Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  The Odessa Lake campground was on her chosen route. Because Ray had failed so spectacularly at Fern, she stopped to inspect it on her way through. Two of the sites were occupied, the tents nestled like bright and poisonous mushrooms among the spectacularly huge boulders that had fallen into the narrow neck of Tourmaline Gorge. Both camps had been abandoned for the day, their residents hiking or fishing or annoying the natural resources in one way or another, but for one rather woebegone vacationer.

  Perched on a rock like a Goth version of the White Rock fairy was a girl of ten or eleven. Her hair was coal black and cut in a spiky punked-out style that made her look younger and ageless at the same time. She was gaunt to the point Anna wondered if she suffered the early stages of anorexia, and dressed in the uniform of a boy emulating gang chic: oversized shorts with the crotch nearly to her knees and a man-sized football jersey with the number 1 in white on a red background.

  “Hey,” she said listlessly as Anna walked into her camp.

  “Hey your own self. Where is everybody?”

  “Fishing.”

  Anna couldn’t tell if the girl was sullen or just hadn’t had enough to eat in her short life to give her the energy for enthusiasm.

  “They leave you behind to guard the camp?”

  “I don’t like to kill things,” she said with a vehemence Anna couldn’t but admire.

  “A girl after my own heart.” Anna was in a hurry but there was something about this champion of fishes that touched her. “What do you like?” she asked, to prove another human being cared on at least a rudimentary level.

  The girl looked away, toward Odessa and Fern lakes, and spoke as if to the killers of fish who’d left her to her own devices for the day. “The ranger from the other lake leads nature walks and does evening programs,” she said in the flat voice with which she’d hailed Anna. “Yesterday afternoon he took us all around the lake in the afternoon and told us about the plants and the animals for a couple hours.”

  Receiving an education about the fishes didn’t spark in her the same passion that the thought of killing them had. Perhaps she was more about rejection than acceptance. Not unusual in a preteen female.

  “Sounds interesting,” Anna said. “Tell me what you saw.” She didn’t give a damn what the kid saw but she wanted to keep her talking. She sensed something off about the girl.

  The ploy was unsuccessful.

  “I’ve got to go,” the scrawny Goth announced and slid down from the rock, hiking the baggy shorts up over her skinny thighs. Without a good-bye or a wave of the hand she walked toward Odessa Lake and the murderers of fishes.

  Mildly unsettling as the interview had been it had settled one question. Ray Bleeker was telling the truth. Having led a two-hour nature walk the previous afternoon, there was no way he could have been Anna’s squirrel butcher.

  By ten o’clock she’d reached Picnic Rock. Rather than try and follow Rita unseen, she’d gambled that pulling her out from under a rock wasn’t the only reason Rita had hiked up Tourmaline Gorge, just as shoving her off one hadn’t been Robert Proffit’s goal. Both, she believed, were fortuitous accidents. The first lucky for her, the second for Mr. Proffit.

  Waiting when there was an action to be taken drove Anna nuts. Waiting when waiting was all she could do, she rather enjoyed. A time of forced indolence for the body and necessary alertness for the mind.

  She watched through the quiet of the morning as the sun’s warmth worked its golden stillness down the ragged granite and into the trees. By one o’clock, even the birds and insects seemed to drowse. The golden eagle never returned, but she imagined him close and twice saw shadows glide across the sparkling gray of the granite slab. At two o’clock, the first white cloud appeared. Soon it was joined by others, and their subtle grumbling suggested there was lightning within and they were not averse to loosing it on the unwary hiker who dared climb too near their heaven.

  At two forty-three the crunch of boots on dirt and gravel grated on Anna’s ears, so long attuned to the more euphonious whisperings of the real world.

  Pay dirt, she thought. Waiting rather than trailing had been a gamble. Far more satisfying to win on a long shot. It was in her mind to spring silently to her feet to await the younger ranger’s passing. Damaged muscles and sinews rebelled and she did little more than flinch and fold. Bowing to necessity, she eased up slowly, pushing off the rock and wondering if this was what one felt like all the time when one was very old.

  First you must live that long, she told herself reassuringly. Like many a wild child of the sixties and seventies, she’d figured she’d die young. The idea had never bothered her much till she’d met Paul.

  The owner of the crunching boots was Rita Perry. Anna let her pass, then quietly fell in behind her.

  Following her was not terribly difficult. People not expecting a stalker travel in blind cocoons of thought. A phenomenon muggers count on to further their predatory ends. Anna had taken the rudimentary precaution of wearing pine- and dirt-hued shorts and shirt. There was no shortage of this unexciting palette in her wardrobe. It was as if, wearing the national park uniform for so many years, she’d come to think of variations on the green and gray as the only suitable color for clothing.

  For a couple of miles, maybe less, Rita followed the trail up toward Gabletop Mountain. Since Gabletop was not a terribly popular destination in the park, the trail was not maintained with the assiduity of those to Longs Peak or Frozen Lake or a dozen other heavily visited destinations. This was not only a practical choice on the part of the Park Service, but an aesthetic one. Visitors willing to push farther and harder into the wilderness enjoyed a sense of newness, of being one of the few to discover this world. A wide, well-maintained trail with water bars and rock steps up the tricky bits spoiled the fantasy.

  Rather than walk steadily as was her habit when covering ground, Anna walked in fits and starts, pausing often to listen for Rita’s boots on the trail. With no crowds for cover and Rita’s easy recognition of her, Anna couldn’t risk keeping her in sight. On the few occasions she misjudged and rounded a bend in the trial to see Rita’s retreating form, she backed off and waited. Given her weakened condition, the difference in their ages, Rita’s long-legged stride and the fact the woman hiked like an all-terrain vehicle running on premium fuel, Anna’s greatest concern was that gasping for breath would give her away. Two years at near sea level, her days spent sitting in offices and patrol cars, hadn’t served her well for a return to mountain duty.

  After ninety minutes of this forced march, tree line was reached and Anna was afforded a clear view of a sketchy trail winding up to the barren, rocky heights. No Rita. Backtracking, her attention on the minutiae to either side of the trail, Anna found where she had turned off. Again uphill. Had she not been fighting for breath, Anna would have noticed it when first she passed. The cutoff had been used many times. This must have been where Proffit was headed when he and Anna had met up at Picnic Rock, where Rita was going when she stopped to rescue her.

  Anna took out her topographical map of the area. It looked as if Rita was cutting up to the backside of Loomis, a small lake, scarcely more than a pond. Ignoring the burning in her lungs and the plaints of her back muscles, Anna picked up the pace. No mean feat in country grown so steep she slid on the downed needles and clung to trees to help herself along.

  The burst of speed paid off. Twenty minutes of hard climbing and she caught a glimpse of Rita. Another hour and the woman, who Anna had come to believe was a machine, her heart a nine-pound hammer, her legs pistons of titanium, crested the butte above Loomis, dropped down several hundred yards and came to a stop.

  Lest she lose her again, Anna waited till Rita had removed her pack before she, too, set hers aside and sat down with her back to a tree, her binoculars in her lap.

  Rita’s destination was a small clearing several hundred yards above Loomis Lake. Another trail, far easier than the cross-country route they had followed, ran from Fern Lake to Loomis’ e
astern shore. Rita hadn’t wanted to be seen, hadn’t wanted anyone to know where she was headed. That was reassuring. Anna hated to think she’d pushed her aching body over hill and dale to observe her seasonal law enforcement ranger bird-watching or sketching the wonders of nature.

  The clearing where Rita had stopped was rich in one of the park’s most abundant resources: rocks. Boulders formed a truncated Stonehenge, a natural wall on three sides. The fourth Anna couldn’t see but surmised was open by the fact Perry appeared and disappeared as if she entered and exited a small box canyon. This bizarre exercise was repeated six times. Each time Rita brought in something she’d had cached in the trees out of sight from Anna’s binoculars. Twice the young ranger went down to the lake and returned with a bucket of water. The bucket was presumably stored with whatever else she had hidden away beneath the evergreens. Occasionally Perry’s lips moved as if she spoke or sang to whatever it was she tended in the corral of granite.

  After these six trips, her work, whatever the hell it was, evidently done, Rita sat down with her pack and a paperback book and ate lunch.

  Curious what Christian prison wardens read in the backcountry, Anna trained her binoculars on the book in Rita’s hands. John Sanford’s Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality.

  Out of a sense of duty to the body that had served her so well—if not without complaint—Anna tried to eat but excitement robbed her of her appetite. That Rita watered and spoke to whatever was incarcerated in the rocks suggested it was alive.

  Candace Watson.

  Unbidden, half a dozen Dean Koontz novels flittered piecemeal through Anna’s brain. Mr. Koontz’s unique and terrifying visions combined with no respect to publication dates. The one that could not be eradicated by bites of peanut butter and cloudberry jelly or washed away by draughts of water was from a novel where the villain created grim and intricate sculptures from murdered victims whom he carefully arranged in his gallery beneath an abandoned amusement park.

  The mice.

  The Abert.

  Perhaps Rita didn’t need her victims alive to feed, water and converse with them.

  twenty

  Thunderheads formed. Temperature dropped. Sudden hectic breezes ruffled the tops of the pines. Anna waited and she watched. Rita finished her lunch, set aside her book on the rock she used as a table, talked to the enclosure of stones, fetched another bucket of water. When nearly two hours of this had passed, the lanky ranger finally hefted her pack and started back up toward Anna’s hiding place. She passed within twenty feet of where Anna sat but never looked right or left. Her eyes were fixed on the tops of her boots, her mind god knew where. Most people walked through life seeing only the movies they played in their head. A majority of the reels Anna had accumulated over half a lifetime weren’t the sort she wished to view a second time. This outward focus allowed her to see without being seen more times than she could remember.

  She listened without moving until she could no longer hear the crinkling thump of Rita’s boots on the needle-strewn earth. When the living silence of the high country returned, a silence made deeper by the grumble of thunder and the rare call of a bird, Anna waited another ten minutes just to be sure. Then, with an adolescent mix of dread and excited anticipation, shouldered her daypack and started down to the ring of boulders in the clearing. From habit and caution she walked quietly. There was no guarantee that whatever Rita held captive would be glad to see her.

  The rocks were more than head-high. The cluster appeared to have grown there, no nearby escarpment to give a clue from whence they had fallen. As Anna reached this tumble of granite, she stopped and listened. The first drops of cold rain had begun to fall and the stamp of tiny wet feet on pine needles and stone masked any sounds from within. If anything was alive in this natural enclosure to make sounds.

  After half a minute her patience was rewarded. A thin whine, like that of a small creature enraged, cut through the dull patter of the wind-driven rain.

  “Shit,” Anna whispered and, with visions of lacerated children dancing in her head, she walked around to the lakeside of the rocks, the side on which Rita had lunched and talked and delivered water. There the boulders almost completed their ring. An opening two feet wide at most had been closed off with a waist-high gate made of pine branches lashed together with twine. The gate was not sturdy enough to keep anything in or out that was not already in a crippled or weakened state.

  The stick gate was held in place by two rocks the size of bowling balls. The whine came again, sharper this time. Anna moved the rocks, lifted the gate away and squeezed between the boulders. Within the rough circle, the granite chunks leaned together, nearly meeting at the top, forming dark alcoves beneath. The area they protected wasn’t more than six by eight feet. With the overcast sky, light was at a premium. What Anna could see appeared to be empty. The air was tainted with the smell of rotting flesh.

  Movement, faint and furtive, from the dark crevice to her left caught her eye. Then a whine and the flash of eyes. Anna crouched and shined her Maglite under the overhang of rock.

  Puppies.

  “What in hell . . .” She held out her hand and was rewarded by a fierce growl from a beast slightly bigger than a breadbox. She couldn’t but admire its courage.

  Seasonals were not allowed pets, and anyone who lived inside the park wasn’t allowed pets that went outside of a fenced yard. During her years in the parks Anna had had to deal with the occasional unauthorized cat or dog. As handmaiden to a cat—now two cats—and a three-legged dog, she understood the need to have one’s companions near. This was the first time she’d known someone to go to such absurd lengths to make it so.

  She lay down on her belly, the better to study Rita’s little family. There were four of them: one nearly black, two silvery gray and, the littlest one, gray with tawny ears.

  Wolves.

  Rita had wolf puppies. A snippet of a ranger report Anna had read came back to her. A wolf bitch had been shot by a rancher near Jackson, Wyoming. The local vet said it appeared she’d recently had a litter of pups. The pups were never found, they’d said.

  If Anna remembered correctly, Rita coached high school girls’ basketball in Jackson. She must have found the pups and brought them to Rocky, where there was an overabundance of elk for them to feast upon when they grew up. It wouldn’t be the first time park policy was given a wee boost from an enterprising ranger.

  Much as she wanted to, Anna didn’t try to lure the pups out, pet them or play with them. Though Rita conversed with the little wolves, she’d very rightly not tried to domesticate them. It was even bad form for Anna to remain in the pen. A wolf desensitized to human beings is destined to have a very short life span.

  “Don’t touch them,” came a voice above and behind her.

  Rita had come back and Anna, so recently proud of her powers of observation and stealth, was so engrossed in the delight of wolf pups that she’d heard and sensed nothing. It took all of her self-control not to squawk.

  “I’m not,” she said calmly. “But it’s not easy.”

  Regretfully she shoved herself to her knees, her back still denying her her usual grace and ease of movement. Part of the problem was she was tensed up, waiting for a blow or a kick. Instead Rita crouched down beside her.

  “I know.” She was gazing intently at the hostile little faces beneath the rock. The rain was coming down harder now but neither woman seemed to notice. “I’ve had them since they were two weeks old.”

  “The wolf bitch that was in the news?”

  “The same,” Rita said. “It took me nearly forty hours searching but I found the den. The poor little guys were half starved. I guess when they’re so young it doesn’t take all that long. A good thing really. It’s not like they can count on Health and Human Services finding foster homes for them when Mom is murdered.”

  “You bottle-fed them?” Anna asked. She wasn’t quite successful in keeping the envy out of her voice. Rita heard it and smiled.

  “Fo
r as short a time as possible. I was afraid of making pets out of them. Soon as I could, I got them on meat. I haven’t touched them since and I throw the meat in.”

  “You feed them elk meat,” Anna said, the bloody truth of the backpack dawning on her.

  “The resource manager, Ellen, told me they should be habituated to their natural food source. Ellen knows nothing about this,” Rita added quickly. “She thought we were just talking ‘what ifs.’ ”

  “Road-kill elk,” Anna said, remembering the vanished elk carcass on Bear Lake Road and the bloodied bit of carpet she’d excised from the trunk of Rita’s patrol vehicle.

  Rita nodded. “I froze what I could fit in our weensy freezer and packed it in.”

  “Robert Proffit was carrying food for the pups when he knocked me off the rock.”

  “It was an accident.” Rita rose.

  For a long moment they stood there in the rain, staring at the rock overhang that hid the little wolves from view.

  “What’s going to happen to the pups?” Rita asked finally.

  That was the question Anna was pondering. Rocky Mountain was in dire need of an effective predator to keep the elk herd healthy. Though these four carnivores might not live, might not find any way to reproduce, might never form a viable and sustaining pack, they were a start. Once it was established that wolves had returned to these mountains of their own volition—Rita’s abducting and reintroducing them remaining a secret—the endangered-species protections would kick in. A wolf program would be instituted, maybe animals from another pack introduced, a mating program begun.

  Maybe.

  If.

  Possibly.

  Too many stumbling blocks. But it could happen and the idea thrilled Anna. Suddenly she laughed.

  “What?” Rita said.

  “The night I spent in Tourmaline Gorge I thought I heard wolves howling.”

  “They do howl,” Rita said. “Puppy howls. I love it. I’m surprised you could hear it on the other side of the gorge.”