"People are stinkers," Anna said philosophically.
"People don't know any better," Joan said charitably.
"They're just weeds," Van Slyke offered and was nonplussed by the severe looks he got from both his elders.
"Lecture, after dinner tonight," Joan forewarned him. "Be there."
She radioed the site of the disturbance and the extent of the damage to dispatch so it could be passed on to law enforcement. It crossed Anna's mind to tell her to give them the description of the young hiker they had met, but she didn't. The crime wasn't worth the investigation. And, too, Joan had liked the boy with the beatific smile. Earlier in the year, when Anna had first reported for duty on the Natchez Trace, she'd worked the murder of a child-a girl, really, sixteen. The experience had ruined her taste for making the world a little darker for any reason.
Because the burn had denuded it of trees, leaving them no way to string the wire, the second trap couldn't be put where it had been marked. Joan found a place nearby that would suffice. At the confluence of three game trails, tried and true paths through the broken country sure to be favored by bears, they strung their wire around the snags of several white pines and the branches of an alder.
A tall snag, looking as sere and crippled as a mummy's fingerbone, thrust up near one edge of the enclosure. Joan, working as carefully as if she were handling nitroglycerine, took one of the film canisters containing the skunk lure from the glass jar and perforated the hard plastic with an ice pick so the love scent could broadcast its charms.
While she strung it up in the top of the snag, Anna and Rory foraged down the still-green slope of the ravine for downed wood. When they had a pile a couple feet high and twice that in diameter, they came to the moment of truth.
Desirous of proving himself on the battlefield of the thoroughly revolting, Rory volunteered to do the honors. Anna and Joan watched as he uncapped the liter bottle of blood lure and poured it over the wood. The liquid was black and thick. Out of self-preservation, Anna had forgotten how unbelievably strong and unremittingly vile the smell was. The makers of stink bombs could take a lesson from bear researchers.
The trap set, the three of them departed as quickly as they could. Rory walked beside and just behind Anna, Joan taking the lead since she was the only one who knew where they were going.
"I think I got some on my hands," Rory said.
"Oh, ish," Anna said unsympathetically. "Stay away from me."
"No. Seriously. I think I got some on me."
This time she heard the panic in his voice and stopped.
Rory's face was tight and young with fear. His eyes had gone too wide. Anna could see a narrow line of white between the pupils and the lower lids. She enjoyed tormenting young people as much as the next person, but fear, real fear, could not be ignored. "This is really bothering you, isn't it?"
He stopped beside her. He clasped his hands around the shoulder-straps of his pack to stop their shaking then let go suddenly as if afraid the taint on them would spread to his equipment. "No big deal," he said, the need to hide his fear as great as the fear itself. "I just thought if I got that smell on me… well, you know."
Anna could think of no way to deal with Rory's obvious terror of wild animals. She realized some of what Joan had taken for orneriness earlier had been her knee-jerk attempt to kid him out of it. At a loss, she let her sight turn inward. A picture came to mind. She had been very small. A rotten boy, Daryl Spanks, a boy terminally infected with cooties, had put them all over her tuna sandwich at the end-of-year school picnic.
Mrs. White, her first grade teacher, had not told her how silly she was being. Instead, she had taken the sandwich and painstakingly picked every single cootie off of it.
"Let's have a sniff," Anna said and shrugged out of her pack.
Rory put out his hands palms up in the universal pose of inspection. Anna sniffed both arms carefully up to the elbow. "I don't think you got any on you," she said finally. His eyes had lost their panicked glaze but he was still wound too tight for comfort.
"Just to be sure," Anna said. She dug her liquid soap from her pack, doused his arms with her drinking water and made him lather and rinse twice. Fear was a killer. Anna had seen people die of it when their wounds weren't anywhere near mortal. Rory wasn't in that kind of trouble, but fear distracted. That in itself was a danger with off-trail travel.
The second rinse completed, she conducted another sniff test. "If there was any residue, that got it. Smell."
Rory smelled his arms. The cooties were gone.
"What are you guys doing?" Joan called. She'd turned around, discovered she was alone and backtracked.
Alarm returned to Rory's face. This time it didn't take an adept to divine the cause. He didn't want his boss to know he was a weenie.
"Rory had a splinter," Anna said. "We got it out."
Rory could no more thank Anna for this face-saving lie than she could have run a four-minute mile. Instead, he offhandedly helped her on with her pack and she understood the gratitude implicit in the gesture.
They followed the rim of the canyon inhabited by Continental Creek. Though they walked always through the black and dusty shadow of the old fire, the ravine had escaped the flames. By contrast the growth in it seemed the more miraculous and verdant.
Late in the afternoon they came out of the trailless country to the improved and maintained West Flattop Trail. Travel became so carefree, had her pack been lighter, Anna would have skipped. Nothing like a little hardship to bring about appreciation of the finer things. Two hours before sunset they hiked out of the burn. Fir trees closed around the trail, breathing cool, clean air and a reassurance of peace the burned area lacked.
They camped off trail, midway between the next trap they would dismantle and the site where they hoped to set the new one.
Joan had picked a lovely place half a mile off West Flattop in a small meadow ringed with fir and pine. A stream no more than a foot wide with silky grasses growing nearly over the top of it, so tiny it did not show on the map, cut through one edge of the clearing. In the startling way of glacier-carved country, near the stream, apparently fallen from the sky, was an immense slab of gray-and-sand-streaked stone.
The beauty of the place did as much to knit the raveled sleeve of care as sleep might and they stayed up late, lying shoulder to shoulder on the rock, watching for falling stars and telling the inconsequential truths strangers thrown together in the woods often do.
There was no discrimination between male and female, old and young, they just existed, unimportant and free under the infinity of Montana 's sky. Anna told them of her new sweetheart in Mississippi, a southern sheriff who moonlighted as an Episcopal priest. And who had a wife who refused to grant him a divorce. Mississippi took the sacrament of marriage seriously. There were only three reasons a person could get a divorce without his or her spouse's cooperation: adultery, felony or mental cruelty.
"I think it'd be mental cruelty to make somebody stay married to you who didn't want to," Rory said, sounding as if he spoke from experience.
Rory talked about his stepmom, telling them of this great joke she'd pulled on Les: telling everybody at a party that he had a penile implant and making cracks all evening about pumping things up.
That brought on an extended silence as Anna and Joan tried to figure nut what the funny part was. Rory seemed to need them to laugh with him but neither managed it.
Joan talked about wanting a dog and how life in the parks made that an impossibility. Had she been able to hear the loneliness underlying her wish, she probably wouldn't have told them, but with their backs on good mountain rock and their eyes full of nothing but stars, they had slipped free of the social taboos not to feel too much-and never let on if they did.