Free Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 by Nevada Barr Page B

that dedi-cated 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, hesi-tant 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 accord-ing 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 press-ing 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 previ-ous 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 Thomp-son River District, Anna had jumped at the opportunity.

Since Ray Sleeker 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 of