Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  Her promotion to district ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway was taking its toll. The Trace was a road, hence Anna was a cop. Asphalt could be relied on to be a conduit for crime.

  The boys in the picture frames: not potential victims but future promise made flesh. Attitude screwed around the right way, Anna asked, "Arc those your sons?"

  "Luke and John," Joan said.

  Good apostolic names. Anna smiled. "What happened to Matthew and Mark?"

  "Stillborn."

  Anna's brain skidded to a halt; a feeble jest had struck the jugular. "Shit," she said sincerely.

  "Yup."

  Silence settled around them, oddly comfortable this time, more so given this silence's root.

  "John graduates high school this year. Luke's a junior. I got pregnant while nursing. Another old wives' tale bites the dust. They live with their dad in Denver."

  There was no need for elaboration. The park service, though sublime in many respects, was hell on marriages. Anna was all too familiar with the forlorn photographs of shattered families.

  Accompanied by an alarming creaking noise that she hoped was the ladder-backed chair and not Joan's sacroiliac, the researcher rose. She crossed to the television, returned with the pictures and set them down amid the BIMS reports and scat sample tubes.

  "They're good-looking boys," Anna said, to make up for her evil pedophiliac thoughts.

  "Their dad was a virtual Adonis. Still is. Still knows it. Still drives the little girls wild."

  Another chapter in the same old story.

  "Ah," Anna said.

  "If I ever marry again, it'll be to a rich old hunchback with bad teeth."

  Picking up a frame, Anna studied the photo simply because she thought Joan had brought the pictures that they might be pored over and admired. "John?"

  "Luke. Though he's younger, he's the bigger boy."

  Around the eyes—brown and, because of a slight down-turn at the outer corners, sad-looking—Luke resembled his mother. In all else he had followed along the Adonis lines. "Looks a little like Rory Van Slyke," Anna said. "Looks" wasn't quite the right word. The two boys did have a surface resemblance, but it was the eyes that made them so alike, a depth of vision that boys shouldn't have. As if, during what should have been carefree childhood years, they had seen enough of life to become weary.

  "I noticed that," Joan said.

  Wistfulness permeated the words. Joan missed her sons, maybe picked the Van Slyke boy from the Earthwatch litter because he reminded her of Luke. Evidently Joan heard her own vulnerability and was shamed by it. At any rate, the moment of intimacy was over.

  "BIMS," she said overbrightly. "Never a dull moment. Let me read you one." The forms had been made up in an attempt to keep a record of every bear sighting in the park. They were filled out by visitors and park personnel alike to gather information on the activities and whereabouts of the grizzlies and their less alarming cousins, the black bears. Each form had places for writing the location of sighting, date, time, observer, color of bear, observer's activity and, the most entertaining if not always the most illuminating, the comments section where the activities of the bear were described.

  Joan shuffled through her pile of BIMS and, Anna noted, in the process managed to turn the photos of her sons so they faced away. "Here it is. Listen to this. 'Big bear. Major, mondo, hippo of a bear. Thousand to twelve hundred pounds.'"

  "Too big?"

  "By half. In Glacier, grizzlies don't reach the size they do in Alaska, where they have access to all that salmon protein. Here an average male weighs in at three-fifty or four hundred pounds, the females a little less. We get a lot of exaggerated reports. I can't say as I blame folks. When you see a bear and you're all alone in the big bad woods, they do have a tendency to double in size."

  Joan's jocularity was forced. Equilibrium was not yet reestablished. The ghosts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John still hovered over the scat bottles, Anna wondered whether the situation with the boys was intense or if it was just Joan.

  "I got a good one," she offered in the spirit of denial. She paged back till she located a form filled out in lavender ballpoint. "August fifth. No location. No time. No observer name. Species: grizzly. Age: twenty-six. Color: blond—don't know if this means the bear was twenty-six and blond, or the observer was."

  "Blond for our bears is rare."

  "That's not the rare part. This is." Anna read aloud from the "Comments" box. "'Bear activity: juggling what looked like a hedgehog. Observer activity: standing amazed.'"

  Joan laughed and the air was clear again. Tales of visitor silliness could always be counted on to bring back a sense of normalcy to park life. "Reports like that reassure me that Timothy Leary's alive and well and doing drugs with Elvis," the researcher said.

  After ten o'clock, in Joan's spare room furnished, as was every spare room in every park service house Anna had ever slept in, with peculiar oddments of furniture heavily representing the 1950s and Wal-Mart, and a closet full of backpacks, coats and sleeping bags good to ten below zero, Anna lay awake. Her book, an old well-read copy of The Wind Chill Factor, was open on her chest. Seeing the shapes of animals in the water stains on the ceiling as she used to do as a child, she contemplated the upcoming backcountry trip.

  Months had passed since she'd done anything more strenuous than sit on her posterior in an air-conditioned patrol car. The most weight she'd lifted with any regularity was a citation book and government-issue pen. In desperation, she'd joined an aerobics class at the Baptist Healthplex in Clinton, Mississippi, but she'd only gone twice. One of the requirements for inclusion in this cross-training venture had been the ability to carry a fifty-pound pack. Anna hadn't lied. She could carry fifty pounds. Just how far remained to be seen.

  She hoped she wouldn't slow everybody down. She hoped Joan wouldn't have Rory Van Slyke unwittingly bearing, along with the blood of sacrificial cows, the burden of stillborn apostles because of an uncanny likeness to long-absent sons.

  She hoped she'd see some grizzly bear cubs.

  And that the cubs' momma wouldn't see her.

  2

  Because Joan Rand was a small woman with a great brain, their packs weighed closer to forty than fifty pounds, a fact Anna knew she would be increasingly grateful for as the day wore on. The first three miles of the twelve-mile hike were fairly straight and level. The second three ascended twenty-five hundred feet in steep switchbacks. Rory's pack was somewhat heavier as befitted the younger, stronger, taller and, more to the point, junior member of the team. Twenty-five hundred feet was the ascent Anna'd used to climb twice a week from the ranger station in Guadalupe Mountains National Park to the high country. She'd been younger, stronger and taller herself in those days and still it was a bitch of a climb.

  A member of the bear team assigned to handle bears that clashed with visitors gave them a lift partway up the famous Going to the Sun Road that cut through some of the most scenic country in the park, a road made in the 1920s and '30s, when labor was cheap and so was wilderness. He dropped them off at Packers Roost, a horse and hiker staging area at the bottom of Flattop Mountain.

  Unlike some of the parks Anna'd worked, Glacier was a pristine rather than a rehabilitated wilderness. Most of the land had never been logged, mined or grazed. The trees were old growth, the land scarred only by the natural phenomena of fire, flood and avalanche. An unusual departure from this purity was the old fire road they followed to the beginning of the ascent.

  Because it had once been cut clear of trees then left to heal, it had a fairy-tale quality. A wide swath of delicate green moss grew in from the road's edges to a narrow trail kept barren by foot traffic. This living carpet was starred with tiny white star-shaped flowers. Overhead, feathery branches of fir and cedar closed out the sun. A tenuous heady perfume, found only in the mountains of the west, scented the air. With each breath, Anna was transported. As she walked she enjoyed flashbacks to the southern Cascades at Lassen Volcanic and to the tip of
the Rocky Mountains in Durango before they let go their alpine greenery and flowed into the red mesas of New Mexico.

  Those native to Montana had been complaining of an uncharacteristic heat wave that was pushing temperatures into the eighties, but Anna, having so recently fled a Mississippi August, reveled in the cool and the shade.

  Joan went first, followed by Rory. Anna took up the rear. Over the years she'd found by slowing down and dropping back a little, she could slip free of the chatter zone and enjoy the solitude of the hike. And, here, the silence.

  Nothing stirred. No birds fussed above or scratched in needles and leaves. Insects didn't buzz. Squirrels and chipmunks didn't clatter through the treetops scolding her for trespassing. She wondered if the western forests had always been so preternaturally quiet, or if her ears had merely become accustomed to the ongoing concert of life that played in the woodlands of the deep South.

  Or perhaps there was a great toothy predator that had momentarily struck dumb the lesser beasts of the forest.

  Anna waited for a titillating frisson of fear to follow the thought, but it didn't. Fire ants: now they put the fear of God into her. Not grizzlies. Rory, she could tell, was not so sanguine. On the ride up, the bear-team guy had regaled them with the story of an attack he'd worked on two summers before. Three hikers had been mauled in the Middle Fork area—the southern edge of the park.

  Joan, kindly disposed to the damaged hikers but clearly protective of the accused bear, had given her take on the events. Once or twice a year a bear mauled a visitor. Usually the person was not killed. Grizzlies, Joan told them, did not customarily attack with the idea of eating one. Grizzlies kept their cubs with them two or even three years. With the exception of humans and the great apes, they were the animals who spent the most time educating their young. They taught them how to survive, where to find springs in dry years, what plants to eat and where they grew. A female grizzly didn't bear offspring until she was six and would only have five to ten cubs in her lifetime. This made her extremely protective of them. When she perceived a threat, whether another bear or a hiker, her goal was not to eat it but to teach it the meaning of fear.

  Seldom would she charge a group of four or more people. The threat to her and hers was perceived as too great to overcome and she would run away. That was why the park suggested backpackers never hike alone.

  The bear under discussion had been surprised by two hikers, charged them, mauled them—"Couldn't be too bad," Joan said, "they walked out"—then fled up the trail and smack into unfortunate hiker number three.

  "Nobody died," Joan pointed out. "If the bear wanted them dead, they'd be dead. If the bear wanted to eat them, they'd be dragged off and eaten, their remains cached in a shallow hole and covered over for later. Ergo, the bear did not want to kill them. Ergo, the bear did not want to eat them."

  From the look on Rory's face, all he'd heard was "kill them and eat them." Since they'd been on the trail he'd been peering into the woods like a man being stalked.

  If a bear had been watching or following, there was no doubt in Anna's mind that they'd never know it was there. Because Glacier was blessed with a heavy snowpack in winter and afternoon rains throughout the short summer, it lacked the open, cathedral aspect of the woods on the eastern slope of the Sierra or the southern tip of the Cascades. In Glacier, the forest floor was thick with dead and down trees, never burned, never logged, fallen in places as thick as pick-up sticks in the child's game. Fern, huckleberry, bearberry, service berry, the shoulder-high broad-leafed thimbleberry, and a plethora of plants Anna couldn't put a name to, tangled in the cross-hatching of rotting timber.

  A bear wanting to hide would do so.

  Following her thoughts into the woods, she realized for the first time what an arduous task it was going to be fighting through the underbrush off-trail to service and reset the traps. Selfishly, she was glad they were covering the high country. Some of it would be above tree line. A good chunk was encompassed by the burn left from the 1998 fire. The going was bound to be somewhat easier.

  Lost in thought, she rounded a bend in the trail and nearly walked on the heels of Rory Van Slyke. Next to "never hike alone" on the rangers' list of safe behavior in bear country was "stay alert." So far Anna was oh-for-two.

  "Here's one," Joan was saying when Anna bumbled into the meeting. "This is one of the hair trees we've marked. This yellow diamond is what you'll be looking for." She pointed to a piece of reflective plastic that had been nailed to the tree about as high as the average person could reach with a hammer.

  "We also number them to be sure we know exactly which samples came from which tree. The numbers are behind the trunk at the bottom. We want to notice these trees but we don't want to advertise them to every hiker down the pike."

  "What's the barbed wire for?" Rory asked at the same time Anna noticed segments had been stapled to the bark in an uneven, widespread pattern.

  "That scratches them a little deeper is all. Pulls out some of the under-fur that's more likely to have a little bit of tissue clinging to it so that we can more easily get a DNA sample."

  "Doesn't that make them mad?" Rory's concern at an enraged grizzly in the neighborhood was clear on his face.

  "No," Joan reassured him. "They like it. We didn't know if they would or if they would abandon the wired trees. But they seem to actually prefer them. See the tracks?"

  Worn into the moss from the paws of many bears following the same path from the rubbing tree to the trail were two prints made larger by repeated use.

  "Cool, huh?"

  Anna agreed it was cool.

  Rory asked, "Does pepper spray really work?"

  "It's the same stuff we use in law enforcement," Anna told him. "It's made from the essence of red-hot peppers. I guess it would work on bears. Unless they've developed a taste for Mexican food. Then I think it would only serve to whet their appetites."

  Joan shot her a look that was not without humor but made it clear that tormenting Rory was not an acceptable form of entertainment. "We're not going to get ourselves into a situation where we have to find out," Joan said firmly.

  "Rory, you're an exception to the rule. Most boys love bears. I actually get fan mail because I am the Bear Lady at Glacier." Joan's voice was pleasant as ever, but it was clear that in harboring fear of bears, Rory had impugned them and the researcher's feelings were hurt. "One boy e-mails me every couple of days. He's drawing a map and has to know where the bears go to eat at any given time."

  "I like bears," Rory said defensively.

  "You will," Joan promised.

  "They would certainly like you," Anna said ominously.

  To distract the children from their squabbles, Joan made the mistake of introducing Anna to huckleberries. Arm in arm with thimbleberries and bearberries, they grew wild over much of the park. In late summer and fall, when they were at their peak, they were the favored food of bears, both black and grizzly. They consumed them by the ton as they stored up as much sugar and fat as they could for a long winter spent curled in dens at the higher elevations.

  For the next mile or so, Anna played catch-up, foraging for the delicious dark purple berries then trotting to catch up, pack slamming down on hip and knee joints that weren't nearly so forgiving as they once had been.

  Joan couldn't resist a few berries herself but took her responsibilities to her job more seriously than those to her immortal berry-loving soul.

  The Van Slyke kid had gone about his berrying with zeal till Anna gave into the temptation to muse aloud as to whether bears would find huckleberry breath an irresistible enticement. For that she earned an exasperated look from Joan Rand and Rory's share of the berries.

  When they crossed Kipp Creek, glittering over stones of vivid red, green and gold—not the murky, brown, cottonmouth creeks that prevailed in Anna's new home in the south—interest in berries gave way to interest in breathing.

  Unbeknownst to him, Rory got some of his own back. He was stronger than he loo
ked. And younger than some of Anna's towels. On the climb, much of it on an exposed southwest-facing mountainside, the sun proved its strength. After a mile Anna was hurting. Sweat poured into her eyes. Lungs pumped and burned. Breath sawed through a mouth dry from hanging open gasping for air like a landed trout.

  Periodically Joan called a rest stop in the shade offered by the occasional towering white pine. For this Anna could have kissed her feet had she not known that if she did so, she'd never get up again. During these brief respites, Anna swatted deerflies obsessed with the backs of her thighs and split her concentration between enjoying the view and hiding her physical weakness from her compatriots.

  From their ever-higher vantage points they could see seven mountains. Four, along the Continental Divide, formed a wall encircling them from west to east. Mountains, not green but blue, were still streaked with snow at the summits, and long mares' tails of water cascaded over the rocky faces in tumbles and falls tracing through stone and forest for thousands of feet.

  The canyon they labored so hard to climb out of was no exception. A ribbon of white water, now falls, now rapids, now fishing holes, appeared and disappeared as the mountain's magic act unfolded.

  Between sweating, faking fitness, and mentally promising Amy, her aerobics teacher back home, that she would attend classes religiously if she survived this hike, Anna was dimly aware they pushed through an array of wildflowers that she should be appreciating.

  By noon they reached the top. Sheered off by glacial movement, Flattop was a peculiarity among its steep-sided neighbors. To the east, the argillite cliffs of Mount Kipp in the Lewis Range rose over alpine meadows. Six miles north, the planed top of Flattop Mountain dropped away, wrinkling down into the Waterton River Valley and on to Canada.

  Once on Flattop they left the comforts of the trail and struck west through the burn, heading toward Trapper Peak. Between Flattop and Trapper's imposing flanks was a deep cut, much like the one they'd followed during their ascent, where Continental Creek carved its way down three thousand feet to McDonald Creek to empty its glacial melt. The first of the hair traps was located in a small avalanche chute above the gorge, a place made as attractive as its grander competition by several springs that ran even in the driest years.