"Craig's tent is desert camo," Harland said. "He was bragging about it to me the other day. It'll be a bitch to find in broken country."

Corinne jerked her chin at Christina. With a certain awe of Chris's telepathic powers, Anna watched her quietly leave the conference room.

Several minutes later she returned in the midst of a discussion of Craig Eastern's probable itineraries. Corinne looked at her and everyone stopped talking.

"Due to the fires, all helicopters in the Southwest region are in use. Highest priority. It will be a week or ten days before they can guarantee us one for this search."

"Paulsen's got one," Anna said, remembering suddenly.

"Jerimiah D.? That's right," Harland added. "He has."

Christina went without the nod, and returned to report that Paulsen's helicopter was undergoing repairs. The rotor was in Sante Fe being worked on. As soon as it was running, he'd be glad to lend it to the National Park Service.

The meeting adjourned at five after six. Search dogs had been promised by the El Paso Police Department in two days' time. At present all their dogs were in use searching for a ten-year-old boy lost in the Gila National Forest.

Tomorrow Anna and Paul would begin a man hunt, starting with the most likely points of entry: Williams Ranch and PX Well. Anna would ride Gideon; Paul, Pesky. Harland was to coordinate transportation for the rangers and the livestock.

It was, Paul pointed out, better than sitting on their hands.

Christina would continue her search by phone.

Harland was waiting at PX Well when Anna and Gideon rode out the next evening. She was late, nearly two hours. Always, as she rode, was the nagging sense that just a little further, just over the next ragged, rocky hill, she would find something. She'd blown her shrill plastic search whistle till her ears were buzzing and Gideon had begun to flinch as if she laid a lash to him. Between the two of them they'd consumed forty pounds of water-five gallons-and would've consumed another gallon if they'd had it.

The sight of the waiting horse trailer gave the old horse back his youth. Then he saw Roberts and began to flag. Gideon stumbled half a dozen times in the last quarter-mile. He was putting on a show for Harland.

A long drink of water was waiting for the horse and a cold Milwaukee Black Label for Anna, courtesy of Harland Roberts. She was popping the top as she said: "I'm in uniform, I really shouldn't."

Harland opened a can for himself, sipping to her gulps. More of a promise never to tell on her than a serious drinking of beer. Anna slid to the ground in the shade of the horse trailer, her back against the fender.

"Not a damn thing," she said to his questioning look. "Davy Crockett couldn't track a tank over this kind of country. Yours Truly was totally baffled. We played it by ear. Followed the obvious animal trails, sought out the snakiest-looking country. Not so much as a gum wrapper. Maybe the Martians did beam him up." She leaned her head back against the warm metal of the trailer and poured another quarter of a can of beer down her throat. It was the finest beverage she'd ever tasted. Heaven was just Hell in the shade with a cold beer.

"Maybe tomorrow," Harland said.

"Maybe tomorrow."

Tomorrow brought the dog from El Paso and the policewoman who worked with her. The dog's name was Natasha Osirus. Her handler, Betsy McLeod, called her Nosy. Nosy was an eleven-year-old golden retriever trained to search. Serious, almost grave, she was terribly dedicated until Betsy produced a well-chewed Raggedy Ann doll, then she was the silliest of puppies. Like Nosy, Betsy was blond, though Anna suspected it was due more to Lady Clairol than the desert sun. Both had a loose-jointed unkempt look that put Anna at ease immediately. They also shared a warmth and a brown-eyed sincerity that gave one faith.

Noon found Paul, Anna, Betsy, and the dog on the porch of the Williams ranch house. A plain wooden building, it had been constructed at the turn of the century for a new bride who took one look at the desert stretching barbarous miles out from her very doorstep and fled back to civilization.

The next woman had loved the place, the land, the house. Anna'd never read any official documentation to that fact; she simply felt it. Love was there in the choice of wallpaper in the entry hall, in the careful border prints along the ceilings, and the neatly nailed tin gliders on the thresholds.

Now the paper hung in colorless ribbons. Collared lizards peeked unfathomable eyes up through gaps between the floorboards. Black-throated sparrows nested under the elevated porch. Some days, on West Side patrol, Anna would take her lunch onto the porch and, in her mind, redecorate and inhabit this graceful little home on the skirttails of the Guadalupes with all the deserts of Texas rolling away.

Nosy, her snout full of Craig's scent-socks, a shirt, the EARTH FIRST! cap Paul had taken from Eastern's apartment- made short work of the house and, on Betsy's command, began to circle further afield. At every other step the poor creature got sand burrs or mesquite barbs in her paws. Betsy, walking with her, pulled out the stickers and murmured comfort. The dog was too well trained to quit working, but it was easy to see her concentration was affected.

No trail was found. With the heat, the stickers, the varied smells of visitors who'd come to see the Williams ranch house, Paul was not confident Nosy could sort out one six-day-old track.

Betsy was sure. Nosy was loaded back into the jeep and Anna began the seven-mile, forty-five-minute drive out the guttered road. Betsy sat in back with the dog, fashioning little canvas booties from an old piece of tarp that had been covering the jack.

At four o'clock they reached PX Well. Nosy was more comfortable with her paws tied up in canvas, and the well had been so long in disuse that there were few human scents to sort through, but the end result was the same: no sign of Craig Eastern.

After supper that night, Anna went over to Christina's to visit. Erik-who Anna had assiduously avoided meeting- had taken Alison into Carlsbad to see The Little Mermaid. The two women talked little. Christina seemed to need the quiet and Anna found it soothing. They sat out in the garden, enjoying the heady scent of Chris's carefully tended exotics and sipping tiny crystal glasses of ice-cold peppermint schnapps.

The phone search, Christina said, had become so general as to be absurd. Craig had few friends and was a virtual stranger to his one living relative-a sister in Brownsville. Christina was down to calling his grammar school teachers and the night security guards at the University lab where he worked. No one had seen or heard from him.

The following day, at the Marcus entrance to the park, Betsy and Nosy sniffed out a tarantula, a great granddaddy of a western diamondback rattler, and two Texas horned lizards. The three remaining entrance gates didn't produce even that much in the way of results. Come sundown, Betsy loaded Nosy back into her Camaro and headed for El Paso.

The next morning's Incident Command Meeting was glum. Nothing to report. The Forest Service, pressured by Corinne, promised a helicopter in three days. No one fooled themselves that, if Craig were indeed on the West Side, he was still alive. There were no springs. No one could carry in water enough for seven days.

Corinne had worked her way around to the all-important chore of placing the blame-or at least shrugging herself free of any taint of it-when the call came in.

Frank Kanavel, the rancher owning the property along the boundary between the gate to the Williams ranch road and PX Well, had let some "snake guy" from the park leave his car on his property for two days. More than a week later he comes back from his sister's wedding in Lubbock to find the damn thing's there again. Did the park think they had an open invitation to walk over his land any time they wanted, trample down his fences, upset his cows?