The trap itself was marvelously 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
pièce de résistance
: 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.
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 enforcement. 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.