By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoria that she would've guessed. For the first time since she'd stumbled across the body, she felt a personal sense of loss. She wished she'd gotten to know the Dog Canyon Ranger better. They might have been friends.

As they drove down the miles of winding road cutting back west through the Lincoln National Forest, Mrs. Drury asked: "Are we in the park now?" She was pointing to the fenceline on both sides of the road. It was the first time Anna had noticed the new fencing edging nearly all of the Paulsen Ranch. "That's Jerry Paulsen's property. He owns forty sections. Not really a big place in this part of the country. It abuts the park on the northern boundary outside of Dog Canyon."

The fence cut down the middle of a lot of man-made divisions: it marked the border between Texas and New Mexico, between public and private lands. Deer jumped it, toads hopped under it, and birds and clouds floated over it without a downward glance. But in the petty depths of humanity it was an important line.

Paulsen had spared no expense: new green metal posts, shining silver wire with four-pronged barbs half an inch long and, every fifty or sixty feet, a brand-new sign reading NO TRESPASSING.

Paulsen was dead serious about private ownership. STAY OFF JERRY PAULSEN'S LAND was xeroxed on every page of the Boundary Patrol Report Forms to remind rangers riding fenceline. Anna wished he'd return the favor. The next time he flew his shiny new helicopter over so much as one corner of the park she would go to the Federal Aviation Agency.

There'd been bad blood between the park and the local ranchers from the beginning. The Guadalupes had been their backyard for generations. They hunted and camped, drew water from the springs, grazed cattle and goats in the high country. Then suddenly in 1972 it was off-limits.