"We're up near Kootnai Pass, off West Glacier Trail half a mile. How far away are you?"
"Maybe three miles. We can get there before dark."
"I'll have Vic wait on the trail."
Ruick replaced the radio on his belt and picked up the pace.
Gary Bradley wouldn't say what they'd found over the public air waves. The only thing that made people that circumspect was a corpse.
Anna sighed. So much for the cocoa.
Chapter 5
According to Anna's internal hiking pedometer, it was approximately two miles from their camp to where the man called Vic was waiting for them: forty minutes walking. The sun had gone behind Nahsukin Mountain, but the snow on Trapper Peak still reflected molten fire. So far north, the twilight would linger.
Vic was another of Ruick's seasonals, on four months, off eight. The image of these economic nomads was that of rootless college students collecting life experiences with the safety net of Mom and Dad's income still stretched beneath them. That hadn't been true for ten years or more. Certainly not since Anna had joined the service. Vic was in his late thirties. A gold band on his left hand proclaimed him a married man. Chances were good he had a kid or two to support while he waited for the park service to offer him a full-time job with benefits.
An ugly man, tubular and tight and pointy-headed, the seasonal began waving the minute they appeared on the trail. Both hands waved a welcome ratified by an accompanying shout. Given this gay greeting Anna began to think things weren't as bad as they had feared.
Then they got close enough so that she could see him clearly. It wasn't welcome that animated his tin-woodsman form but relief. He trotted up the trail babbling about times and distances and rockfalls, only half of which they could understand. Ignoring Anna and Joan, he stopped in front of the chief ranger. Though he hadn't run more than twenty feet, he was panting, his long face with its tight little features had a grayish cast and he was sweating profusely. Anna could smell the unmistakable reek of vomit boiling off him with his body heat.
"Take it easy… Vic." Ruick read the man's name off the brass plate over his left front pocket. Harry Ruick had reached that rarified stratum of management where the names of the little people ran together.
The chief ranger might not know his seasonals' names, but he knew his job. Keeping his voice light and confident, he said, "Anybody going to die in the next five minutes?"
"No," Vic admitted, "but-"
"Then let's slow down. I don't know about these two," he jerked his chin at Anna and Joan, "but I need to catch my breath." The trail where Vic met them ran along the northern edge of the burn. To the south, sinking into an oblivion of inky darkness with the going of the sun, was charred land, burnt spikes of trees snagging the skyline. Tiring of its grim aspect, Anna looked north to where the mountain fell away in green and stone, tumbling steeply into the canyon cut by Kootnai Creek. In mist and blue velvet the Rockies rushed like water frozen in time across the Waterton Valley toward Canada. For the first time she had the sense she was on top of a mountain. Fragments of the rainstorm had settled beneath Flattop, clouds clinging to the sides of the far mountains. Sun-touched tops were pink, bottoms gray, leaching night up from the canyons.
Transfixed by this glimpse of paradise, she found herself standing alone. Harry had led Vic to a log, where he sat between the chief ranger and Joan, seeming to take comfort from the authority of the one and the mere presence of the other. Anna had nothing to offer so she remained where she was, acutely aware that the pleasure she took in this asymmetry of perfection would soon be blotted out by whatever nasty sorrow humans had brought upon themselves with their meddling.
That in Rory's case she was one of the prime meddlers was not lost upon her. She would feel 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.