Think of something else, Anna commanded herself. As she entered the familiar channel between Amygdaloid Island and Belle Isle, and saw the ranger station snugged up safe from storms at the foot of the moss-covered cliff, she allowed herself one short dream of cholla cactus and skies without milky veils of moisture, of a sun with fire to it and food hotter even than that.

After the lion incident at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Anna had felt the need to move on, to start over. At heart, the Park Service was a bureaucracy and, in the wake of the discoveries, there had been much talk and little action.

Still, Anna had worn out her welcome in West Texas. The next move, she promised as she eased the Bertram up to the dock, would be back to the Southwest, to the desert. And with a promotion; twenty-two thousand dollars a year was getting harder and harder to live on.

The 3rd Sister, a handsome forty-foot cabin cruiser with a high-ceilinged pilot’s cabin and a flying bridge decked out in red and white pin-striping, was moored across the dock. A hibachi stood unattended on the rough wooden planking of the pier. Anna could smell fish broiling over charcoal.

As she stepped onto the dock, lines in hand, a lithe form bundled in a heavy woolen shirt and a close-fitting fisherman’s cap leapt from the deck of the diving boat and took the stern line to make the Bertram fast to the dock.

Anna finished tying the bow, tugging the half-knots snug, then coiling the tail of the line out of tripping distance. “Thanks, Holly,” she called down the length of the boat. The wind took her words and flung them out over the channel. Anna was just as glad. As her helper turned, faced the last light from the western sky, she realized it was Holly’s brother, Hawk, the third man in the Sister’s three-person dive crew.