Cautiously, she stepped out from the massif and looked up. Twenty yards above, something dark and lumpish, not yet a bear but, in the dull gray evening light, not entirely human either, was curled down, shoulder against a boulder three or four feet high and that much across.

The rain of pebbles stopped, and in the sudden silence Anna saw the boulder give up its tenuous hold on the unstable mountainside and begin to roll, dislodging smaller rocks as it passed. The abutment she stood near was too low, not vertical enough to provide shelter from a landslide, even a small one.

Perhaps she could not run from bears but running from people was almost always a good idea. No time to think or to retrieve pack, water or radio, she fled headlong down the mountainside, angling away from the vertical, hoping the rock would roll straight. Crashing sounds of her own progress mixed with the crashing of the rock and she could not tell if the entire mountain was coming down upon her, or if her half-man half-beast had followed the rock and was upon her heels. One sound did cut through the rest. The unmistakable report of a gunshot. Just one, just once, but it lent her a burst of speed that the onset of avalanches and grizzlies could not.

Anna never looked back, never fell and never stopped until she was deep in the dwarf forest and had reached the ledge atop the cliff dividing the high country from the more hospitable climes significantly below treeline.

There she collapsed. A furtive look back showed no pursuer. The gnarled trees were steeped now in a night that seemed to generate beneath their branches and move upward to darken the sky. Crawling into a crack in the rocks that topped the crumbly cliff face, she covered her mouth and nose with both hands to muffle her breathing. Stilling herself, she listened.

With the abdication of the sun, the wind had picked up, whistling from the valleys, complaining as it crossed the ragged rocks where she'd gone to ground. Between the breathing of the mountains and that of her own belabored lungs she was deafened. Frustration and fear tried to get her to poke her head out.

She hadn't the strength to run any farther. It was too dark to climb safely down the treacherous wall of argillite. She had nothing to defend herself with but sticks and rocks. Taking a lesson from bunnies, ducklings and others of nature's most helpless creatures, Anna stayed hidden. Her breathing returned to normal. Knees and shoulders wedged against the sides of the crevice, head cocked, she listened through the crying of the wind.

Nothing. Nothing proved nothing. She settled herself in as best she could. Haste, not comfort, had dictated her choice of hiding places. The crack into which she wedged herself was hardly large enough to hold all her parts. Definitely not large enough to hold them in any configuration that wasn't torturous. Still, she was grateful to have it and in no great hurry to venture back into the woods in search of better.

Darkness wove its imperfect cover. South-facing, the cliff collected heat from the day and, though Anna was cold, she would not die of exposure. Pointed chunks jabbed at her left buttock and pried under her right shoulder blade, but she could move a little and that kept her legs and feet from going to sleep.

She listened. She dozed. She felt sorry for herself and angry by turns. She dozed again. A crack, a snap, two pieces of wood banged together or the dream memory of a gunshot woke her. Listening only made her ears ache. She drifted. In a dream, she heard the soft padding of a huge bear outside her temporary tomb, dreamed it so close she could hear the questing whuff-whuff and smell its breath. Dog breath,she dreamed, foul and familiar.

Thirst became an overriding factor around three a.m. She'd fled without water. The run had cost her. Here and there throughout her career, Anna'd suffered the usual discomforts of dwelling outside civilization: heat, cold, hunger, high altitude, sore feet, insect bites and stinging plants. The most insistent of these was thirst. The body knew it would survive the stings and itches, pain and even, for a while, hunger. Water it had to have.

Determined to stay in hiding till first light, she passed the hours wiggling fingers and toes and resolutely not thinking about liquids in any form. Near five o'clock the quality of darkness at the mouth of her hidey-hole began to change. Despite the dire misgivings she'd had, the sun was going to rise again and she was going to be around to see it.

Fumblingly, she found her feet and pushed to a standing position, head and shoulders above the lip of the ledge. From this rabbit's-eye viewpoint she took stock of the black and gray predawn world. No gunmen lounged nearby waiting to blow her head off. For once the wind wasn't blowing. The silence of the morning was so absolute that, had it not been for the cracking of her joints as she unfolded, she would have suspected she'd gone deaf overnight.

Nowhere was the sound of birds waking, water running, squirrels doing whatever it was squirrels did at this hour of the morning. Slowly she became aware of a slight smacking sound intruding on the perfect peace. It was her tongue as it tried to drum up enough saliva to wet her throat.

As she realized again her thirst, a water bottle materialized. It had been there all along but in the grainy morning light she'd not noticed it. Like a mirage in the desert it stood alone and upright not ten feet from where her head stuck up out of the cliff's top. By itself, sitting on a slab of rock the wind had swept free of needles, it looked like bait in a clumsily laid trap.

She'd carried no water on her helter-skelter run down the mountain. She'd neither dropped it nor, in her haste, forgotten. While she'd slept, someone had crept close to where she was hiding and put it there. Something had visited her. Who would try and crush her with a boulder, take a shot at her, then track her to her lair to leave water? Before fear could take over, it was gone. Anyone, anything, who brought water must be a benevolent spirit. Unless the water was poisoned. Absurd. Surely it would be infinitely easier to smash her skull with a chunk of argillite while she slept than to poison water and leave it for her to find.

Having visually searched the still-empty area along the cliff top she looked again at the bottle. It was hers, taken from the pack she'd abandoned. Near the top, written in red nail polish, the most indelible of all marking substances, PIGEON was printed in block letters.

A sense of unreality swept over her. It was so strong her vision blurred and she reeled in her cramped space, her pelvic bones rapping painfully against the stone. Like a bad comic, she did a double take then rubbed her eyes with her fists. But when she looked again the apparition was still there, bizarre in its homely mundane form.

Thinking of the Lost Boys and the poisoned cake, Hansel and Gretel and gingerbread, Anna eased from the crack in the rock one stiff, chilled inch at a time, emerging like a lizard too long out of the sun. The crevice she'd squished herself into was no more than a shallow vertical chink in the rocky drop where a rectangular piece of argillite had fallen away. She crawled on hands and knees to the water. Resisting the temptation to snatch it up and pour it down her throat, she studied the plastic bottle. White with blue lettering, she'd gotten it free when she'd joined the health club in Clinton, Mississippi, the previous spring. The bottle was as she remembered it but for two puncture marks about a quarter of the way down from the mouth. One dented the plastic. The other pierced it through. Had it not been set carefully upright, the water would have leaked away.

Teethmarks. Anna remembered her dream of padding paws and dog breath. A bear then, not a dream. A bear had brought her water to drink. Savoring the fairy-tale image while the unreality of it made her head swim, Anna watched her hand reach for the water, her fingers curl around the cold plastic. She popped open the nipple and drank.