Anna snorted. Sensing an equine conversation in the offing, Ponce snorted back. "Isolate myself more than usual," Anna said to him. Ponce lost interest once she reverted to the human tongue. He returned to his grazing.
Humans were tribal creatures. Isolation was a form of punishment so extreme even in prisons it was only used for serious breaches of conduct. Those who isolated themselves usually suffered as a consequence. Anna'd long been aware of the tiny cracks in what passed for normalcy when she'd purposely been too long alone, locked inside the ivory tower of bone that served as skull.
Shifting position, her back to the trail so her ever-vigilant eyes could keep watch on the woods, she considered her slow withdrawal. The unseen scratchings of a small woodland beast sent her pulse rate up and she realized what it was. She had been dispossessed, made homeless. Not removed from her house and cat and dog in Mississippi-the park housing she enjoyed on the Natchez Trace Parkway was simply one in a chain of way stations. Her home, where she felt safe and centered, had always been the wild country. Towns, streets, houses, dumpsters, PTA meetings- that was where evil lurked. In the backcountry was only the often pitiless but never malicious work of the gods.
In Glacier that amoral purity was gone. A wrongness stalked. Had it been only the warped and hostile actions of people, Anna would not have felt the same. But it wasn't. Nature herself was being unnatural. The bear that had torn up their camp was behaving in a creepy, unbear-like way. When human beings were evil they were merely, if the Christian teaching was to be believed, exercising their God-given right to free will. When nature got personal, then whatever passed for Satan was surely afoot.
No wonder she'd bonded so completely with Joan Rand, Anna thought. The researcher was the only person she could talk to about their bear. Joan had been there. Joan felt it. To others, even Molly or Paul, she would seem just another scared tourist anthropomorphizing and exaggerating, the sort who submit reports in lilac ink of grizzlies juggling hedgehogs.
The next hour was spent riding back to Fifty Mountain in hopes Bill McCaskil would have returned. But for a brief interlude with two visitors from Washington State, an incredibly chirpy middle-aged man hiking with a serene and homely woman Anna presumed was his wife, she spoke with no one. The Washingtonian had been afire with the news that there was a "Boone and Crockett elk" a mile down the trail that Anna must see. The animal had moved on by the time she and Ponce came to where it was sighted and she was mildly disappointed. She'd never heard a creature referred to as a "Boone and Crockett" but given Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett's legendary stature, it must have been a grand old bull.
Bill McCaskil had gone the way of the elk. His campsite was empty, pack gone from the tree in front of his tent. What Anna had intended to ask him she wasn't sure but she needed to do something with her time. And though it was so uncharacteristic she didn't recognize the motivation, she wanted to do something around other people.
Against the wishes of both his son and Chief Ranger Ruick, Lester Van Slyke had hiked back to Flattop. He was taking up residence in his abandoned camp when Anna walked down from McCaskil's site.
Les was gray with the effort the twelve-mile walk had cost him-a coronary wandering around in shiny new boots. He carried an NPS radio, probably at the insistence of Harry Ruick. Other than that he seemed as ill-prepared for the rigors of camping as ever. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want to explain his persistence in remaining in the backcountry, didn't want to discuss his former wife's violent behavior. After a quarter of an hour she was glad to leave him in peace and start back the way she'd come, returning to the tiny meadow where she, Joan and Rory had first set up camp.
It was as it had been before the bear attack. New tents were pitched, not where the old had been, but on the far side of the flat rock as if Joan, or more likely Rory, had suffered an attack of superstition and 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 clichéd 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."