Anna looked around doubtfully.
Her expression made him laugh. "Trust me. You'll be comfortable tonight. It's getting up in the morning that takes some fortitude."
She seemed to accept his assurance, which pleased him. "When will we go by the place Heather and Jack were attacked?"
"We won't," he told her. "I don't want our scent anywhere near there. I want us to look like prey, not any kind of official investigators."
"You think he cares one way or the other?"
Charles took off his backpack, set it on a rock that stuck out of the snow like a whale rising out of the ocean. "If he's really a rogue defending his territory, no. If he's here to cause trouble for my father, he won't attack people who look like they might carry word of his work out to the world."
She followed his lead and set her pack up out of the snow. He pulled a packet of raisins out of the pocket in his arm-the last packet he had handy, so he'd have to restock for the morning. She took it with a put-upon sigh, but opened it anyway and started munching.
With Anna occupied eating, he took a moment to examine his chosen campsite. There was a better one near the lake; he'd intended to reach it sometime in the early afternoon and give Anna the chance to rest up. It wouldn't be the first day of hiking that got to her-he had some experience taking other greenhorns out into the mountains. It would be the third or fourth.
But the first rule of playing in the woods was to be flexible. They could have made it to his first pick before dark, but he thought that giving her some time to rest after the first hike was more important.
He'd slept here before, and the rock hadn't changed since he was a boy. The last time...he thought about it for a minute, but he couldn't pin it down. The bushes on the side of the rock hadn't been there, and he could see the stump of the old Douglas fir that had sheltered him from the east the last time he'd been here. He put his toe against the rotten stump and watched the wood crumble. Maybe fifty years ago, or seventy.
Charles laid down a ground cloth but didn't bother setting up the backpacker's tent. As long as the weather held out, he had no intention of making them that vulnerable to attack. He seldom used tents if he didn't have to-and never if he was out hunting something that might hunt him back. The tent blocked his vision, muffled sounds, and got in the way. He'd brought it for Anna, but only if necessary.
The old fir was too wet to be good fuel, but there were other downed trees. A half hour of hunting gave him a generous armful of dry wood coaxed from the corpses of a couple of old forest monarchs.
Anna was perched up on the big rock next to his backpack when he returned, her snowshoes leaning against the base of the rock. He took off his own and set about building a small fire, conscious of her eyes on him.
"I thought Indians built fires with friction," she said when he took out a can of Sterno and a cigarette lighter.
"I can do that," he said. "But I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and a Bic are much faster." They were all right again, he thought. It had started when she fell asleep in the car, but throughout the whole hike up here, she'd been relaxing more around him. Until, during the last few miles, she'd grabbed his coat several times to point out this and that-the tracks of a wolverine, a raven that watched them from a safe perch in the top of a lodge-pole pine, and a rabbit in its winter white.
"What would you like to eat?" he asked her after he'd arranged the fire to his liking and put a pot of snow on to boil.
"No more jerky," she said. "My jaw is tired of chewing."
"How about sweet-and-sour chicken?" he asked.
* * * *
He stirred in the packet of olive oil and handed her the larger foil bag. She looked inside dubiously. "It doesn't look like sweet-and-sour chicken," she said.
"You need to pay more attention to your nose," he admonished and took a bite of his own stew. It wasn't as good as dinner last night, but not too bad for something you poured water on and ate. "And at least the sweet-and-sour chicken doesn't look like dog food."
She leaned over and looked in his bag. "Ewwe. Why did they do that?"
"They can only freeze-dry small pieces," he said, pulling his bag back before she got her hair in it. "Eat."
"So," she asked, back on her earlier perch, "how long will our scent disguise last?"
He was pleased to notice that after she'd taken the first bite, she'd fallen on her food like a lumberjack.
"It won't matter," he told her, as he made quick inroads on his own meal, "as long as we keep talking about what we're doing so that any wolf out there can hear us."
She stopped eating and opened her mouth to apologize, then stopped midword to frown at him. He wondered if he should have smiled so she'd know he was teasing; but she got it, because she waved her spork at him. "If there was a werewolf within hearing range, you'd know it. Answer the question."
He seldom spoke of his magic to anyone, including his father-because Brother Wolf told him that the fewer people knew about it, the better weapon it was. But Brother Wolf had no objections to telling Anna anything she wanted to know.
So he ate a bite of beef and admitted, "I don't know. As long as we need it to-unless we tick off the spirits and they decide to aid our enemies instead."
She stopped eating a second time, this time to stare. "You're not teasing this time?"
He shrugged. "No. I'm not a witch to impose my will on the world. All I can do is ask, and if it suits their whims, the spirits allow it."
She'd taken a mouthful of food and had to swallow hastily to ask, "Are you a Christian? Or..."
He nodded. "Like Balaam's ass, I am. Besides, as a werewolf, you know there are other things in the world-demons, vampires, ghouls, and the like. Once you know they're out there, you have to admit that God is present. That's the only possible explanation of why evil hasn't yet taken over the world and enslaved the human race. God makes sure that evil stays hidden and sly." He finished off his food and put away his spork.
"Balaam's ass?" She muttered to herself, then caught her breath. "Balaam's ass saw an angel. Do you mean you've seen an angel?"
He grinned. "Just once, and it wasn't interested in me...but still, it sticks with you." Gave him hope in the darkest night, in fact. "Just because God is, doesn't mean there aren't spirits in these woods."
"You worship spirits?"
"Why would I do that?" He wasn't crazy or stupid-and a man had to be one or the other to go out looking for spirits. "All that would do is get me more work-and my father gives me more than enough work as it is."
She frowned at him, so he decided to explain. "Sometimes they help me out in this or that if I ask, but more often they have something they need done. And there aren't as many people who hear them as there used to be-which means more work for those of us who do. My father keeps me busy enough for three people. If I were seeking the spirits out in daily conversation, I wouldn't have time to tie my shoes. Samuel spends a lot of time trying to figure out where spirits fit into Christianity-I don't worry about it so much."
He thought he was going to have to remind her to finish her food, but she stared at her bag for a bit, then took another bite. "What do you do if they ask you to do something wrong?"
He shook his head. "Most spirits are more friendly or unfriendly rather than good or evil." And then, because the odd urge to tease her was still strong, he added, "Except for the brain-sucking spirits who live around here waiting for silly hikers to camp under their trees. Don't worry, I'll keep them off of you."
"Jerk," she told her sweet-and-sour chicken, but not like she was bothered.
Somewhere out in the darkness a wolf howled. It was a long way off, a timber wolf, he thought. Twenty years ago there hadn't been any wolves to howl, but they'd been making steady progress back down into Montana from Canada for a decade or more. The sound made him smile. His father worried that there was no more room in this tame planet for predators, but he figured if humans had decided to allow the wolves back into their rightful place, they could adjust to werewolves given enough time.
* * * *
Walter found the dead man, dressed in hunter orange, propped up against a tree. From the looks of him, he'd fallen from the rocks above where a game trail snaked along the edge of a short cliff. One leg had been broken, but he'd managed to drag himself a few yards. Probably he'd died of the cold a few days ago.
He must be the reason all the searchers had been hiking through the woods. He must have gotten turned around because no man with any sense would have gone hunting this far from a road without a pack animal of some sort. It was so far from where people had been looking that the chances of anyone finding the body were somewhere between slim and none. By spring there would be little left to find.
He thought about burying the body, but he'd have to dig through eight or ten feet of snow and another six of frozen ground. Besides, he didn't have a shovel with him. The dead man's feet were the same size as Walter's, so he took the boots as well as the gloves and parka-leaving behind the orange vest. Leaving the hunter's gun was a more difficult decision, but ammunition was hard to come by, and he had no desire to advertise his presence with gunfire.
He bowed his head and began a prayer. It wasn't a very good prayer because the only one he could remember was the prayer he'd said before bedtime as a kid. But he focused on it, because it was helping him ignore the beast inside him that saw the hunter as meat. It was hungry, and it didn't care where the meat came from.
He was just finishing the prayer when the demon howled. He felt an answering growl rise from his belly, a challenge to his enemy. But he held the sound to himself. He knew about stalking evil...for a moment he was back in the war with Jimmy, sliding from shadow to shadow as they approached their commander's tent. The sobs of the village girl hid their approach.