“Who is she?”

“She’s waiting tables at the Roadhouse. She’s great, Kate. I’ve never met anyone like her. She loves the outdoors, she loves the wildlife, she hikes and mountain-bikes, and she’s a good cross-country skier. She wants to learn how to climb and maybe take on Big Bump with me next summer. She’s gorgeous, too.” He paused. “I’ve got at least twenty years on her. I’ve been afraid to ask her how old she is. I don’t know what she sees in me.”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “Don’t worry. I do.”

He grinned, a little sheepish. “I’m heading out to the Roadhouse this afternoon. I’ll introduce you. And buy you a drink?”

“Sold. See you there.” She stopped to survey him from the door. Reassured by the sparkle in his eyes and the reappearance of the dimples in his cheeks, she turned and left, Mutt at her heels, flourishing her graceful plume of a tail like a pennant of friendship.

His smile lingered after they were gone. He had been feeling besieged, and if he was not mistaken, he had just received a delegation from the relieving force.

Well. If his friends-it appeared he did have some after all-were going to fight for him, he could do no less.

His smile widened. And he knew just who to recruit for the front lines. He stood up and reached for his parka.

On the way back down the mountain, Kate thought of all the things she could have said in answer to Dan’s question. That he’d been the chief ranger for the Park for eighteen years, after working his way up the Park Service’s food chain fighting alligators in Florida and volcanoes in Hawaii. That Park rats knew him and trusted him as no Alaskan trusted a federal park ranger anywhere else in the state. That moose and bears both brown and black wandered regularly through her yard, and that a herd of caribou migrated regularly over the plateau, and that no one in the Park who knew how to shoot or any of their families and friends had ever gone hungry on Dan O’Brian’s watch.