Usually Cheryl laughed a lot. The kind of laugh that made others laugh too, even before they knew what the joke was. There'd been no laughter that day.

Cheryl had carried Drury's pack and, over the rough spots, one end of the Stokes litter. The woman was powerful but that's not what stuck in Anna's mind. What had impressed her was the unobtrusive way Cheryl had supported, eased, bolstered, comforted, bucked-up everybody around her. Apparently she did it without effort or even knowledge that she was doing it. A well-timed smile, a touch, a proffered drink from her water bottle.

Anna envied it. Kindness-true, unadulterated kindness-was beyond her.

If Cheryl's kindness was legitimate, Anna's resident cynic interjected the customary sour note. Unadulterated, altruistic kindness? It went against the grain. Still and all, it was kindness.

"I think too much to be kind," she excused herself to a disinterested cat. Had Cheryl found a way to laugh about it by now? Though she and Craig and Manny were all business at the scene, there would be jokes tonight after a few beers and, maybe, for Craig, some nightmares. Probably Anna wouldn't hear much about it and Paul, nothing. Everyone pretended there was no wall between the permanent National Park Service employees and the seasonals. And everyone knew there was. A veritable bureaucratic Jericho with no Joshua in sight. Everyone was transient. Seasonals came and went like stray cats. Even permanent employees seldom stayed in one place more than a few years, not if they wanted to advance their careers. People who "homesteaded"-stayed in one park too long-tended to come to think of the place as theirs; they developed their own ideas of how it should be run. The NPS didn't care for that. It made people less tractable, less willing to follow party line dictated from half a continent away.