The king and Queen of solver

Part 1

Predators of humans

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

If someone in this forest had been watching her- a man with a gun, for hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees- he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of her feet .He would have judged her an angry woman on the trail of something hateful.

He would have been wrong .She was frustrated, it's true, to be following tracks in the mud she couldn't identify. She was used to being sure. But if she troubled to inspect her own mind on this humid' sunlit morning, she would have declared herself happy. She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with sibilant percussion that empties your head of words. Her body was free to follow its own rules: a long –legged gait too fast for companionship, unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch broken foliage, a braid of hair nearly as thick as her forearm falling over her shoulder to sweep the ground whenever she bent down. Her limbs rejoiced to be outdoors again, out of her tiny cabin whose log walls had grown furry and overbearing during the long spring rains. The frown was pure concentration, nothing more. Two years alone had given her a blind person's indifference to the look on her own face.

All morning the animal trail had led uphill, ascending the mountain, skirting a rhododendron slick, and row climbing into an old-growth forest whose steepness had spared it from ever being logged. But even here, where a good oak-hickory canopy sheltered the ridge top, last night's rain had pounded through hard enough to obscure the tracks. She knew the animal's size from the path it had left through the glossy undergrowth of mayapples, and that was enough to speed up her heart. It could be what she'd been looking for these two year and more. This lifetime. But to know for sure she needed details, especially the faint law mark beyond the toe pad that distinguishes canine from feline. That would be first thing to vanish in a hard rain, so it wasn't going to appear to her now, however hard she looked. Now it would take more than tracks, and on this sweet, damp morning at the begging of the world, that was fine with her. She could be a patient tracker. Eventually the animal would give itself away with mound of scat (which might have dissolved in the rain, too) or something else, some sign particular to its species. A bear will leave claw marks on trees and even bite that bark sometimes, though this was, would have to be a wild and hungry one to be out in such a rain.

She found a spot where it had circled chestnut stump, probably for scat marking. She studied the stump: and old giant, raggedly rotting its way backward into the ground since its death by ax or blight. Toadstools dotted the humus at its base, tiny ones, and brilliant orange, with delicately ridged cps like open parasols. The downpour would have obliterated such fragile things; these must have popped up in the few hours since the rain stopped-after the animal was here, then. Inspired by its ammonia. She studied the ground for a long time, unconscious of the elegant length of the nose and chin in profile, unaware of her left hand moving near her face to disperse a cloud of gnats and push stray hair out of her eyes. She squatted, studied herself by placing her fingertips in the moss at the foot of the stump, and pressed her face to the musky old wood. Inhaled.

"Cat," she said softly, to nobody. Not what she'd hoped for, but a good surprise to find evidence of a territorial bobcat on this ridge. The mix of forests and wetlands in these mountains could be excellent core habitat for cats, but he knew they mostly kept to the limestone river cliffs along the Virginia-Kentucky border. And yet here one was. It explained the cries she'd heard two nights ago, icy shrieks in the rain, like woman's screaming. She'd been sure it was a bobcat but still lost sleep over it. No human could fail to be moved by such human –sounding anguish. Remembering it now gave her a shiver she balanced her weight on her toes and pushed herself back upright to feet.

And there he stood, looking straight at her. He was dressed in boots and camouflage and carried a pack larger than hers. His rifle was no joke- a thirty-thirty, it looked like, and surprise must have stormed all over her face before she thought to arrange it for human inspection. It happened that she ran into hunters up here. But she always saw them first. This one had stolen her advantage- he'd seen inside her.

"Eddie Bondo ", is what he'd said, touching his hat brim, though it took her a moment to work this out.

"What?"

"That's my name."

"Good lord," she said, able to breathe out finally. "I didn't ask your name"

"You needed to know it, though."

Cocky, she thought. Or cocked, rather. Like a rifle, ready to go off. "What would I need your name for? You fixing to give me a story I'll want to tell later?" she asked quietly. It was a tactic learned from her father, and the way of mountain people in general – to be quiet when most agitated.

"That I can't say. But I won't bite." He grinned- apologetically, it seemed. He was very much younger than she. His left hand reached up to his shoulder." And I don't shoot girls"

"Well. Wonderful news."

Bite him' said, with the northerner's clipped i. an outsider, intruding on this place like kudzu vines. He was not very tall but deeply muscular in the way that shows up through a man's clothing, in his wrists and neck and posture: a build so accustomed to work that it seems tensed even when at ease. He said you sniff stumps, I see."

"I do."

"You got a good reason for that?"

"Yep"

"You are going to tell me what it is?"

"Nope."

Another pause. She watched his hands, but that pulled