by Nevada Barr
The fire of 1998 had burned slowly and exceedingly fine, consuming everything in its path. Blue-black snags clawed at the sky. Without shade, without greenery or moisture, the sun weighed as heavily on Anna's back as her pack. With every step, cinders crunched under her boots. Black dust boiled up to stick in the sweat and DEET sprayed on her legs. Despite the insecticide, horseflies, deerflies and mosquitoes followed. With only a brief window of opportunity in which to slake their thirst, they were fearless.
Despite the ash and grit, she blessed the fire that had torched ten thousand acres of America's crown jewel, taxed the Glacier superindent's courage, not to mention the Waterton superintendent's faith in the good sense of the U.S. superintendent as he watched the NPS "let burn" policy crackle toward the Canadian half of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. Waterton-Glacier was a unique and highly successful experiment. The only park of its kind, one half was in Canada, the other in the United States, with major environmental decisions and park regulations worked out jointly between the two countries.
The Canadian superintendent was less optimistic than the American superintendent when it came to letting nature burn where she would, but Glacier's superintendent stood firm. The fire had been left to burn itself out and Anna was glad. She was no great devotee of trees; they blocked one's view of the forest. And fire cleaned out the deadwood, exposed the soil to light and air, making possible the riot of life that followed fire's necessary cleansing and renewal.
Against the scorched earth, with the liquid gold of the lowering sun, a carpet of glacier lilies glowed with an electric green so intense she could remember seeing it only in the altered states of consciousness of the late sixties and the paintings of Andy Warhol.
Glacier lilies were fragile yellow blooms, smaller than a half-dollar, that hung pointed and curling petals in graceful skirts around red stamens heavy with pollen. Their leaves grew from the base, sharpened green blades as tall as the blooms. Under this glamorous show, according to Joan, they hid bulbs rich in starch. The bulbs were routinely dug by the grizzlies in late summer and early fall as they followed the huckleberries into the higher elevations. At the height of the season great swatches would be dug up, leaving areas that looked as if they'd been rototilled.
This year, the flowers were spectacular. Glacier had gotten nearly twice its normal snowfall. Snows hadn't melted above six thousand feet until July. Spring, summer and fall were happening simultaneously as plants, so lately released from their winter sleep, rushed through the stages of life to reseed before the first cold nights in September.
"Hey," Joan said, "we've got company."
Anna dragged her eyes up from where they frolicked in fields of green and gold.
On a low ridge to the north, black as everything was black from a fire that had burned hot, fast and to the bone, stood a lone hiker. Behind him was a wall of exposed stone, probably once fawn-colored but now the gray-brown of rotting teeth where the rains had imperfectly washed it free of soot and char.
It wasn't against park rules to hike off trail. Or camp off trail for that matter, though that required a special permit. It was unusual. For a man alone it was also foolish. Bears were the least of the dangers of hiking by oneself in the backcountry. The greatest were carelessness and stupidity. A slip, a fall, a badly sprained ankle or shattered kneecap, and one could die of exposure or thirst before anybody thought to begin a search.
Rory, sensing a social—and so, static—occasion, was quick to drop his pack and dig out his water bottle, a state-of-the-art model with the filter built in. Anna allowed herself a fleeting moment of envy.
"Hello," Joan called cheerily, because she was that kind of person.
A happy "hello" from a small middle-aged lady was scarcely the stuff of nightmares, but even at twenty yards, Anna could swear she saw the hiker flinch, cast a glance over his shoulder as if deciding whether or not to make a run for it. Like a hound that hears the clarion call, fatigue fell away and Anna's mind grew sharp.
"Wonder what in hell he's been up to." She wasn't aware she'd spoken out loud till she noticed Joan and Rory staring at her. "What?" she demanded.
Joan just chuckled. Few people chuckled anymore, that low burbling sound free of cynicism or judgement that ran under the surface of mirth.
Anna's attention went back to the hiker. He was walking toward them. Reluctantly, she thought. This time she kept her suspicious nature under wraps. At first she'd resented the heightened awareness that law enforcement duties forced upon her. But somewhere along the line she'd come to enjoy it, as if looking for trouble was a desirable end in itself.
The interloper was in his teens at a guess, though maybe older. His beard was nonexistent, but an accumulation of grime aged him around the mouth. He'd been in the backcountry awhile. Hazel eyes, startling under beautifully shaped brown brows and shaded by a ball cap with a dolphin embroidered above the brim, moved nervously from place to place, as if he looked beyond their tiny band to see if there were reinforcements hiding, waiting to ambush him. The pack he carried was big, too heavy for day hiking but not packed for overnight. Judging from the way the ripstop nylon bagged inward it contained neither sleeping bag nor tent. He was camped out somewhere. So why carry the frame pack? And why the haunted look?
"You're a ways from anywhere," Joan said and stuck out her hand.
After the briefest pause, he took it. Workman's hands, Anna noted, callused and scarred, the nails broken and rimed with dirt from too long between baths. Odd for a boy so young. His shirt was streaked with soot and he wore a chain wrapped twice around his waist.
"You all just out camping or what?" he asked. The question didn't seem particularly neighborly to Anna but didn't bother Joan in the least. She launched into an explanation of the Greater Glacier Bear DNA research project, the wording geared for the ears of laymen. Anna set her pack down and freed her water from a mesh side pocket. Joan was proselytizing, converting the masses to greater respect of bears. Anna tried to figure out where the boy's accent was from. Henry Higgins aside, few people could place others by their dialect, except within the broadest of areas. Americans made it more difficult by swimming around the melting pot: kindergarten in Milwaukee, third grade in San Diego, high school in Saint Louis. The south was as close as Anna could place him, anywhere from Virginia to Texas.
Out of long habit she committed his physical description to memory. He was a big kid, though not tall, around five-foot-eight, chunky without being fat. The kind of body that's a good deal stronger than one would think. Shoulders sloped away from a round handsome neck. What hair she could see poking from beneath the ball cap was silky brown with a natural wave. One day soon his face would be chiseled into classic good looks. Anna could see it in the aquiline nose and the rounded prominent chin.
She took another drink. Sat on a rock.
The boy never loosed his pack, made none of the comfortable settling-in gestures she and Rory engaged in. When Joan had done with her sales pitch, he asked her where they were going for their traps. Obligingly Joan began showing him on the topo. Anna found herself wishing she wouldn't. His interest was overly specific, having nothing to do with the project and all to do with where the three of them were going to be at any given time.
"I'm Anna Pigeon," she interrupted none too subtly. "This is Joan Rand, Rory Van Slyke." Stepping up to him, she thrust her hand out much as Joan had done. No better way to get the feel of somebody literally as well as figuratively. Despite the afternoon's heat, his palm was clammy. He was scared or had serious problems with circulation. A rank odor came off him. Not just the accumulation of unwashed body odors but something muskier, almost an animal smell. "What's your name?"
Again the flinch. "Geoffrey ... uh ... Mic-Mickleson."
"Nicholson?" Joan asked helpfully.
"Nicholson."
Now Anna knew he was up to something. "Where are you from, Geoffrey?" Had she been on the Trace, in uniform, she would have had this boy out of his car, his driver
's license in her hand quicker than a swallow can change directions in flight.
"Oh. You know. All over. I'd better be going. It's a ways back to camp." He smiled for the first time and Anna resisted the temptation to be charmed. Not only was it pretty—his straight, white teeth probably the cleanest part of him—but sparked with a hint of apology and an innocence that bordered on goodness. The smile was at odds with the rest of the package. Anna chose to ignore it.
"Be seeing you around," she said as he turned and walked back the way he had come. It sounded more like: "We'll be keeping an eye on you." Anna meant it to. Some people bore watching. She was sure this fellow was among them. She was just as sure they wouldn't be seeing him. Not if he saw them first.
Burbling notes drew her back into the present. Joan was smiling, her eyes full of altogether too much fun. "I do declare, in another minute or two you were going to frisk that boy and read him his rights. Frisking I could understand. A smile to make you lie right down and die."
Rory found a lump of charred wood to fix his attention on, evidently uncomfortable with women his mother's age—or older—having impure thoughts.
"He was so fishy I thought he was going to sprout gills and swim away," Anna defended herself.
"Aw, he was just shy."
"He was carrying a half-empty frame pack."
"Maybe he lost his day pack."
"It was too full for a day hike."
"Maybe he's a photographer, carrying cameras, tripods, film."
"Maybe," Anna said, but she didn't think so. "Why the big interest in where we were going, where we were camping?"
"Because he's a nice young man and nice young men pretend to be interested in what their elders and betters are saying. Isn't that right, Rory?"
"That's true," Rory said with such sincerity Anna wanted to laugh but didn't for fear of alienating him.
"See? Proof," Joan said.
Anna didn't say anything. She was getting entirely too crabby over the whole thing. "Are we almost there?" she asked plaintively.
3
By the time they reached the vicinity of the first hair trap, too little light and too little strength remained for anything but setting up camp.
With the departure of the sun, the mountain grew cold. The thin, dry air did not retain heat. Horseflies and deerflies took themselves off to wherever it was they went during the dark hours but the mosquitoes remained, a cloud of mindless hunger hovering over the camp.
Despite their carnivorous attendance, Anna hauled water from a startlingly beautiful creek, a ribbon of green that cut through the burn scar, sparked by a joyous multitude of mountain wildflowers. Staying clean in the backcountry was an arduous undertaking, results obtained for effort put forth seldom satisfying, but for Anna, it was a necessary if she was to maintain anything close to good cheer. Tonight's ablutions were brief as every square inch of flesh was assaulted by flying proboscises the moment it was exposed.
Too tired for culinary frills or witty conversation, the three of them ate their freeze-dried lasagna, then crawled into their sleeping bags. Rory was restless and noisy in the tent beside theirs; Anna lay next to Joan, scratching insect bites and wondering if all earthly paradises had been infiltrated by something wretched, all ointments incomplete without the requisite fly. Yet she was uniquely happy. From time and use, cloth walls and hard ground had come to symbolize a freedom that loosed her mind and soothed her soul in a way she'd never been able to duplicate between cotton sheets.
Sleep curled down and she went willingly into freefall.
The trap they tended in the morning was in as awkward a locale as nature and researchers could devise. Glacier National Park was slashed with avalanche chutes. These cuts were scoured year after year when snow grew unstable in springtime and was carried by its own prodigious weight down these natural passages. Because snow and ice cleared the chutes of larger vegetation, the rocky soil had little to bond it to the steep-sided gorges. When rain followed snow, mudslides followed avalanches.
The only plants that could survive these inhospitable conditions were fast-growing, supple and ever-renewing. From a distance the chutes appeared as paler green pleats in a mountain-green robe: nearly barren, at best knee-deep in ground cover. Up close they were head-high in a riot of color: red paintbrush, lavender fleabane, hot-pink fireweed, white cow parsnip, lacy green false hellebore, the flashy red of chokecherries, white pearls of baneberry, rich purple huckleberries, fierce yellows of butterweed and arnica. Of these, the bears enjoyed all the berries, hellebore and cow parsnip. A veritable salad bar and a perfect place for the trap.
The trap itself was marvellously low-tech. Eighty feet of barbed wire was strung from tree to tree or, in this case, tree to rock to snag to tree, fifty centimeters above the ground. Inside this ephemeral corral was a litter of rotten pieces of wood strewn haphazardly about and a single sapling twenty feet high.
"What do you think?" Joan asked.
Such was the pride in her voice, Anna dug deep to find something nice to say. "It doesn't stink," she ventured.
"That's right!" Joan said as if Anna was a very clever student. The researcher dropped her fanny onto a rock, letting the stone take the weight of her pack as she squeezed free of the shoulder straps. "The smell of the DNAmite—"
"DNAmite? You're kidding," Rory said incredulously.
"That's what we call the blood lure," Joan admitted.
"A lot more civilized than what I'd call it," Anna contributed.
"Be grateful for DNAmite," Joan said. "We've tried Runny Honey made of blood, fish and banana, and Blinkie's Demise with fish blood and fennel oil. My personal favorite, Cattle Casket Picnic in a Basket, a succulent mix of blood, cheese essence and calamus powder. Then there was one with Vick's VapoRub—Licorice Whip with blood, anise and peppermint."
"DNAmite is sounding better all the time," Anna said.
"Anyway," Joan went back to the original thought, "the smell goes off in a week or ten days. The love scent lasts somewhat less."
"The skunk in the film canister," Rory said. He too was divesting himself of his pack. Anna followed suit.
"That's right!" Joan exclaimed. Two excellent pupils in one day. "Only this one was a sweet cherry scent. Every two-week round, we change this lure. Bears are terrifically smart. It only takes them once to learn something. And they teach it to the cubs, usually in one lesson they remember for a lifetime. The bears come for the DNAmite and have a good roll but there's no food reward. We didn't want to get them habituated to traps as food sources. So next time maybe they're not so interested when they smell the blood and fish. "That's why we've got the love scent; a little something new to pique their interest. We started with beaver castor, then fennel oil, smoky bacon—a real winner—then sweet cherry and now, last round of traps, bears with jaded palates, we bring out the piece de resistance: skunk."
Free of her pack, Joan stood and shook each of her parts—feet, legs, hands, arms, trunk—like she was doing the hokeypokey. Ritual completed, she turned her attention to the trap. "The love scent's hung up high to broadcast on the breeze and to keep it out of reach so the first bear doesn't take it down—" She paused a moment, then muttered, "Harumph."
Anna laughed. She'd never heard anyone say "harumph," though she'd read it a time or two when she was working her way through the old dead English authors.
"Hung it too low," Joan said. "Heads will roll. Look. It's gone."
Anna hadn't coupled Joan Rand with the activity of rolling heads, but watching her face, she had little doubt the threat was not empty. Clearly, incompetence was not tolerated in pure research. Anna made a mental note never to screw up.
"Maybe a bear climbed up and got it," Rory offered. He'd felt the chill as well and tried to deflect the anger from the hapless hanger of scent.
"Grizzlies don't tend to climb trees," Joan said. "Not the adults. Cubs can climb some. This little tree is not big enough around to climb. No. If it had been hung properly, a bear couldn't get
it, not unless he had a fifteen-foot reach."
"Where does the hard stuff go?" Anna asked. "The DNAmite?"
Rory snorted.
"Okay, okay," Joan said. "Let's just call it the lure. Now, that wonderful catnip of bears is poured on a pile of rotting wood in the middle of the trap. Or if the middle is ocupado, as in this case," she waved at a four-foot-high piece of rock nearly obscured in the brush that choked the enclosure, "at least five feet from the wire. We don't want 'em getting the goodies without squeezing under the wire first. We save that lure for last. Pour it, then get upwind before it permanently saturates our nose hairs. Take a look at this." Joan poked at a bit of the widely scattered pieces of rotten wood. "It's everywhere. Our bears must have had a regular jamboree."
A painting, "Teddybears' Picnic," came to Anna's mind: a bucolic scene of bears depicted in human poses picnicking in the woods, indolently pursuing human entertainments. She'd always found the picture disturbing. "I was told dead bears, bears that have been skinned, look like people," she heard herself say, and wondered where the comment had sprung from.
Joan hesitated before responding. Her usually clear greenish eyes narrowed and clouded briefly. Anna got the feeling she'd been out of line but couldn't guess how.
"That's so," Joan said. "It's unsettling. Not something I'd care to look at more often than I had to." She glanced at Rory. He'd lost interest in them and washed trail mix down with water.
Anna realized what the problem was. Joan suspected her of trying to creep-out the Van Slyke boy for the sheer evil fun of it. "Oh," she said and closed her mouth to reassure the researcher that her motives were pure.
