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I was wondering when you'd think of that," Anna said. " They thought about that for a while, Anna reliving remembered footage from Old Yeller. "I wish we'd gotten a look at the bear," she said after a while. "We may yet," Joan said. Put in the future instead of the past, the concept wasn't nearly so attractive. They waited through the false dawn in silence. By half past five the light grew strong enough to again think about the boy and the bear. Both tents were destroyed. Anna and Joan spread them out to assess the damage.

The kind of precision knife or hatchet job that had been done on her face was the work of ten or fifteen minutes, maybe more considering the flesh cut away had been removed from the site. Butchering was a job requiring privacy. Consequently the body had been carried off the trail, as the drag marks attested. Corroborating this theory was the fact that the body had none of the scratches or scrapes that might be expected on the arms of a healthy live woman forced through a thick alder copse. Had the murder occurred any distance off trail, most likely the killer would have had all the privacy needed to mutilate in peace and would have had no need to move the victim after death.

But then it broke something, a stick or something, and I heard it growl. I've been to zoos and all and I saw that movie The Bear, but I thought they'd mixed things to get that noise—lions or trains or whatever, like they mixed noises to get Tarzan's yodel to come out big enough. " Anna turned away on the pretense of tucking the blood pressure cuff back in its plastic case so he wouldn't see her smiling at the image of a scrawny little Rory Van Slyke pounding on his bony chest and calling to herds of imaginary backyard elephants.