"I doubt we'll even see them from a distance," Joan said. "This itsy-bitsy chunk of map I've been pointing at represents a whole lot of territory when you're covering it on foot." There was a slamming-the-iron-door quality to her dismissal of the domestic issue that made Anna suspect her of being a mother in her other life. If she had another life. In the forty-eight hours Anna had known her, Rand had worked like a woman buying off a blackmailer. It wasn't that she lacked humor or zest, but that she pushed herself as if her sense of security was held hostage and only hard work could buy it back.

A classic workaholic.

Anna's sister, Molly, had been one until she'd nearly died; then, at the ripe age of fifty-five, fallen in love for maybe the first time. Molly was a psychiatrist. She could tell Joan that no amount of work would suffice. But if Joan was a true workaholic, she wouldn't have time to listen.

Personally, Anna loved workaholics. Especially when they worked for her. In a sense those laboring to save one square inch of wilderness, rescue one caddis fly larva from pollutants, were in the deepest sense public servants. And maybe, if the gods took pity and the public woke up, these rescuers would save the world, one species, one coral reef, one watershed at a time.

Anna'd organized a backpack so often it took her no more time than a veteran airline pilot packing for a four-day trip. The five liters of blood and guts were secured in a hard plastic Pelican case. Rory would carry that. Anna and Joan split the rest of the equipment between them: fencing staples and hammers, vials of ethanol for scat samples, envelopes for hair, a trap log to record the salient facts of the sites, like where, precisely, in the two million acres of Glacier each four-hundred-square-foot trap was located so the next round of researchers could find it. The skunk lures, five in all, weighed next to nothing. Wool, permeated with the scent purchased from a hunting catalogue, was stuffed in film canisters and stowed in a glass jar. That went in Anna's pack. In under two hours everything was arranged to Joan's satisfaction.