Nowhere was the sound of birds waking, water running, squirrels doing whatever it was squirrels did at this hour of the morning. Slowly she became aware of a slight smacking sound intruding on the perfect peace. It was her tongue as it tried to drum up enough saliva to wet her throat.
As she realized again her thirst, a water bottle materialized. It had been there all along but in the grainy morning light she'd not noticed it. Like a mirage in the desert it stood alone and upright not ten feet from where her head stuck up out of the cliff's top. By itself, sitting on a slab of rock the wind had swept free of needles, it looked like bait in a clumsily laid trap.
She'd carried no water on her helter-skelter run down the mountain. She'd neither dropped it nor, in her haste, forgotten. While she'd slept, someone had crept close to where she was hiding and put it there. Something had visited her. Who would try and crush her with a boulder, take a shot at her, then track her to her lair to leave water? Before fear could take over, it was gone. Anyone, anything, who brought water must be a benevolent spirit. Unless the water was poisoned. Absurd. Surely it would be infinitely easier to smash her skull with a chunk of argillite while she slept than to poison water and leave it for her to find.
Having visually searched the still-empty area along the cliff top she looked again at the bottle. It was hers, taken from the pack she'd abandoned. Near the top, written in red nail polish, the most indelible of all marking substances, PIGEON was printed in block letters.
A sense of unreality swept over her. It was so strong her vision blurred and she reeled in her cramped space, her pelvic bones rapping painfully against the stone. Like a bad comic, she did a double take then rubbed her eyes with her fists. But when she looked again the apparition was still there, bizarre in its homely mundane form.
Thinking of the Lost Boys and the poisoned cake, Hansel and Gretel and gingerbread, Anna eased from the crack in the rock one stiff, chilled inch at a time, emerging like a lizard too long out of the sun. The crevice she'd squished herself into was no more than a shallow vertical chink in the rocky drop where a rectangular piece of argillite had fallen away. She crawled on hands and knees to the water. Resisting the temptation to snatch it up and pour it down her throat, she studied the plastic bottle. White with blue lettering, she'd gotten it free when she'd joined the health club in Clinton, Mississippi, the previous spring. The bottle was as she remembered it but for two puncture marks about a quarter of the way down from the mouth. One dented the plastic. The other pierced it through. Had it not been set carefully upright, the water would have leaked away.
Teethmarks. Anna remembered her dream of padding paws and dog breath. A bear then, not a dream. A bear had brought her water to drink. Savoring the fairy-tale image while the unreality of it made her head swim, Anna watched her hand reach for the water, her fingers curl around the cold plastic. She popped open the nipple and drank.
If it was poisoned, so be it. She wouldn't have missed the spurious magic of the moment for the promise of ten lifetimes.
Chapter 18
Because she was truly thirsty, Anna could follow the water down her throat, feel it spread out in her stomach, soak through the walls, thin her blood and plump up her skin. Not a trace of poison anywhere. No one, nothing, sprang from the woods to strike her down as she drank. The water was a gift, not a trap, and she was as grateful as she was mystified.
The body satisfied, the mind was able to expand its focus past where the next drink was coming from. Carrying the bottle, empty now but far too interesting with its puncture marks to be left behind, she moved partly to get the blood flowing and because, gift or no gift, she did not want to linger in a place she'd been found out.
Walking slowly into the trees, where morning's light had not yet cleared away the shadows, she put together a rudimentary plan. Had the water not made its miraculous appearance, she would have headed down toward camps and creeks immediately. Given a short reprieve, she needed to go back to where she'd left her pack. Not to find, capture or confront evil-doers, she promised herself, but to look without being seen and to get her stuff back, including the 35-mm camera with film containing pictures of her attacker's bootprints. Or Gunga Din's bootprints. Could the roller of the rock and the bringer of water be one and the same? It made even less sense than Anna's image of a beneficent bruin carrying her water bottle in its kindly jaws.
Taking her time, moving with an ear to her own footfalls and an eye to keeping trees or rocks between her and the ridge where the pack had been left, she walked in a long ellipse so she would come upon the place from the north and above. This time she would be the stalker.
Movement and the return of the sun restored her equilibrium. Hunger, burning lightly in her middle, was a pleasant companion, reminding her she was alive and had much to look forward to. Within thirty minutes she had wended her surreptitious way back to where her reckless sprint had begun the evening before. Above and to the right of the den's-if it was in fact a den-entrance she made herself comfortable, her back to a green and gold boulder rapidly warming in the sun. The branches of two pines, tangled like ancient lovers fighting, created a pierced screen between her and the world.
A woman in purdah, Anna watched in security. She even began to enjoy herself as befitted a person given a front-row seat in a crown jewel park. Her pack was not where she'd dumped it, but ten or fifteen feet away. The sleeping bag had been pulled off, unrolled and thrown aside. The pack itself was open and the contents spilled out. From this distance she couldn't tell what was missing. It occurred to her that the camera-or at least the exposed film-would be taken or destroyed. Probably her radio would have suffered a like fate. She hoped her notes had been overlooked.
The boulder that had been pushed down toward her had come to rest below the pack, maybe six yards. Beneath its bulk poked the crushed arms of a small tree. From her elevated vantage point it wasn't hard to see the tree branches as the scaly withered arms and legs of a flattened witch. Anna let the Wizard of Oz take over and, in her imagination, saw the witch's legs shrivel and vanish beneath the fallen house.
The mind game shifted and she saw herself beneath the rock. Her own life crushed, her own legs and arms made sere and dry. That, after all, was what had been intended. She thought about that for a while. It hurt her feelings and offended her delicate sensibilities but, sequestered in the warmth of the sun, safe from prying eyes, she wasn't afraid.
The rock and the tree milked for all the drama they had to offer, her thoughts moved on.
The brush that had been banked against the bottom of the rocky outcrop, partially obscuring the slot in the stones, had been dragged away. The opening was considerably larger than she'd imagined, several feet high and eight or ten feet wide, tapering down at either end. A nice place to pass the winter or hide out from the law.
Since it was not near denning time Anna had given little thought to disturbing a bear inside. Now she thought of the mother and cubs she'd seen the day before and wished she knew more about the habits of the grizzly. Did they use their dens in summer? Take naps there? Water the plants? Dust? She seemed to remember that, given the choice, a bear would return to the same place to den winter after winter but adapted fairly easily if the den were made uninhabitable by some natural disaster: flood, avalanche, ski resort.
Snug on her hillside, the thought of bears in residence did little more than delay her slide and scramble down a few minutes more. Her long watch was for two-legged animals. An hour passed. Anna neither heard, saw, smelled nor sensed anything to suggest that she was not alone.