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wild for a while, he was his usual self.”
    “It seriously bugged him when he hadn’t seen one live in a while?”
    “No, no, nothing like that. I was just using that as an example of how normal he was with his one-track mind to locate them. Not just him, our whole team feels that way.” He shrugged. “I know we all sound nuts, but every day in wolverine world is like a powerful drug. It’s an addiction. I don’t expect anyone other than those of us who do the research to understand.”
    But I did understand. I had caught the power of the truth-seeking drug myself. Amid the sad and burdensome world of death and destruction, the quest for what really happened, for the big T can consume you. I felt it creeping up on me when Cathy was asking me for answers, and I had felt it full force on Bear Bait. I could imagine the quest to understand the fierce and relentless wolverine was just as catching—that amid the world of dwindling glaciers and increased rate of climate change was a potent urgency to unravel some of the secrets of one of the most mysterious species in the contiguous states and what it requires to survive.
    “I mean,” Sam continued, “he was telling jokes and was excited to see if the cameras had caught any footage. Told me all about how Jeff’s baseball season was going—that they’d just had a tournament in Sandpoint. He was so proud of Jeff.” Pain filled his eyes at the thought of the boy. “It’s just—” He shook his head. “It’s just so unreal.” He swallowed hard and I could see his Adam’s apple jerk up, then down. “So unfair. So incredibly unfair.”
    I looked around, but didn’t say anything. He was right, there wasnothing fair out here at all in these mountains. But there was nothing unfair in them either. Glacier Park spans about sixty miles along the Montana Rockies and every inch of its jutting contours and colorful rock layers hollers stories of a landscape that is billions of years old. The mountains towered above us daily, and you either survived them or you didn’t. Wolfie would have known that better than anyone.

7
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    K EN AND I drove back down to headquarters, my third trip down this curving narrow roadway that I knew by heart. This time of the year, the line of cars moves slowly with tourists taking it all in. Plus there’s no cell service in this part of the park, a blessing for visitors—a chance to wean themselves from the rat race. For us, we had the use of the radios, but it was easier to work from a phone at headquarters. I was slightly frustrated but ready to get to the busywork of checking Wolfie’s credit cards, phone records, and to get ahold of the surveillance tapes posted at the entrance gate in West Glacier.
    I thought of the adage that if a murder has been committed, it must be solved within the first forty-eight after it’s occurred or forget it. What they reminded me in DC was that forty-eight hours within the commission of the crime is not exactly true. It’s partially true, but not completely true. It’s more a question of people forgetting how things went down past two days’ time, in any situation, not just crime.
    In this case, I had no witnesses that I knew of anyway. Joe and I had asked the media to press for anyone witnessing the fall or anything strange around the Loop the previous day to come forward with information regarding the incident. But more frustrating to me was not knowing if we were even dealing with a crime. My instincts whispered to me that we were, but so far the lack of evidence suggesting foul play said we weren’t.
    I had already placed a few calls in the morning over coffee and had some faxes waiting for me in the incident room Systead and I hadused in the last case. A government pea-green counter traversed one wall of the room with a printer and fax machine smelling of toner and paper dust on one side and an old coffeepot next to the sink on the opposite. A long conference table with metal chairs hogged the