On this surface, despite the failing light, tracking grew suddenly easy. Everywhere the person stepped on the sharply angled ground a mark had been left. Anna moved forward at a footpace, stopping only twice when a clear bootprint presented itself and she paused to photograph it. At last there was some genuine information: waffle tread cross-training shoes, a man's size ten to ten and a half, not new, with a distinct wear pattern on the inside of the heels as if the shoe's owner was slightly knock-kneed.
Keeping to the curve of the mountain, she followed the prints into the stunted forest of pine. Shadows merged and light diffused but the trail remained clear. Anna forgot the coming darkness.
At a small stone abutment, rust-faced with lichen and darkened with a brow of trees so dwarfed and twisted by the weight of winter snows that they more resembled mutant shrubs than stately pines, the trail ended abruptly.
For a moment Anna was still, her eyes searching, her senses on full alert. At the base of the rocks was a cleft, three feet wide and perhaps that high; the entrance to a small cave. The twisted arms of a squat pine tree partially obscured it. A place where grizzlies might den or lunatics hide. Awakened from the narrow dream of footprints and broken needles, she became aware of how little sunlight was left, how cold the air had become, how lonely the place where the trail brought her. Her intention was to follow and find, not to confront. For that she would want backup in the form of many burly rangers. Discreet departure was the wisest course of action.
An alien noise penetrated these thoughts. It was the merest whisper of sounds, needles sliding over one another or the shush of fabric against bark, but it shrieked against Anna's heightened senses with the force of a gale through high wires. "Shhh," she breathed to herself, though all that moved or sounded within her was the rapid beat of her heart. Noiselessly she crabbed away from the den's mouth to put her back against the rock. The sound had not come from inside but from down the hill, opposite from the direction she'd come.
The sun was long gone. The light that remained was of the clear gray quality that reminds one that the sky is not a blanket of blue benevolently spread over the earth but only the beginning of cold and impossible distances. Acutely feeling her isolation and vulnerability, Anna thought to free her radio from her pack, call in her position. She should have done it hours ago. In the all-absorbing grip of tracking, she had forgotten. Now she found herself afraid to move, to make the unavoidable noise of finding and calling. If she was invisible, unnoticed, she could not be hurt.
Dread of being trapped in an external frame pack heavy with drinking water and a sleeping bag galvanized Anna and she unsnapped the harness at chest and hips and, letting the rock take the pack's weight, slid out of it. Five seconds scraping and a muffled thump and she was free. Breathing heavily as if she'd performed a terrific feat of strength and endurance, she listened again, desperate to hear over the machinations of her own heart and lungs.
A skittering watery sound of pebbles moving brought her head up an instant before afine rain of rocks fell from the top of the incline she'd taken refuge against. With it came a huffing grunt and the heavy grind of moving stone.
Cautiously, she stepped out from the massif and looked up. Twenty yards above, something dark and lumpish, not yet a bear but, in the dull gray evening light, not entirely human either, was curled down, shoulder against a boulder three or four feet high and that much across.
The rain of pebbles stopped, and in the sudden silence Anna saw the boulder give up its tenuous hold on the unstable mountainside and begin to roll, dislodging smaller rocks as it passed. The abutment she stood near was too low, not vertical enough to provide shelter from a landslide, even a small one.
Perhaps she could not run from bears but running from people was almost always a good idea. No time to think or to retrieve pack, water or radio, she fled headlong down the mountainside, angling away from the vertical, hoping the rock would roll straight. Crashing sounds of her own progress mixed with the crashing of the rock and she could not tell if the entire mountain was coming down upon her, or if her half-man half-beast had followed the rock and was upon her heels. One sound did cut through the rest. The unmistakable report of a gunshot. Just one, just once, but it lent her a burst of speed that the onset of avalanches and grizzlies could not.
Anna never looked back, never fell and never stopped until she was deep in the dwarf forest and had reached the ledge atop the cliff dividing the high country from the more hospitable climes significantly below treeline.
There she collapsed. A furtive look back showed no pursuer. The gnarled trees were steeped now in a night that seemed to generate beneath their branches and move upward to darken the sky. Crawling into a crack in the rocks that topped the crumbly cliff face, she covered her mouth and nose with both hands to muffle her breathing. Stilling herself, she listened.
With the abdication of the sun, the wind had picked up, whistling from the valleys, complaining as it crossed the ragged rocks where she'd gone to ground. Between the breathing of the mountains and that of her own belabored lungs she was deafened. Frustration and fear tried to get her to poke her head out.
She hadn't the strength to run any farther. It was too dark to climb safely down the treacherous wall of argillite. She had nothing to defend herself with but sticks and rocks. Taking a lesson from bunnies, ducklings and others of nature's most helpless creatures, Anna stayed hidden. Her breathing returned to normal. Knees and shoulders wedged against the sides of the crevice, head cocked, she listened through the crying of the wind.
Nothing. Nothing proved nothing. She settled herself in as best she could. Haste, not comfort, had dictated her choice of hiding places. The crack into which she wedged herself was hardly large enough to hold all her parts. Definitely not large enough to hold them in any configuration that wasn't torturous. Still, she was grateful to have it and in no great hurry to venture back into the woods in search of better.
Darkness wove its imperfect cover. South-facing, the cliff collected heat from the day and, though Anna was cold, she would not die of exposure. Pointed chunks jabbed at her left buttock and pried under her right shoulder blade, but she could move a little and that kept her legs and feet from going to sleep.
She listened. She dozed. She felt sorry for herself and angry by turns. She dozed again. A crack, a snap, two pieces of wood banged together or the dream memory of a gunshot woke her. Listening only made her ears ache. She drifted. In a dream, she heard the soft padding of a huge bear outside her temporary tomb, dreamed it so close she could hear the questing whuff-whuff and smell its breath. Dog breath,she dreamed, foul and familiar.
Thirst became an overriding factor around three a.m. She'd fled without water. The run had cost her. Here and there throughout her career, Anna'd suffered the usual discomforts of dwelling outside civilization: heat, cold, hunger, high altitude, sore feet, insect bites and stinging plants. The most insistent of these was thirst. The body knew it would survive the stings and itches, pain and even, for a while, hunger. Water it had to have.
Determined to stay in hiding till first light, she passed the hours wiggling fingers and toes and resolutely not thinking about liquids in any form. Near five o'clock the quality of darkness at the mouth of her hidey-hole began to change. Despite the dire misgivings she'd had, the sun was going to rise again and she was going to be around to see it.
Fumblingly, she found her feet and pushed to a standing position, head and shoulders above the lip of the ledge. From this rabbit's-eye viewpoint she took stock of the black and gray predawn world. No gunmen lounged nearby waiting to blow her head off. For once the wind wasn't blowing. The silence of the morning was so absolute that, had it not been for the cracking of her joints as she unfolded, she would have suspected she'd gone deaf overnight.