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Earlier, from her elevated perch, she had spotted five oval excavation areas. She'd inspected three. Alert for signs of returning diners, she hurried toward the fourth. She never got there. Halfway between the third and fourth was a bear dig of a very different aspect. It was linear, the rocks turned over in neat rows and not as deep, six to eight inches at most.
Things natural tended to eschew straight lines. Lines were a mathematical construct taught to the disordered minds of children until, in adulthood, people favored them, writing, digging, planting and, when possible, walking in them.
On hands and knees, A
Sitting on her heels, eyes roaming the edges of the depression for interlopers of any species, she thought about the strange young man, Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. The day they'd seen him, before the grizzly had come to their camp, they had passed a field of glacier lilies, another preferred food of the Glacier bear population. Someone with a spade had been digging them up. Most likely the obvious choice: Geoffrey Whoever. At the time it seemed of little importance. Illegal certainly, but one man with a shovel and a backpack was not going to dig the lilies to extinction.
There was nothing to indicate the digger of moths was the same person as the digger of lilies except that people pilfering the natural food of bears was an oddity. Rare to catch one doing it; statistically improbable to find two. The young man with the lovely smile and the suspicious habits was not a bear researcher; Joan would have known him. At least he wasn't a bear researcher in Glacier.
Could an adolescent rogue researcher be murderously messing about with Glacier's grizzlies? The concept was absurd but A
Because it was cold and she was tired and the sun was going to be down in a couple of hours, she thought of werewolves. As a rational westerner, A
Why not a bear?
Like those suffering from lycanthropy, could the psychosis go so far as to drive the sufferer to seek to live as a bear would live, eat as a bear would eat and kill as a bear would kill?
A
A deep and rotten core of fear opened in A
"Wait, wait, wait," A
Creating a trance-like state induced by self-hypnosis that allows the fears and wish-images of the subconscious mind to be accessed by the conscious mind. A
"Werebears," she said out loud to mock herself out of the heebie-jeebies.
It didn't work. The missing flesh so carefully cut from the face of Mrs. Van Slyke-a person using a knife rather than teeth and claws to pull the edible flesh from the prey? An absorbing if macabre theory. Much that was known didn't fit with the werebear tale: the specificity and tidiness of the flesh removal, caching the flesh, stealing film, moving and hiding the body.
A
Six o'clock; time was up but A
Clearing her mind of everything that was not visible on the ground, she slid easily into the tracker's zone, a quiet place where one could wait for as long as need be for the minutest sign to come clear. The shovel dig was fresh, not more than twenty-four hours old.
The fine layer of silt on the bottoms of the overturned stones was dry on the surface but, when scratched, still retained vestiges of moisture beneath. Overturning the stones carefully, she saw that the moths licked up by real bears had here been scraped off by human hands. The trail the fingers left during the harvest was clear. The navy bag had told A
There was no way to tell which end of the linear dig was the begi
The low angle of the sun was perfect for tracking. And besides herself and bears, the digger was probably the only human who'd walked here for maybe years. Had conditions been otherwise she would not have been able to track over such an inhospitable surface.
A tread mark in the dust half obliterated by what must be the print from an enormous padded paw. A scuff, straight and smooth that could be made only by the side of a shoe- leather or rubber. Four yards farther on a veritable signpost: a single slab of talus overturned by the edged tool. Why that one, A
A puffing, like a small steam engine straining uphill, broke her concentration. Before she looked she knew what it was. She'd heard it the night of the bear visitation. Fear, sudden, new, remembered, washed down from throat to belly to bowels.
The bears had come to feed.