by Nevada Barr
Joan handed out latex gloves, envelopes and pens from where they were cached in her pack. Anna and Rory were set to work collecting the hair while she took scat samples from the many opportunities with which ecstatic bears had provided her.
Approximately every foot along the wire was a barb. Wearing gloves so as not to contaminate the samples, Anna carefully plucked the fur free of each barb and deposited it in its own small envelope. Rory then sealed it and wrote the date and location of the trap on the back. Using an alcohol-based disinfectant, the metal was then cleaned to remove any remaining tissue or hair cells, and they moved on to the next barb to repeat the process. When they were done collecting, the wire would be rolled up and packed out to be reused at the next trap site.
The trap they currently worked had been extremely successful. Nearly every one of the rusted points was tufted with fur. The chore was tedious. The footing uneven. The deerflies hellacious. Still Anna preferred it to the soulless air-conditioned patrol car she'd spent her days in for too many months.
"You're good at this," she said to Rory, because she was feeling generous and it was true.
Despite Mother Nature's considerable aggravations, Rory worked with a quiet diligence Anna found admirable in a boy his age. The patience he exhibited with the fussy and exacting nature of their task was admirable in a person at any age.
"My dad—Les," he corrected himself, or punished his father, "and I used to put together airplane models when I was in grade school. When he used to do stuff."
"Used to? What does he do now?" Anna asked, ready to change the subject if he brought up any touching stories of cripples or lingering illness. No sense getting to know him that well.
Rory's coarse blond hair, not yet as sweaty as Anna's, fell from underneath the brim of his ball cap. He pushed it back and she noticed how small and fine-boned his hands were. He probably fought against being perceived as delicate or wimpy. There was something in his silences that could be attributed to an attempt at toughness. "Les is a low-level number cruncher," he said with an unbecoming sneer.
Careful not to lose any, Anna brushed three hairs from a gloved fingertip into the envelope he held pinched open. "Low-level number cruncher" sounded like a quote. Anna wondered who had called Rory's dad that and why the boy had embraced the derogatory term.
"What does your mom do?" she asked, hoping for a little more enthusiasm to pass the time.
"Mom's cool," Rory said as they crabbed over half a yard to the next section of wire. "She's a lawyer."
"Trial lawyer?"
"Divorce. We live in Seattle. Carolyn's my stepmother. My real mom died when I was five. Dad married Carolyn a couple years later. She doesn't take shit off anybody."
Rory meant that as high praise indeed. Anna could tell that not taking shit was of great importance to him. At eighteen that boded ill. Refusing to "take shit" translated in Anna's experience to taking pride in the character flaws of impatience, intolerance and insecurity. Any law enforcement officer who refused to "take shit" was not doing his job. Or at least not well.
"Speaking of taking shit..." Joan came up behind them. "Got four superb samples. Come look at this one." She had tucked the vials into their padded carrying case so Anna could only assume she wanted them to follow her back to the source. Rory rose from his knees in a single fluid movement. Anna pushed belatedly up from hers, none too excited about exerting herself in the mad-dog-and-Englishman sun to go look at bear excrement.
Joan had squatted down on her heels, Rory in like posture at her elbow. Content not to toy with gravity any more than need be, Anna remained standing.
"Looky," Joan said. "This bear's been into something he oughtn't." Poking through the excreta, she turned up a couple of reddish fragments. "Paper. Maybe he got into a pack. Or an outhouse. It's illegal, but people sometimes still dump their trash down the toilets at the camps rather than carry it out. Bears go after it. Or he might have got into garbage. See this? Probably tinfoil."
Joan pondered that a moment. Anna slapped at the flies trying to skinny-dip in the sweat at her temples. "Did you read anything in the BIMS about bears in garbage, campsites, anything like that?" Joan asked Anna after a moment.
Anna hadn't.
"Ah, well," Joan said. "Could have been a backcountry outhouse the rangers haven't checked in a couple of days." She looked worried. One of her four-hundred-pound charges had misbehaved. The concern wasn't misplaced, considering what penalties humankind often extracted from other species for even the slightest infractions.
Joan stirred around in the pile some more. "These lumps, dog food or horse pellets is my guess. Bears don't have what you'd call careful digestion. Food passes through them almost in its original form sometimes. See? You can see the edge of this pellet. Hardly dulled. Grizzlies have a terrific range but it's a safe bet this fella got his ill-gotten gains here in the park. This trap is far enough from any of the borders; for it to be going through his system here, he'd've got it locally, so to speak."
Researchers lived in the details. Anna accepted this preoccupation as necessary but couldn't embrace it as her own. "Must be," she said and went back to her furgathering.
The new trap to be set up in cell sixty-four was plotted on paper just under three miles as the crow would fly from the old trap. Dismantling the traps and setting them up was the work of an hour or two. Getting their decidedly uncrowlike selves to the next destination was the time-and-energy-consuming part of the job.
Anna's body was as tired as it had been the first day out but it was settling into its wilderness mode. Aches dulled or vanished as muscles began to realize no amount of whining was going to deter her. She began thoroughly enjoying herself. On the west side of Flattop, still in the burn and away from improved trails, lakes, glaciers or much else that would recommend it to tourists, the isolation felt complete. They followed game trails where they could and scrambled over the broken serrated stone of the sheared-off mountain where they had to.
Hidden gardens occasionally appeared with such sudden and unexpected beauty they ratified Anna's belief in magic. On some of the steep and rocky hillsides, where the soil was too thin to support trees, the fire had leapt over, leaving the stony steps unburned. White and gold rocks, rimmed round with purple butterwort, Indian paintbrush and feathery yellow stonecrop, created magnificent tumbles of color in the desolate landscape.
At one such oasis, where they broke for lunch, Joan pointed out an area that had been dug up, the charred soil turned over in a rough square, eight feet on a side.
"Bears digging glacier lilies," she told them.
Glad to be free of her pack with a few minutes to do as she pleased, Anna wandered over to where the dirt was disturbed, hoping to find some good tracks. Instead of bear prints, she found boot prints and, in the dig itself, the sharp-edged marks that could only be made by a shovel.
"I think I know what our Geoff Mickleson-Nicholson was up to," she called back. Joan came to join her and Anna pointed out what she had found.
"Son of a bee," Joan said. "Somebody's sure been digging them up. No proof it's our guy."
"Hah," Anna said rudely.
"It happens," Joan said.
Anna knew that. People routinely—and illegally—supplemented their gardens by digging up rare or merely desirable plants on park lands. Though why anyone would come so far to dig the plants and go to the effort to pack them out was a mystery. There were plenty of places near the Going to the Sun Road where a reasonably stealthy individual could get all the lilies he wanted and dump them in the waiting trunk of his car.
"People are stinkers," Anna said philosophically.
"People don't know any better," Joan said charitably.
"They're just weeds," Van Slyke offered and was nonplussed by the severe looks he got from both his elders.
"Lecture, after dinner tonight," Joan forewarned him. "Be there."
She radioed the site of the disturbance and the extent of the damage to dispatch so it could be passed on to law enfo
rcement. It crossed Anna's mind to tell her to give them the description of the young hiker they had met, but she didn't. The crime wasn't worth the investigation. And, too, Joan had liked the boy with the beatific smile. Earlier in the year, when Anna had first reported for duty on the Natchez Trace, she'd worked the murder of a child—a girl, really, sixteen. The experience had ruined her taste for making the world a little darker for any reason.
Because the burn had denuded it of trees, leaving them no way to string the wire, the second trap couldn't be put where it had been marked. Joan found a place nearby that would suffice. At the confluence of three game trails, tried and true paths through the broken country sure to be favored by bears, they strung their wire around the snags of several white pines and the branches of an alder.
A tall snag, looking as sere and crippled as a mummy's fingerbone, thrust up near one edge of the enclosure. Joan, working as carefully as if she were handling nitroglycerine, took one of the film canisters containing the skunk lure from the glass jar and perforated the hard plastic with an ice pick so the love scent could broadcast its charms.
While she strung it up in the top of the snag, Anna and Rory foraged down the still-green slope of the ravine for downed wood. When they had a pile a couple feet high and twice that in diameter, they came to the moment of truth.
Desirous of proving himself on the battlefield of the thoroughly revolting, Rory volunteered to do the honors. Anna and Joan watched as he uncapped the liter bottle of blood lure and poured it over the wood. The liquid was black and thick. Out of self-preservation, Anna had forgotten how unbelievably strong and unremittingly vile the smell was. The makers of stink bombs could take a lesson from bear researchers.
The trap set, the three of them departed as quickly as they could. Rory walked beside and just behind Anna, Joan taking the lead since she was the only one who knew where they were going.
"I think I got some on my hands," Rory said.
"Oh, ish," Anna said unsympathetically. "Stay away from me."
"No. Seriously. I think I got some on me."
This time she heard the panic in his voice and stopped.
Rory's face was tight and young with fear. His eyes had gone too wide. Anna could see a narrow line of white between the pupils and the lower lids. She enjoyed tormenting young people as much as the next person, but fear, real fear, could not be ignored. "This is really bothering you, isn't it?"
He stopped beside her. He clasped his hands around the shoulder-straps of his pack to stop their shaking then let go suddenly as if afraid the taint on them would spread to his equipment. "No big deal," he said, the need to hide his fear as great as the fear itself. "I just thought if I got that smell on me . . . well, you know."
Anna could think of no way to deal with Rory's obvious terror of wild animals. She realized some of what Joan had taken for orneriness earlier had been her knee-jerk attempt to kid him out of it. At a loss, she let her sight turn inward. A picture came to mind. She had been very small. A rotten boy, Daryl Spanks, a boy terminally infected with cooties, had put them all over her tuna sandwich at the end-of-year school picnic.
Mrs. White, her first grade teacher, had not told her how silly she was being. Instead, she had taken the sandwich and painstakingly picked every single cootie off of it.
"Let's have a sniff," Anna said and shrugged out of her pack.
Rory put out his hands palms up in the universal pose of inspection. Anna sniffed both arms carefully up to the elbow. "I don't think you got any on you," she said finally. His eyes had lost their panicked glaze but he was still wound too tight for comfort.
"Just to be sure," Anna said. She dug her liquid soap from her pack, doused his arms with her drinking water and made him lather and rinse twice. Fear was a killer. Anna had seen people die of it when their wounds weren't anywhere near mortal. Rory wasn't in that kind of trouble, but fear distracted. That in itself was a danger with off-trail travel.
The second rinse completed, she conducted another sniff test. "If there was any residue, that got it. Smell."
Rory smelled his arms. The cooties were gone.
"What are you guys doing?" Joan called. She'd turned around, discovered she was alone and backtracked.
Alarm returned to Rory's face. This time it didn't take an adept to divine the cause. He didn't want his boss to know he was a weenie.
"Rory had a splinter," Anna said. "We got it out."
Rory could no more thank Anna for this face-saving lie than she could have run a four-minute mile. Instead, he offhandedly helped her on with her pack and she understood the gratitude implicit in the gesture.
They followed the rim of the canyon inhabited by Continental Creek. Though they walked always through the black and dusty shadow of the old fire, the ravine had escaped the flames. By contrast the growth in it seemed the more miraculous and verdant.
Late in the afternoon they came out of the trailless country to the improved and maintained West Flattop Trail. Travel became so carefree, had her pack been lighter, Anna would have skipped. Nothing like a little hardship to bring about appreciation of the finer things. Two hours before sunset they hiked out of the burn. Fir trees closed around the trail, breathing cool, clean air and a reassurance of peace the burned area lacked.
They camped off trail, midway between the next trap they would dismantle and the site where they hoped to set the new one.
Joan had picked a lovely place half a mile off West Flattop in a small meadow ringed with fir and pine. A stream no more than a foot wide with silky grasses growing nearly over the top of it, so tiny it did not show on the map, cut through one edge of the clearing. In the startling way of glacier-carved country, near the stream, apparently fallen from the sky, was an immense slab of gray-and-sand-streaked stone.
The beauty of the place did as much to knit the raveled sleeve of care as sleep might and they stayed up late, lying shoulder to shoulder on the rock, watching for falling stars and telling the inconsequential truths strangers thrown together in the woods often do.
There was no discrimination between male and female, old and young, they just existed, unimportant and free under the infinity of Montana's sky. Anna told them of her new sweetheart in Mississippi, a southern sheriff who moonlighted as an Episcopal priest. And who had a wife who refused to grant him a divorce. Mississippi took the sacrament of marriage seriously. There were only three reasons a person could get a divorce without his or her spouse's cooperation: adultery, felony or mental cruelty.
"I think it'd be mental cruelty to make somebody stay married to you who didn't want to," Rory said, sounding as if he spoke from experience.
Rory talked about his stepmom, telling them of this great joke she'd pulled on Les: telling everybody at a party that he had a penile implant and making cracks all evening about pumping things up.
That brought on an extended silence as Anna and Joan tried to figure nut what the funny part was. Rory seemed to need them to laugh with him but neither managed it.
Joan talked about wanting a dog and how life in the parks made that an impossibility. Had she been able to hear the loneliness underlying her wish, she probably wouldn't have told them, but with their backs on good mountain rock and their eyes full of nothing but stars, they had slipped free of the social taboos not to feel too much—and never let on if they did.
It was after midnight when they finally crawled into their sleeping bags.
Without warning, Anna's eyes were open, blind and useless in the claustrophobic dark of the tent. Something had signaled an abrupt end to sleep. A sound. Cracking. Wood on wood or a twig snapping under a heavy foot. Or hoof. Or paw. Perhaps Rory, up in the night to answer the call of nature. Though the poor boy was so afraid of critters he'd probably suffer till morning in the imagined safety of his tent. Not for the first time, Anna wondered why a young man still frightened of the monsters under his bed would pay to work in bear country.
Not yet concerned, she waited for the sound—the quality alre
ady forgotten, left in the sleep it had so rudely jerked her from—to come again, attach itself to meaning so she could call off the internal watchdogs and close her eyes.
A soft exhalation, the sigh of the wind or a ghostly child penetrated the tent wall, then brushing, gentle, the sound a soft-bristle brush would make on nylon. Anna had heard it before when furry denizens had come to visit in the night: skunks, raccoons and, once, a porcupine. The noise their coats made rubbing against fabric as they explored her campsite.
Tonight's brush was painting strokes high on the tent wall. Deer. Elk. Bear. Anna felt the first tingling along her spine as a race memory of untold millions of years of being hunted by night stirred deep in her primitive brain.
Making no noise, she reached over and touched Joan.
She woke quickly. "What—"
"Shh." Anna listened. Though she could see nothing of her tentmate and no longer touched her, she could feel Joan's tension, along with her own, charging the atmosphere inside the tent.
Shushing, susurrating sound. All around them now as if the animal circled the tent. Not once. Not to probe and, curiosity satisfied, move on. Circle after circle. No sound but the soft brushing and the periodic gusts of air, voiceless woofs. A bear. Grizzly. Black. Full grown. Shoulder touching high on the domed wall of nylon.
With each circuit, Anna's Disney-born sense of oneness with her fellows of the tooth and claw faded. It was replaced by the lurid pen-and-ink illustrations she remembered from a sensationalized account of two women killed when she was in college, both dragged from their tents, mauled, killed and fed on in Night of the Grizzlies.
She pushed her lips as close to Joan's face as a lover might and barely breathed the words, "What's it doing?"
"Don't know," Joan whispered back.
The circling stopped, as if at the thread of sound the two women spun between them. A silence followed, so absolute in the perfect darkness of the tent, Anna felt dizzy, as if she were falling into it. Her senses stretched: blind eyes trying to see through two layers of tenting, deaf ears trying to hear movement beyond the insubstantial walls.
