This seemed to mollify the woman. She said, ‘The things you have to deal with, in your line of work.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Ysbel said.

As she suspected, trying to solve the so-called bear problem was scientifically possible, but its implementation would raise serious scrutiny and challenges, human and native. Not surprising, then, that the people who had cured Seven and the other articulate bears had taken every precaution to keep their project secret, but although they had managed to erase the camp from maps and satellite images, Ysbel reckoned that it would have been much harder to remove every trace left by its construction and operation in financial records and inventories. Excessive and unaccounted overage or wastage, patterns in the distribution of miscellaneous funds, forged stock counts, false allocation schemes: the kind of evidence that exposed disaffected agency personnel who stole materiel for their own use or were knowing participants in schemes got up by natives who had worked out how to manipulate aid and friendship programmes for their own ends. And since the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs had oversight of records of all transactions between agencies and natives, it should be possible to track down irregularities associated with the camp.

She began by working through the records lodged by the Ogres Grave station, which covered most of the west coast. Concentrating on the years when the camp had most likely been built, assuming that it was around the time Seven had been born, but finding nothing of interest and breaking off at dusk, when Ilan arrived. He was somewhat dusty and dishevelled because he had taken a runabout to the nearest village and walked the rest of the way, carrying food packs and a plastic bottle of inky native wine. Ysbel let him take charge of cooking supper, and they drank most of the wine and fell into the big hammock strung under a canvas roof and made slow, careful love, as if rediscovering each other, and fell asleep spooned together.

It was the deepest sleep she had enjoyed since she had begun the investigation. In the morning, she set a pot of oatmeal to cook and shared the outdoor, gravity-fed shower with Ilan. Afterwards, dressed in her running gear, she walked with him down the hill to the spot where he had left the runabout.

‘There’s a favour I need to ask,’ she said. ‘Feel free to turn it down.’

‘I’ll need to hear what it is first.’

‘I was wondering if you could look up surveys of a couple of bear cities. Reports that haven’t been published to open records. Raw data files. Who made the surveys and when. And any images of bear carvings they might have taken.’

‘Like that map you were interested in a while back?’

‘Like the figure on the map,’ Ysbel said. It felt like a confession.

‘I thought you’d given up on that.’