"You're a ways from anywhere," Joan said and stuck out her hand.

After the briefest pause, he took it. Workman's hands, Anna noted, callused and scarred, the nails broken and rimed with dirt from too long between baths. Odd for a boy so young. His shirt was streaked with soot and he wore a chain wrapped twice around his waist.

"You all just out camping or what?" he asked. The question didn't seem particularly neighborly to Anna but didn't bother Joan in the least. She launched into an explanation of the Greater Glacier Bear DNA research project, the wording geared for the ears of laymen. Anna set her pack down and freed her water from a mesh side pocket. Joan was proselytizing, converting the masses to greater respect of bears. Anna tried to figure out where the boy's accent was from. Henry Higgins aside, few people could place others by their dialect, except within the broadest of areas. Americans made it more difficult by swimming around the melting pot: kindergarten in Milwaukee, third grade in San Diego, high school in Saint Louis. The south was as close as Anna could place him, anywhere from Virginia to Texas.

Out of long habit she committed his physical description to memory. He was a big kid, though not tall, around five-foot-eight, chunky without being fat. The kind of body that's a good deal stronger than one would think. Shoulders sloped away from a round handsome neck. What hair she could see poking from beneath the ball cap was silky brown with a natural wave. One day soon his face would be chiseled into classic good looks. Anna could see it in the aquiline nose and the rounded prominent chin.

She took another drink. Sat on a rock.

The boy never loosed his pack, made none of the comfortable settling-in gestures she and Rory engaged in.