Their homemade racket was assisted by the almost constant commentary from Joan's radio. The usual business of the park went on: an illegally parked horse trailer on the north side, a rockslide east of the weeping wall, but most of the talk regarded the search.
The number one-oh-two came up repeatedly. "District ranger?" Anna asked.
"Chief and, till we get a new one, acting superintendent."
Since her promotion and move to Mississippi, district ranger was the position Anna held. As was true in many middle management jobs, district rangers had tremendous responsibilities. It was they who were called upon to search, to rescue, to handle law enforcement situations beyond the field rangers' capabilities. Though they were the ultimate authority available when the chips were down or the proverbial shit hit the fan, they had very little authority in the greater NPS hierarchy. The first hint of real power was reserved for the chief rangers.
"He any good?" Anna asked.
"Harry Ruick? He's good," Joan said. "Sides with the bears when the public isn't clamoring."
"And when they are?"
"Pours experts on them."
"Does he usually go out on searches?" Some chiefs stayed active in the field, but more often than not they didn't. Several times a year they'd make some sort of publicized trek of the brass into the backwoods for management reasons but, particularly in the bigger parks, chief ranger had become an administrative position.
"Not usually," Joan admitted.
The search wasn't three hours old and already the big guns were rolling out. Harry Ruick was guessing Van Slyke was dead.
By eight o'clock a light rain began to fall. August's warmth was co-opted by weather and altitude. It had yet to reach sixty degrees. The low ceiling of clouds would keep out any assistance by air. Rain was light and the wind calm, but visibility on Flattop had dwindled to nothing.
Joan radioed Ruick, who headed up the team, and told him they had nothing. He advised them to eat, rest, stay warm and meet the team on West Flattop Trail around noon, when horses and searchers should be arriving.
"Rory's father and stepmother are camped at Fifty Mountain," Joan said into the radio. "Has anybody been sent to inform them?"
"We'll work on it," Ruick promised and Joan left it at that.
They followed directions, eating as much as they could, resting, then hiking down to the trail. The day shared its misery, cool and rainy: warm enough that rain gear left one overheated and sweating, cold enough to give a severe chill if one got thoroughly wet. A day without a whole hell of a lot to recommend it, as far as Anna was concerned.
Shortly before noon they met up with the search party and led them the three quarters of a mile back to their camp.
Ruick hadn't wasted his time in the saddle. On the ride up he'd worked out the search area and the pattern to be used. The area around the clearing from where Rory'd disappeared was divided into quadrants. The search pattern, Anna noticed, was tight and intense. Ruick was looking for a body or an injured person, not a young man still able to cover any amount of territory.
Anna and Joan went with the chief ranger on the section west toward Trapper Peak and south to the precipitous descent into McDonald Creek. As often as not, park higher-ups went soft. Some went down this road out of laziness; even more did so because in their mountain-climbing, water-rafting youth, they'd trashed knee and ankle joints. Like aging football players, they found themselves stove in and going to fat in their middling years. By midafternoon Anna was wishing one of those fates had befallen Harry Ruick. He was no wunderkindrocketed up to the exalted rank of chief while still a lad; Anna put him in his early fifties. His dark hair was grizzled, and through the open neck of his uniform shirt, it looked as if the thick pelt on his chest had gone completely white. He wasn't a tall man, but built, as Anna's father might have said when waxing uncouth, like a brick shit house: squat, thick and rock-hard.
Ruick set a brutal pace and showed Anna and Joan the compliment of never doubting they could match it. Unencumbered by weight-they carried little but their own drinking water-they did.
Drizzle turned to rain and back to drizzle half a dozen times. The three of them ran rivers of sweat. Rain gear was pulled off and stuffed in packs. Rain washed sweat away and water streamed off their faces and arms. The woods dripped, their silence moving from mysterious to oppressive. Ruick led them down ragged slopes toward McDonald Creek through thickets of alder ten and fifteen feet high and so dense they crawled on hands and knees till mud caked their undersides.
They found no trace of Rory Van Slyke or the bear.
Radio traffic from the other three quadrants, two east into the burn, the other northwest across West Flattop Trail, let them know the hunting had been no better for the other team members.
Just after six that evening, they took a break and ate the sandwiches the team had packed in on the horses. Ruick was as wet and dirty as Anna. And, bless his heart, had the grace to look every bit as tired. "One more hour," he told them. "Then we're getting into dark. One more hour and we'll head back to your camp." Anna lowered her eyes to her cheese sandwich so he wouldn't see the relief in them.
Joan didn't suffer Anna's vanity. "Good," she said. "My dogs are barking." University of Minnesota, Anna remembered. Dogs were feet, barking was tired. Where that strange code fit in with lutefisk and Lutherans she'd never discovered.
Harry Ruick radioed the rest of the team with the quitting time, then they pushed themselves up for another hour of calling and crawling and swearing at the dogged weeping sky.
The last hour did not pass quickly. Time was slowed by a compulsion that had developed in Anna forcing her to look at her watch every few minutes. Finally Ruick said, "That's enough," and they turned back. The search technique he'd opted for was meticulous and labor intensive, the ground they covered rugged, rife with hiding places. As a result, they'd traveled less than three miles from the campsite.
When they were nearly to the clearing, the rain stopped.
Clouds were thinning in the west, letting in a flood of orange light that lifted Anna's spirits as much as the thought of dry clothes and hot cocoa.
Joan was not similarly cheered. She wasn't sufficiently self-centered for rescue work, Anna decided as she watched her, head down, slogging along in Harry Ruick's wake. If Anna had to guess, she would have said Joan wasn't thinking of dry clothes and hot drinks, but of a boy who was facing a cold wet night without them. Or a boy who would never need them again.
"One-oh-two, two-one-four." Joan and the chief ranger's radios came to life in stereo. Two-one-four was Gary Bradley, one of the frontcountry bear-team guys. Anna had met him when they'd gathered before the search and come to know him by proxy, eavesdropping on their radio conversations. Gary was young and bearded and idealistic and interchangeable with a thousand other seasonals who gave up security and the American Dream for an intensely private dream of what the world could be.
Ruick drew his hand-held from its cordovan leather holster on his belt. Anna hadn't noticed before, but the back of his hand was crisscrossed with scratches and jeweled with bright beads of blood where thorns had broken the skin. The sight of blood reminded her of her own wound, the groove dug in her shoulder by the grizzly bear. She half hoped it would leave a scar. The story would be well worth the disfigurement.
"Go ahead, Gary," the chief ranger was saying into his radio.
"We got something here you better come look at."
"What have you found?"