It was the first time Johnny had had to carry news of the dead and dying to anyone, and the task made him feel very odd. He wondered if Kate had felt like this when she had come to tell him his father had been killed. For the first time, he wondered how she had managed. She'd almost been killed, too, or so they said, because she had never mentioned it. She'd been moving slowly and carefully that day, he remembered, as if it hurt to do normal stuff like walk and sit. She'd had bandages on her arm, her hands and face had been skinned and bruised, and the hair that used to hang to her waist in a big fat black braid had been sheared off, all raggedy, not even and neat like it was now. He wondered who had cut it off, and why. He wondered why she didn't let it grow back.

He knew Ruthe and Dina, too, maybe not as well as Kate, but well enough. He'd been to their cabin several times since he'd moved to the Park, and he'd liked the two ladies, even if they were older than God. Dina had started right in on him, wanting to know how much he knew about the Park and what lived in it. He was interested, and she didn't talk down to him, so he didn't mind. She had showed him a photo album that started out with weird little rectangular black-and-white pictures and ended up with normal ones— in color, with digital date stamps in the corners. There were pictures of bears and moose, and one of two bald eagles fighting each other in the air, only Dina had said they were mating. There was a picture of Dina standing twenty feet in front of a walrus haul, with what must have been thousands of walrus, and a picture of Ruthe standing in what looked like the middle of a vast herd of caribou, the animals stretching out all around her, over an immense plain, as far as the eye could see. A mink peeked out of a snowbank; a beaver got caught slapping his tail; a wolverine, fangs bared, looked like he was about to charge. "He was, too," Dina had said, cackling; "we barely got out of there in time."

There were pictures of tracks of every kind—in the mud of spring and the swamp of summer, but mostly in the snow: the long stride and enormous feet of a wolf, the smaller prints of a fox, and the tiny prints of a vole.

In one picture, the hip-hopping tracks of an arctic hare vanished, just stopped altogether. "See?" Dina had said, pointing. Feathered ends of wing tips left a ghostly clue in the show on either side of the tracks.

"Wow," Johnny had said, awed.

"A golden eagle, from the wingspan. Aquila chrysaetos," Dina had said, and she had made him repeat the words until he had the pronunciation correct. "Of the family Accipitridae."