Hard Truth Read online

  Anna had chosen to view these particular remains because she was new to the park. The dead were quite informative and she wanted to see if the animal was crippled, old, flea-bitten, diseased, fat, sleek, male or female, if its coat was fine or mangy. Due to a chronic wasting disease, a freakish malady with a gruesome set of symptoms embracing the best of multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s, Rocky’s elk were some of the most closely watched ungulates in the wild. Reams of information were cached in the research center available for the asking. Eventually Anna would get around to reading them. For now, her brain worked better in fresh air with visual, tactile and olfactory show-and-tell.

  It was possible Rita had taken the carcass to the dump for some reason or another. If so, Anna wasn’t going to pursue it. Not only didn’t she have time before she headed into the backcountry, but she wasn’t that dedicated to her education.

  She radioed 202. “What did you do with the dead elk?” she asked when Rita responded.

  “Dragged it off the road. Standard operating procedure here.”

  “How far?”

  A moment crackled empty between the radios, then Rita’s voice, hesitant and maybe a little sarcastic: “Just far enough. You know. There’s no regs on the exact distance.”

  Anna smiled. Any of her listening seasonals would be growing nervous thinking the new district ranger was the sort to go creeping about the woods with a tape measure to be sure dead critters were disposed of according to the book. It was good for seasonals to be frightened now and again.

  “No,” she said into the mike. “How far off the road did you drag your personal dead elk? The one from last night?”

  Another silence, then: “Why?”

  This wasn’t a “why” sort of question and they didn’t have a “why” sort of relationship. Anna gave the ranger a few seconds to mend her ways. Rita was a smart woman.

  “Maybe fifteen feet or so,” came over the airwaves.

  Anna had been up and down the road a quarter of a mile in either direction from the point of impact. On this particular stretch of the road there weren’t a lot of options. The western side was a dirt cut several yards high, the eastern side a fairly thin tract of trees running down to a creek.

  “Thanks.” Anna let go of the mike button. Something had dragged off the elk’s remains. Coyotes didn’t have the strength; they just ate their fill and wandered away to sleep it off. Mountain lions sometimes cached their food. Nothing fancy like the grizzly bears, but often they’d drag it to a more easily defensible place. It would take a mighty big lion to move even a small adult elk. That left only the black bear.

  People thought of black bears as cute little animals the size of Saint Bernards. They were cute but could grow to three hundred pounds. Like most species who weren’t rich enough to boast obesity as their most pressing health concern, bears wouldn’t turn their nose up at a bit of protein-rich carrion. From the scuttlebutt she’d gathered, Rocky had had problem black bears before. Bears, big bears, this close to the more populated frontcountry camping areas, were usually bad news. Anna looked at her watch. There was nothing she could do about it till a visitor got munched or a bear was harassed, and she had no intention of missing her date.

  As always, when walking away from people, pavement and the ubiquitous golden calf Americans were determinedly sacrificing the environment to—the automobile—Anna felt her heart swell, her mind expand. Eyesight grew sharper, hearing more keen as her soul feasted on the natural world. In the years in Mississippi, she’d almost managed to forget how much the mountains meant to her, how splendid it was to run on the high octane. At sea level all one got was oxygen. At eight thousand feet one could breathe honest-to-god air.

  With each deep breath she consciously blew out soot from the previous night’s emotional conflagration. What should have been a joyous reunion between grieving parents and lost children had turned into a morass of bizarre behaviors.

  Anna had had enough prayers to choke an agnostic. The frustration she suffered watching the parents risking the health of their children by eschewing modern medicine for the dubious healing powers of magic incantations had kept her blood pressure up so long her brain felt parched. When Lorraine suggested she check out the backcountry in the Thompson River District, Anna had jumped at the opportunity.

  Since Ray Bleeker had to hike back to Fern Lake after his impulsive dash out to see the search victims alive and well, or at least two-thirds of them, Anna had chosen to accompany him.

  “How long have you been a backcountry ranger?” she asked. She hated besmirching the day with the rattle of human voices, but it behooved her to get to know her people.

  Ray hiked on for a moment without speaking, as if her banal question was deserving some serious thought. That, or he’d worked in more parks than could be credited to a man of twenty-seven. Anna knew his age because she’d glanced at his employee folder before the hike. If she hadn’t, she’d have put him in his early to mid-thirties. He was good-enough looking, chin a little weak perhaps, pale blue eyes a bit protuberant, but his straight brown hair was thick and his skin good. It wasn’t that the years had marked his face. In fact, the skin around his eyes was remarkably unlined for a man who spent a majority of his days exposed to wind and sun. The backs of his hands, though sunbrowned, didn’t look as if they’d taken the beating four or five seasons in the backcountry could dole out. And he moved as a younger man might, months on the trail making him lean and strong. He just felt older: more internal silence, less of a tendency to let every thought and emotion show.

  “Not long,” he said finally. “How about you?”

  A human being who didn’t grab at an opportunity to talk about itself; Anna found that refreshing. She gave a short answer to his question and enjoyed a quarter hour more of quiet. The trail up from Bear Lake past Odessa and to Fern was glorious. Anna doubted there was a trail in Rocky that wasn’t. From wooded green canyons, glittering and chuckling with fast-running creeks, one could see granite peaks ringing the sky, bald and sharp, the cracks in these giant citadel stones visible where weather had continued the work the glaciers began. Tiny lakes bejeweled unexpected hollows and everywhere there was rock: boulders, hills, palisades of rock in gray and green and gold. Rock that took the light like seasoned actors, playing back emotions of color and shadow through the day, through the seasons.

  Not many rocks in Mississippi. Mostly mud.

  At length, duty roused Anna to try another foray into the realm of employee relations. “What other parks have you worked in?” That question was as standard in the NPS as “did you get all your classes” was when Anna was in college. Till now she’d never known it to fail to elicit a spate of conversation followed up by a satisfying round of “do you know so-and-so?” For all its three hundred and seventy something parks and monuments scattered across America, the Park Service was a small world. A little digging invariably turned up mutual acquaintances.

  “Mostly the upper Midwest,” was the only answer Anna got from Bleeker. Perhaps he had gravitated into backcountry work for solitude. That Anna could understand.

  Duty done as far as was polite, she would have been content to walk with only the whispering of trees for companionship, but there was more than enough human interaction even without Ray. Rocky wasn’t a huge park—slightly over a quarter of a million acres—yet each year it had over three and a half million visitors arriving and departing in hundreds of thousands of automobiles. At the peak of the season there was hardly a place in the park, front- or backcountry, where one was guaranteed to be alone. Summer was nearly over, the kids back in school, but there were still plenty of hikers on Bear Creek Trail leading, as it did, to two popular backcountry campsites.

  Purposely, Anna had chosen not to wear her uniform. Middle-aged, female, in civilian clothes, she could fade neatly into the background each time a group of hikers met them on the trail. She was too new to the park to be of much use answering resource questions and, too, she wanted to watch Ray work. Th
e childhood admonition to listen and learn had always stood her in good stead.

  With visitors Ray Bleeker was outgoing and friendly, with just enough charm to be genuinely charming but not oily. He seemed a little weak on park knowledge. Once, Anna noticed he invented a new name for larkspur, a common enough wildflower, though nearly past its blooming season. She let it pass. Rangers had been known to make things up before.

  By one-thirty the thunderheads began building. They stepped up the pace so lightning wouldn’t catch them on the exposed slopes. Down a rocky defile named Tourmaline Gorge and lined winter and spring with stunning waterfalls was Odessa Lake campground, the site from which Beth, Candace and Alexis had disappeared. The name on the trail sign dragged Anna’s mind from the majestic threat of the grumbling thunder cells to the darker mystery of where the girls had been during the weeks between their vanishing and reappearing.

  “Tell me about the search,” she said, and accidentally stumbled upon the way to Ray’s heart, or at least his language center. The man was a search-and-rescue junkie. For twenty minutes he held forth on the intricacies and thoroughness of the operation, how the area had been gridded and walked. Dogs had been brought in, helicopters, rangers on horseback and on foot, volunteers from Estes Park. He seemed almost gleeful as he told her of each dead end, of clues that came to nothing, dogs who’d followed their noses to abandoned privy holes. Because Anna had a touch of adrenaline addiction herself, and because she’d seen the depth of his concern when he’d hiked out to see the girls, she forgave him this callous enjoyment. It was the nature of the job. Contrary to popular belief, firefighters loved fires, rescuers loved to rescue, EMTs loved to stick needles in people and searchers loved the beauty of the search process.

  It couldn’t have hurt that Ray’s cabin at Fern Lake, just half a mile from the ground zero, had been the hub of the effort. For weeks he’d had more attention than he’d probably gotten in all the other jobs he’d held combined.

  At the bottom of the narrow canyon, he gave her a tour of the Odessa campsite where the youth group had stayed. Though beautiful, it was not a place Anna would choose to spend time. Canyon walls, skirted with boulders the size of semi-truck trailers, pressed close on both sides of a tree-filled ravine. The campsites were dwarfed. This tangle of fallen pines and huge stones made Anna claustrophobic. Instead of natural order it struck her as disorder, as if the earth had become confused. Nature, rendered unnatural, cast a sinister feel over the place and she was glad when Ray had talked himself out and they climbed up to the gentler, more open views of Fern Lake.

  The backcountry cabin at Fern was everything the public imagines backcountry cabins to be and seldom are. Set on a knoll above the small lake, it was made of logs and boasted two bedrooms. The park had recently refurbished it down to fire-engine red curtains in the windows. Unlike many young men, Raymond Bleeker was as tidy as Felix Unger. Anna’s impromptu visit found the place in shockingly good order. Even the mullions of the many-paned windows were dust free. One of the bedrooms served as a storage room for chainsaws, ropes, sleeping bags, backboards, shovels and other necessities of the wilderness existence. Anna noted that everything was neatly hung in its place and newly labeled. Raymond had gone to the lengths of spreading a canvas tarp over the floorboards to serve as a rug. The other bedroom had bunk beds for the cabin’s human inhabitants. A spacious living room–kitchen, with a double bed and dining table set cheek by jowl, was warmed by a wood stove. Against one wall a two-by-four ladder was bolted, leading to a loft space over the bedrooms that tickled the heart of the child that still lurked within Anna. The cabin’s larder was well stocked, food and other housekeeping items packed in by mules.

  Raymond’s personal things were on a single shelf to one side of the dining table. Clothes were folded with factory precision. A laptop and compact high-tech sound system with extra batteries were neatly covered in clear plastic. Shoes were polished and set toes out. Books, of poetry mostly, were captured between two exceedingly clean rocks.

  Everything painstakingly mouse-proofed.

  Now that he’d opened up, Ray proved a surprisingly good companion, adept at drawing out those with whom he talked. By the time they’d consumed a fairly decent spaghetti dinner and the dishes were washed, Anna realized she’d told him just about everything but her bra size and still knew next to nothing about him; an unusual and not unpleasant state of affairs.

  In the quiet aftermath of dinner she sat at the plank table and, by the light of a Coleman lantern, read through the journals. Rangers and visitors, firefighters and skiers had been writing their thoughts down since the 1970s. Nearly thirty years of history told from hundreds of points of view, yet what caught Anna’s fancy was the shared human experience, the timelessness of a life that didn’t change hour by hour with the shock of the new: buildings going up next door, playgrounds razed, Internet spinning its sudden cyberweb, cell phones piercing.

  Along with the usual chatter of the hike and the weather, nearly every entry had two things in common: glowing reports of the landscape and scathing denunciations of the mice, some with drawings of the little creatures committing all manner of mousy depredations on the humans who intruded into their cabin.

  Anna skimmed over the first twenty-five years of the history more for her own enjoyment than anything else. Because of the girls who’d turned up on her professional doorstep, she was mostly interested in the entries for the previous month, those of the SAR (Search and Rescue) rangers who’d stayed at Fern.

  Rita Perry, Anna’s law enforcement seasonal, had written half a dozen or more times. It was no wonder she’d grown close to Robert Proffit. On at least four occasions during the search for the girls, they had bunked together. On a search-and-rescue or wildfire, though the intensity of these activities spawned more than their share of romances, “bunked together” hadn’t any sexual connotation. There was more a sense of military camaraderie, a flopping down of like-minded soldiers at the end of the day. Though with young people—any people if it came to that—sex was a powerful undercurrent, Anna had found far less gender politics when the work was hard and physical, and civilization far away.

  She paged forward and read on. As the search ground down, the names of the participants grew fewer. Rangers still came but volunteers had either given up hope or run out of time. The entries became shorter, dispirited. For the last week or so, no one mentioned the search or the children. Anna stopped reading but left her eyes on the pages of the open journal, a habit so ingrained she was no longer aware she did it. Years in and out of camps and other group living conditions, she’d found if she pretended to read, fewer people felt compelled to talk to her when she needed to think. With Raymond Bleeker the ruse was probably unnecessary. Across the table from her, he seemed content leafing through a four-month-old Seventeen magazine left behind by some ranger’s teenage daughter.

  Taken singly, the entries illuminated fragments of the search, like snapshots from a roll of film shot over four weeks. There was nothing that wouldn’t be covered in greater detail by reports filed in the frontcountry. Taken as a whole, the entries painted the ebb and flow of hope and strength and outlined the players who’d dabbled, those who’d given it the old college try and those few who had stayed on till the bitter end: the rangers and Robert Proffit. The youth group leader’s visits had only tapered off in the last week.

  Perhaps his employers told him if he didn’t stop this futile searching and join them in the real work of wearing down God with endless prayer, he was out of a job.

  “Looks like you’ve got some days off coming to you,” she said to Ray. From the varied mentions he’d gotten in the journal it looked as if he hadn’t taken many lieu days since the girls went missing.

  “I needed the overtime,” he said, but Anna knew it was more than that. After a few weeks in the backcountry even she was ready to forgo hard cash for a hot shower and a couple hours of TV.

  “I get out,” he said as if reading her mind. “Lots of aft
ernoons, sometimes overnight, to get fresh clothes, that kind of thing.”

  “Why don’t you take a few days? Rita will be more than happy to cover. I’ve gotten the idea road patrol is not really her thing.”

  “Rita’s one gnarly ranger,” Ray said with a grin. Gnarly. Anna had heard that adjective before. In Rocky Mountain it seemed a compliment suggesting skill and machismo. Or, conversely, if referring to cliffs or other nonhuman objects, a reference to difficulty and obstacle.

  “You can hike out with me,” she said and rose. It was past ten, time for bed.

  “My normal lieu days are Monday and Tuesday. Why don’t I just finish up and take a long one?”

  Given it was Wednesday night, Anna couldn’t but admire his dedication. But then he’d had a shower and a frontcountry fix the previous night. At twenty-seven, that was enough.

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  The great lack in even the most adorable backcountry cabins was indoor plumbing. Small cisterns and sinks with drains into a bucket served well enough for cooking and washing dishes, but the more basic bodily needs had to be taken to an outdoor privy.

  These privies were dug by hand. And they were cleaned by hand, the human waste hauled out. Rangers in the wilderness of the national parks smelled more than the roses.