No obvious powder burns, bullet holes, or stabbing wounds. Evidently the woman had not been waylaid by drug runners hiding in the wilderness.

Despite the tragic situation, Anna smiled. Edith, her mother-in-law, a veteran of the Bronx ("But darling, it was very middle class in the forties"), of the Great Depression, the number two train from Wall Street, and WWII, stood aghast at the concept of a woman camping alone in the wilderness. ("Anna, there's nobody there. Anyone could be there…")

Anna believed the truth was, alone was safe. A woman alone would live the longest. Criminals were a lazy bunch. If they weren't, they'd get their MBAs and rob with impunity. They most assuredly wouldn't walk eight hard miles to hide. They'd check into a Motel 6 on the Interstate, watch afternoon T.V. and hope for the best.

What did that leave, she wondered, her eye once again against the viewfinder. Suicide? A bit odd to do one's self in, in full gear in a saw grass swamp. Heart attack? Stroke? Drowning? Lots of ways to die. Suddenly Anna felt fragile.

Evening was settling into the canyon's bottom. Soon she'd be wasting film. Three pictures left on the roll. Careful not to disturb anything, Anna leaned down and drew the curtain of heavy dark hair from Sheila Drury's face and throat.

There it was: another way to die. Oddly, the last and the first she had considered: lion kill. Claw marks cut up from Drury's clavicle to her chin. Puncture wounds-claws or teeth-made neat dark holes above the collarbone. Anna did not doubt that Sheila's neck had been snapped as well. It was the way the big cats made their kills.

For a long moment Anna stood, the dead woman at her feet, oblivious to the gathering darkness. Tears welling from deep inside spilled down her face and dripped from the square line of her jaw.

Now the lions would be hunted down and killed. Now every trigger-happy Texan would blast away at every tawny shadow that flickered in the brush. The government's bounty quotas on predators of domestic livestock would go up. Lions would die and die.