Decisions to disturb the wilderness aspect of a national park were not made lightly. Helicopters, bulldozers, chainsaws, even tracking dogs were not brought in at the first whimpering of human discomfort. In Anna's years of watching park politics, some of the most courageous choices she'd seen upper management make were those made not to pour technology on a problem, not to bring in guns and dogs and fork-lifts and borate bombers, but to fight nature on nature's terms. Or, more courageous still, not to fight at all, to let the fire burn, the river change course, the historic crumble without replacement.

Often enough to make it an act of bravery, these administrators lost their careers. The public hated nature when she wasn't in their control. Ruick had chosen to hunt William McCaskil on foot and horseback. The body recovery of Carolyn Van Slyke had already invaded the sanctity of the park experience enough. If Ruick was wrong, if he didn't catch McCaskil and McCaskil turned out to be Van Slyke's killer and killed another visitor, Ruick would pay the price. He'd probably end his days as a chief ranger at some Civil War battlefield two acres across.

Anna respected him for it. Someday she'd have to tell him so. For today she had ground to cover. She was not to take part in the manhunt but to head above treeline to where the moths came to breed and die, where the stones were bleached, where the navy-blue stuff sack had traveled.

The night before, Joan had given Anna a crash course on the grizzly and the army cutworm moth. There were nine identified moth aggregation sites in Glacier that were known to be used by the bears. All were above twenty-one hundred meters in elevation, all on south- or west-facing slopes. The moths aggregated in glacial cirques on talus right below steeper headwalls.

Joan had ended the lesson with strongly voiced disapproval of Anna's venturing into any of the aggregation sites. As a researcher she did not like the impact on the bears that was inevitable when human beings- even one so small and light-footed as Anna-penetrated areas where the animals traditionally roamed undisturbed. As a good-hearted woman she was opposed to Anna's venturing into feeding grounds used predominantly by females with cubs and subadult bears during the peak of their use season.

"You're just making yourself an attractive nuisance," Joan summed up. "A recipe for disaster."

"No pun intended," Buck added, stone-faced.

"Ranger-on-a-stick," Rory said.

Warnings and disclaimers given, Joan had begrudgingly gone over the map, pointing out the sites closest to Flattop Mountain.

Anna took out the topo Joan had marked and showed it to Harry. Logic, a commodity to all appearances singularly lacking in the individual they pursued, suggested the aggregation site Joan had circled on the southern slope of Cathedral Peak. Cathedral, over seventy-six hundred feet high, was the only army cutworm moth site within easy- using the term loosely-commuting distance from Flattop, where the moth-dusted bag had been found. Given the amounts of both moth-wing powder and the grayish-green Joan guessed were traces of argillite remaining on the fabric, the bag had not traveled too far or too long between its dust collecting days and its incarnation as a receptacle for human flesh.

The country Anna was headed into was rugged and steep and dry. Too much for the shamble-footed Ponce. He would have the night off and Anna would walk. Much of the time she would be scrambling. There were no trails, no lakes, no creeks. Only seep springs, and that only if they still had water. Though the cirque she sought was not far in miles, it was a long way in time and energy. Probably she would need to spend the night on the mountain. There would be no trees in which to cache food and, if this aggregation site was being used, grizzlies, mostly females with cubs, would be in attendance. Toothpaste, insect repellent lip balm, and soap remained at Fifty Mountain. Anna ate as much food as she could and packed just enough for one more meal. There would be no breakfast the following morning. Because of the steepness of the terrain she traveled light: no tent, no stove, just camera, tarp, down vest, sleeping bag, water and filter. Even a seep spring could produce enough to refill canteens if one was patient. Or thirsty.

By one-thirty she was headed east away from Fifty Mountain. For the first mile or so, she walked Highline, an improved trail that followed the ridge east of Flattop Mountain, winding back to the Going to the Sun Road where the trail-head was. At about seventy-two hundred feet in elevation, where Highline dog-legged south, Anna turned north, traveling cross-country toward the glacial cirque below Cathedral Peak's south-southwestern slope.

High as she was, even small changes in altitude marked the landscape dramatically. Soil grew rocky and rust-colored. In the distance, on the stern face of the mountain, she noticed small white specks: mountain goats feeding and rambling in their impossible places. Vegetation thinned till only the hardiest of pines still grew. A life of fighting showed in stunted and twisted limbs. Anna felt honored to be moving amid this stalwart troop of rebels battered by the elements but still alive. Much of the time, she traveled baboon-like on feet and hands, the slopes slippery with broken stone and a meager covering of shortened needles the pines let go. Periodically she stopped to rest and, braced against a gnarly trunk, looked westward across the emerald green meadows north of Fifty Mountain Camp to the blue-forested shanks of the mountains beyond. In this land of abundance, of water and game, other deserts thrust up: mountaintops like the one she hoped to gain where nothing grew and the life of rocks was visible to the naked eye.

Just after four p.m. she scaled the last stone massif, a forty-foot gray wall of crumbling argillite that showed its treachery in tens of millions of cracks and crevices, in the deep pile of shattered stone heaped at its base. Glacier was not a park favored by climbers. The rock formations that created its mountains were of soft stuff that would not hold pitons, ledges that could fall away at the merest hint of weight.

A half-mile's scrambling through dwarf pines brought her to just beneath the dramatic upthrust of Cathedral Peak. There lay a classic cirque, a chunk of the mountain gouged out by glacial movement leaving a steep amphitheater two or three hundred yards across and half again that long. Its uppermost end was marked by another massif. From there up was the ever-more-vertical run to the mountain's peak. A quarter of the cirque was still covered in snow. In midsummer, Anna knew it would be of the dry crusty variety of no use for melting and drinking. The rest of the cirque was floored in grayish-green alpine talus, flat loose stones ranging in size from teacups to tabletops.

At present the landscape was free of bears. Joan had told her the pattern of both grizzlies and black bears was to feed on the moths in the morning, rest nearby through the middle of the day, then feed again in the evening.

The long climb had tired Anna but it behooved her to make her explorations during the bears' off time. Just because she couldn't see them didn't mean they weren't around. Wild animals seldom flopped down to nap in plain view. Even in a place they'd always known as safe they tended to hide themselves away. An area as apparently free of secrets as the cirque could easily have hollows beneath stones. Surrounding rocks might harbor caves or even dens, though the bears tended to den up slightly lower, below treeline.

At this altitude there was nearly always wind, often greater than sixty kilometers an hour. In summer it came mostly from the southwest, but with no protection, it blew cold, and as the sweat from the climb dried, Anna grew chilled. Zipping herself into her down vest she rallied her shaking legs and trudged up the incline to the bottom of the cirque. The aggregations of the cutworm moths, and so the feeding grounds of the bears, were usually at the head of the cirques below the massifs. As she picked her way upward over the talus, fatigue was replaced with the not completely unpleasant hyperawareness Daniel might have felt in the lions' den.