Would a small animal inspect a jar of powdered coffee, decide the contents were not to its taste and toss it with violence to the ground?
A large animal then—a bear? That seemed unlikely too, for more than one reason. No bears had been seen in the region for close to half a century and if one had survived it strained coincidence to believe it would have picked the ten minutes he’d been absent from the car to go foraging for food.
A strange feeling came upon Manning then, the almost certain knowledge that more than the coffee and the can of beans had been tampered with. The car itself? How could he be sure that no damage had been done to the car by a visitor so mysterious that…
It hit him all at once, the sheer wild absurdity of what he had been allowing himself to think. It wouldn’t hav
