"I'm Geoffrey Micou. I just-just made up that other name."
"Carl G. Micou was your dad?" Anna asked and he looked surprised. The line about old age and treachery winning every time came to her mind. Geoffrey was at an age where he could still believe each and every one of his thoughts was new, unique to the world. He had yet to learn that all the stories have already been told. What remains is to choose the story one likes best and live that.
"We found your truck and trailer-your dad's truck-" Anna explained. "The tags were registered in the name of Carl Micou."
"Oh." Geoffrey sounded disappointed, magic losing its charm once the trick is explained. "That was what we used to move Balthazar. Dad had it made over."
"I know," Anna said. "The ranger found omnivore food in it." She didn't add that, until recently, they hadn't known it was omnivore food. It served her purposes to appear omniscient. Besides, it was fun.
"He fucking stole him." McCaskil dripped his acid into the circle. "That bear's mine."
Joan turned to him. In lieu of her traditional campfire candle, they had put McCaskil's flashlight butt-down in their midst, needing the security of watching their prisoner and, for Anna at least, the unending awe of watching the bear. In the dim fallout, Joan's face was hard, its customary softness hidden away from the man chained to the tree.
"Don't talk," she said. "We don't want to talk to you. We don't care what you think or feel." Her voice was so devoid of humanity Anna was made cold. McCaskil must have jumped way over onto Joan's bad side when he took a shot at Rory.
McCaskil subsided.
"I did steal him," Geoffrey said with a fond look at his monolithic companion. "Nobody should own a bear like Balthazar. He's not just a thing."
"You're my map boy, aren't you?" Joan asked.
Geoffrey blinked a few times, long dark lashes settling like feathers below wide-set hazel eyes. Then the sense of what she was asking came to him. "Yes, ma'am. I thought if I knew where the food was, I could take Balthazar there and teach him to eat it."
"Reintroduce him to the wild," Anna said, thinking of the looting of glacier lilies, the mining of cutworm moths. "Why the park? There're plenty of places in Canada and Alaska."
"You don't let anybody shoot them in the park," Geoffrey said simply.
"Ah." The logic was indisputable. One does not take a friend to live where murderers are waiting to take his life.
"Why didn't you ask for help?" Years of motherhood and carrying pain for children ached in Joan's voice.
"You'd've said no," Geoffrey answered. "Everybody would have said no."
Neither Anna nor Joan was naive-or dishonest-enough to argue with him. The bear belonged to somebody else. Geoffrey was a kid. He would have been blown off on several accounts.
"That bear's my property," McCaskil felt bound to pipe up. Reassured by the company of others, safe from the bear and, in a strange way, safe within his bonds from the responsibility for decision or action, William McCaskil was recovering his equilibrium. Anna liked him better mute and cowering.
"Can't have pets where you'll be living for the next fifty years," she said.
Anna guessed the bear really did belong to William McCaskil if it was legally obtained as a cub. The brochure had listed the owners of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as George and Suzanne Fetterman. McCaskil had been born to a woman named Suzanne. Anna's bet was Fetterman was Suzanne's second husband, McCaskil's stepfather. Hence the use of Fetterman as an alias. He'd have been grown when Geoffrey was young but evidently visited Mom often enough to torment a little boy and a little bear. McCaskil must have inherited Adventure Trails when old man Fetterman died.
The thought process rippled quickly through Anna's mind. It could be verified easily enough. At present she chose not to speak of it. She didn't wish to give William McCaskil the right of anything.
"Mr. McCaskil was going to sell Balthazar," Geoffrey said.
"I found a home for him, a nice ranch in British Columbia where he would roam free," McCaskil said virtuously.
"Boone and Crockett," Anna snapped. "Balthazar would have been shot as a wild bear by some slob hunter for a trophy. What were they offering? A hundred thousand? Two? That must've seemed a fortune to a small-time fraud like you. Or could you get more because Balthazar would stand and roar on cue, add to the drama? Even charge and attack without any real risk to the hunter. You're ason-of-a-bitch, McCaskil. Be nice and shut up or you will be shot trying to escape." As a rule, Anna refrained from abusing prisoners in her custody. The venom she poured out on McCaskil was tied directly into the loss and outrage she felt looking across the flashlight at the quiet miracle eating a red ball cap and thinking of him destroyed for the sake of a little entertainment and bragging rights.
"Mr. McCaskil told me that's what he was going to do," Geoffrey said. "He said I could visit Balthazar's head after it was on somebody's wall. He said that to me. That's when I took Balthazar. I wrote you from the road," he told Joan. "I've got a laptop and a cell phone back where my stuff's at."
"Does the bear-Balthazar-do whatever you say?" Rory spoke for the first time. Anna covered her mouth to hide her smile. The envy was heavy in Rory's voice. What boy, what person of any age or gender, wouldn't want a twelve-hundred-pound omnivore as friend and backup?
"Pretty much," Geoffrey said. "My dad was Mr. Fetterman's animal curator. They got Balthazar when he was really tiny and I was about ten. We grew up together and I helped Dad train him and we'd do shows together. People liked seeing us, a bear and a little boy. After Dad died, Mr. Fetterman kept me on. I lived in his wife's old sewing room-Mrs. Fetterman had been dead a year or so before Dad went. I took over with Balthazar. He's a trained bear but he's not a pet," he warned and Anna noted he shot her as severe a glance as he did Rory. "He's a wild animal. They've got their own rules and you can't go around breaking them. Balthazar can't be scared or hurt or teased. He doesn't understand it. That's why he hates Mr. McCaskil so much. When he smells him he knows something bad is happening and he goes back to bear rules to save himself."
"Fucking menace," McCaskil growled. Balthazar growled back and McCaskil shut up. "How do you tell him what to do?" Rory asked. "Lots of ways. He responds to a few verbal commands.
He'll sit down and play dead to whistles. Some tricks he taught himself and just does them for fun when he's happy. He likes to juggle-kind of play catch really-with pinecones. Sometimes he just starts in to dance even when there's no music."
"I guess I'll pay closer attention to bizarre bear management reports in the future," Joan said, and Anna laughed.
Geoffrey went on, "For the show, Dad taught him to growl and stand tall and charge by different numbers of raps on pieces of wood. He picked the wood because the noise was natural and it would seem more real."
"We found one of your clacking sticks," Anna said. "After the night you and Balthazar tore up our camp."
Geoffrey looked away, fixing his eyes on the flashlight between them. "I'm sorry about that. I just wanted you to leave. Balthazar got into some kind of trap thing. A tree with wire around. It took me fifteen minutes to get him to leave. He'd got hold of a little thing that smelled like cherry candy up in the little tree and wouldn't stop playing with it, I figured it was one of those traps you'd told me about that day we met. I was afraid you'd find out somehow."