned to Rory's face. This time it didn't take an adept to divine the cause. He didn't want his boss to know he was a weenie.
'Rory had a splinter,' Anna said. 'We got it out.'
Rory could no more thank Anna for this face-saving lie than she could have run a four-minute mile. Instead, he offhandedly helped her on with her pack and she understood the gratitude implicit in the gesture.
They followed the rim of the canyon inhabited by Continental Creek. Though they walked always through the black and dusty shadow of the old fire, the ravine had escaped the flames. By contrast the growth in it seemed the more miraculous and verdant.
Late in the afternoon they came out of the trailless country to the improved and maintained West Flattop Trail. Travel became so carefree, had her pack been lighter, Anna would have skipped. Nothing like a little hardship to bring about appreciation of the finer things. Two hours before sunset they hiked out of the burn. Fir trees closed around the trail, breathing cool, clean air and a reassurance of peace the burned area lacked.
They camped off trail, midway between the next trap they would dismantle and the site where they hoped to set the new one.
Joan had picked a lovely place half a mile off West Flattop in a small meadow ringed with fir and pine. A stream no more than a foot wide with silky grasses growing nearly over the top of it, so tiny it did not show on the map, cut through one edge of the clearing. In the startling way of glacier-carved country, near the stream, apparently fallen from the sky, was an immense slab of gray-and-sand-streaked stone.
The beauty of the place did as much to knit the raveled sleeve of care as sleep might and they stayed up late, lying shoulder to shoulder on the rock, watching for falling stars and telling the inconsequential truths strangers thrown together in the woods often do.
There was no discrimination between male and female, old and young, they just existed, unimportant and free under the infinity of Montana 's sky. Anna told them of her new sweetheart in Mississippi, a southern sheriff who moonlighted as an Episcopal priest. And who had a wife who refused to grant him a divorce. Mississippi took the sacrament of marriage seriously. There were only three reasons a person could get a divorce without his or her spouse's cooperation: adultery, felony or mental cruelty.
'I think it'd be mental cruelty to make somebody stay married to you who didn't want to,' Rory said, sounding as if he spoke from experience.
Rory talked about his stepmom, telling them of this great joke she'd pulled on Les: telling everybody at a party that he had a penile implant and making cracks all evening about pumping things up.
That brought on an extended silence as Anna and Joan tried to figure nut what the funny part was. Rory seemed to need them to laugh with him but neither managed it.
Joan talked about wanting a dog and how life in the parks made that an impossibility. Had she been able to hear the loneliness underlying her wish, she probably wouldn't have told them, but with their backs on good mountain rock and their eyes full of nothing but stars, they had slipped free of the social taboos not to feel too much-and never let on if they did.
It was after midnight when they finally crawled into their sleeping bags.
Without warning, Anna's eyes were open, blind and useless in the claustrophobic dark of the tent. Something had signaled an abrupt end to sleep. A sound. Cracking. Wood on wood or a twig snapping under a heavy foot. Or hoof. Or paw. Perhaps Rory, up in the night to answer the call of nature. Though the poor boy was so afraid of critters he'd probably suffer till morning in the imagined safety of his tent. Not for the first time, Anna wondered why a young man still frightened of the monsters under his bed would pay to work in bear country.
Not yet concerned, she waited for the sound-the quality already forgotten, left in the sleep it had so rudely jerked her from-to come again, attach itself to meaning so she could call off the internal watchdogs and close her eyes.
A soft exhalation, the sigh of the wind or a ghostly child penetrated the tent wall, then brushing, gentle, the sound a soft-bristle brush would make on nylon. Anna had heard it before when furry denizens had come to visit in the night: skunks, raccoons and, once, a porcupine. The noise their coats made rubbing against fabric as they explored her campsite.
Tonight's brush was painting strokes high on the tent wall. Deer. Elk. Bear. Anna felt the first tingling along her spine as a race memory of untold millions of years of being hunted by night stirred deep in her primitive brain.
Making no noise, she reached over and touched Joan.
She woke quickly. 'What-'
'Shh.' Anna listened. Though she could see nothing of her tentmate and no longer touched her, she could feel Joan's tension, along with her own, charging the atmosphere inside the tent.
Shushing, susurrating sound. All around them now as if the animal circled the tent. Not once. Not to probe and, curiosity satisfied, move on. Circle after circle. No sound but the soft brushing and the periodic gusts of air, voiceless woofs. A bear. Grizzly. Black. Full grown. Shoulder touching high on the domed wall of nylon.
With each circuit, Anna's Disney-born sense of oneness with her fellows of the tooth and claw faded. It was replaced by the lurid pen-and-ink illustrations she remembered from a sensationalized account of two women killed when she was in college, both dragged from their tents, mauled, killed and fed on in Night of the Grizzlies.
She pushed her lips as close to Joan's face as a lover might and barely breathed the words, 'What's it doing?'
'Don't know,' Joan whispered back.
The circling stopped, as if at the thread of sound the two women spun between them. A silence followed, so absolute in the perfect darkness of the tent, Anna felt dizzy, as if she were falling into it. Her senses stretched: blind eyes trying to see through two layers of tenting, deaf ears trying to hear movement beyond the insubstantial walls.
A barely audible rustle as Joan pushed herself up on her elbows sawed across Anna's nerves with the impact of sandpaper on a sunburn. No second hand to measure it, time did not tick by but pulsed, expanding and contracting like the air in her lungs as Anna forced herself to breathe.
'Do you think-' she whispered.
A snap of wood.
