Breathing in slowly, Anna calmed herself. The breath didn't come easily. Her chest had tightened into a straitjacket of muscle. The second attempt provided better results. Fortified with oxygen, she slid her eyes in the direction from whence the sound had come. On the far eastern side of the cirque, about halfway up, a sow with two cubs, new this year, watched her. The sow was swaying back and forth, weight shifting from paw to paw, head moving in slow arcs. The cubs, less focused, divided their attention between Mom and Anna ready to do as they were told.

Anna was down on one knee, close to the ground. Be big,she remembered. Stand, wave your arms above your head, make loud noises so the bear will run away,she'd been told. Don't make eye contact; stand in profile, be as nonthreatening as possible,she'd been told. Sit down, stand up, fight, fight, fight, the old high school cheer rattled through her mind and brought with it an almost overpowering need to giggle. Almost. Don't run.That was one consistent rule.

She breathed again and felt, to her surprise, the fear that gripped her loosening its hold. These were real, honest-to-God bears, bears in broad daylight doing the things bears were supposed to do. Far less terrifying than the half-mad half-man, half-beast imaginings she'd allowed herself earlier. Less terrifying than the bestial slashings that came in the night.

She looked away from the trio to her escape route, the trail she'd been following toward the western side of the cirque. She was nearly there, maybe a hundred feet, then an easy scramble up a rocky escarpment eight or ten feet high. Beyond that was fifty yards of scree and then the beginning of the scruffy pine belt that marked treeline. Not that trees would save her. None were substantial enough to climb should she be so lucky as to reach them.

Anna's life now existed at the whim and pleasure of the sow. Realizing that produced an odd calm. When there was nothing to be done, one was free of the responsibility to think of how to do it. Risking a moment of eye contact, she gave the sow an almost imperceptible nod, conceding the field of battle, and returned to her tracking. Minutes passed before her concentration reasserted and she could see again. Her eyes, the ones in the back of her head, saw the sow charging, but her ears heard nothing. Anna forced herself not to look, to move slowly, close to the ground as before, seeking out signs left by the human digger who had been here before her.

When she reached the low escarpment and was as yet undevoured, she chanced another peek. The two cubs were cavorting in the talus. In the strong evening light she could see the startling pink of their tongues as they licked moths from the bottoms of rocks their mother had turned over for them. Momma Bear wasn't digging but paced back and forth between her cubs and Anna. At either end of her path, when she stopped to turn, she looked in her direction.

A bargain seemed to have been struck. If Anna went quietly away, she would be allowed to live. It was a good deal and she took it, crawling as unobtrusively up the escarpment as possible, to disappear momentarily from the bear's sight behind a natural ridge no more than two feet high.

Once safe out of sight, reaction set in and Anna realized she'd not given over to the she-bear with quite the Zen-like equanimity she'd thought. Relief rushed through her until she felt mildly hysterical, wanting to laugh and cry with equal intensity. In the end she did neither, just lay in the weakening rays of the alpine sun, letting small wordless prayers of gratitude drift from her mind to whichever god looked after bears and lady rangers.

Niceties observed, she turned her mind back to more earthly pursuits. Time had abandoned its petty pace somewhere between her first notice of man-tracks and the last farewell to the family of grizzlies. Two hours had slipped by like the shadows of westward flying birds. In thirty minutes the sun would be down. Already the light had faded to the point where tracking was becoming more difficult.

It was time to stop, to find a camp for the night, but Anna kept on. Following trail had an addictive aspect not unlike that of eating Doritos. One more, then I'll stop,Anna found herself promising each time she found a partial print, a scuff, a wrinkle in the scree that told of a shod footfall.

Below Cathedral Peak the mountain flared, enough earth collected to sustain plant life and provide a walking surface for animals and people. The individual Anna followed had taken the path of least resistance, traveling downhill on the tree-studded skirt at an oblique angle to the peak.

On this surface, despite the failing light, tracking grew suddenly easy. Everywhere the person stepped on the sharply angled ground a mark had been left. Anna moved forward at a footpace, stopping only twice when a clear bootprint presented itself and she paused to photograph it. At last there was some genuine information: waffle tread cross-training shoes, a man's size ten to ten and a half, not new, with a distinct wear pattern on the inside of the heels as if the shoe's owner was slightly knock-kneed.

Keeping to the curve of the mountain, she followed the prints into the stunted forest of pine. Shadows merged and light diffused but the trail remained clear. Anna forgot the coming darkness.

At a small stone abutment, rust-faced with lichen and darkened with a brow of trees so dwarfed and twisted by the weight of winter snows that they more resembled mutant shrubs than stately pines, the trail ended abruptly.

For a moment Anna was still, her eyes searching, her senses on full alert. At the base of the rocks was a cleft, three feet wide and perhaps that high; the entrance to a small cave. The twisted arms of a squat pine tree partially obscured it. A place where grizzlies might den or lunatics hide. Awakened from the narrow dream of footprints and broken needles, she became aware of how little sunlight was left, how cold the air had become, how lonely the place where the trail brought her. Her intention was to follow and find, not to confront. For that she would want backup in the form of many burly rangers. Discreet departure was the wisest course of action.

An alien noise penetrated these thoughts. It was the merest whisper of sounds, needles sliding over one another or the shush of fabric against bark, but it shrieked against Anna's heightened senses with the force of a gale through high wires. "Shhh," she breathed to herself, though all that moved or sounded within her was the rapid beat of her heart. Noiselessly she crabbed away from the den's mouth to put her back against the rock. The sound had not come from inside but from down the hill, opposite from the direction she'd come.

The sun was long gone. The light that remained was of the clear gray quality that reminds one that the sky is not a blanket of blue benevolently spread over the earth but only the beginning of cold and impossible distances. Acutely feeling her isolation and vulnerability, Anna thought to free her radio from her pack, call in her position. She should have done it hours ago. In the all-absorbing grip of tracking, she had forgotten. Now she found herself afraid to move, to make the unavoidable noise of finding and calling. If she was invisible, unnoticed, she could not be hurt.

Dread of being trapped in an external frame pack heavy with drinking water and a sleeping bag galvanized Anna and she unsnapped the harness at chest and hips and, letting the rock take the pack's weight, slid out of it. Five seconds scraping and a muffled thump and she was free. Breathing heavily as if she'd performed a terrific feat of strength and endurance, she listened again, desperate to hear over the machinations of her own heart and lungs.

A skittering watery sound of pebbles moving brought her head up an instant before afine rain of rocks fell from the top of the incline she'd taken refuge against. With it came a huffing grunt and the heavy grind of moving stone.