Free Borderline by Nevada Barr Page A

about food animals.
    Idly, Anna coiled the rope they’d been using to pull Easter with. It was light, a tough plastic line, but a hundred and fifty feet of it was still bulky.
    “Hey,” Anna said, a thought striking her. She stood, shouting, “Hey!” down at Lori and Chrissie, who’d unloaded the camp chairs and sat on the shore reading. “Will one of you bring up an oar? The longest one you can find.”
    “What are you thinking?” Paul asked, sounding alarmed. “We can’t carry her. We don’t have the manpower.”
    “Woman power!” Cyril said, but didn’t look as if she believed there was enough of that to manhandle a cow down to the river either.
    “We don’t carry,” Anna said. “We lower. Tie her feet up, thread the paddle through, tie a line to either end of the paddle so she swings beneath it the way the great white hunter did in those old cannibal cartoons and lower her to the grassy knoll.”
    “Grassy knoll,” Steve said. “Where have I heard that before? And did things come out well in the end? Could this be a sign?”
    “Why do you want a paddle?” Chrissie hollered back up. She’d not yet risen from her camp chair.
    “Just bring it, please,” Anna called back. “Takes too long to explain,” she added nicely. She was beginning to take against the young woman and, on the first day of a three-day camping trip with lots of close encounters on the docket, she didn’t dare let even a hint of it show. Backcountry groups most often bonded; it was one of the reasons people loved them, but a group could go sour faster than an arts department at a university. Not only did it ruin it for everyone but it could prove dangerous in situations where working together for the good of the team was paramount.
    Chrissie took her time gathering all the paddles together then holding them one against the other in front of Lori, choosing the longest. Anna sat back down and schooled herself in patience. Cyril did not have to. After five minutes of watching this meticulous process, hands on hips, she shouted: “Just pick one already.”
    Peer pressure did what usurped authority dared not and Chrissie selected a paddle and headed toward the little hill where the ledge began.
    “How do you get up?” she called.
    Cyril’s shoulders slumped and her head fell dramatically to her chest. “Dear sweet brother, wombmate of mine, I will let you be the pretty one for two whole hours if you will go down and help Chrissie find her rear end. I believe she already has both hands and a flashlight but she needs your intellect to guide her.”
    Steve didn’t move. “Three hours,” he said.
    “Two and a half.”
    “Done.”
    He rose gracefully from where he’d squatted on his heels and walked down the sloping ledge. Anna expected a catty remark from Cyril about Chrissie or at least an apology for the other girl by way of distancing herself but it didn’t come and Anna was pleased. The vile hordes of humanity raping and squandering the earth would have to take out Cyril Kessler and her brother before they could claim total dominion. Anna hadn’t cheered up enough that she could muster any faith that the hordes wouldn’t win out in the end, but it was nice to pretend for a bit.
    Odds were Anna was wrong about Chrissie, anyway, that she was a fine young woman with outstanding talents and capabilities and simply rubbed her the wrong way. There’d been enough surprises, both pleasant and un-, in Anna’s past that she’d come to accept the fact she was not a great judge of character and her first impressions of people weren’t to be counted on for much.
    Sitting three in a row like monkeys without evil, Anna and Carmen and Cyril watched placidly as Chrissie handed the paddle to Steve. He extended it back down to help pull her up the short rock scramble between the hill and the ledge then started back toward where they rested, spines to the wall, feet to the cow.
    Paul did not join them. He squatted near the cliff’s