Blood Lure (2 page)

The bear researcher dropped the skunk accent, adjusted her oversized glasses and said, “Take a seat. This is Rory Van Slyke. He’s our Earthwatch sherpa, general dogsbody and has promised, should a bear attack, to offer up his firm young flesh so that you and I might live to continue our important work.”

Rory, the individual to whom Joan referred, smiled shyly. In her years with the National Park Service Anna had only had occasion to cross paths with the Earthwatch organization once before. Some years back, when she was a boat patrol ranger on Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, Earthwatch—an independent environmental organization funded by donations and staffed by volunteers—had been working on a moose study with the National Park Service. They had the unenviable task of hiking cross-country through the ruggedest terrain of a rugged park seeking out dead and rotting moose, counting the ticks on the carcasses, then packing out the really choice parts for further study. They did this not merely voluntarily, they paid for the privilege, suggesting that the altruism gene was not a myth. All of the Earthwatchers she’d met, including Rory Van Slyke, were young. Probably because the work they did would kill a grown-up.

“How you do?” Anna said mechanically.

“Well, thank you. And yourself?”

A long time had passed since anybody had bothered to finish the old-fashioned greeting formula. Evidently Rory had been raised right—or strictly.

“Fine,” she managed. The boy—young man—had a light, high voice that sounded as if it had yet to change, though he was clearly years past puberty. He didn’t look substantial enough to be much of a sherpa, but as bear bait, he’d do just fine: slight build, tender-looking skin, coarse sandy hair and dark blue eyes fringed with lashes so pale as to be virtually invisible.

“Here’s the plan.” Joan spread a topographical map on the table in front of Anna, then leaned over her shoulder to point. She, too, stank to high heaven. It was good to be a member of a group.

“We’ve gridded the park into cells eight kilometers on a side,” Joan said as she dropped a transparent plastic overlay on the topographical map, aligning it with coordinates she carried in her head. “Each cell is numbered. In every square—every cell—we’ve put a hair trap. This is not to trap the bear in toto but merely designed to ensure visiting bears leave behind samples of their hair for the study. Traps are located, near as we can make them, on the natural travel routes of the bears: mountain passes, the confluence of avalanche chutes, that sort of thing. So we’re talking some serious off-trail hiking here, bushwhacking at its whackingest. These asterisks,” she poked a blunt brown forefinger at marks made by felt marker on the overlay, “are where the last round of traps are located. They’ve been in place two weeks. The three of us will take five of the cells: numbers three-thirty-one, twenty-three, fifty-two, fifty-three and sixty-four. Here, on the central and west side of Flattop Mountain. What we’ll be doing is going into the old traps, collecting the hair, dismantling the traps and setting them up in the new locations, here.” She put another plastic overlay on top of the first, and a second set of asterisks appeared. “Or as close to these respective ‘heres’ as we can get. Mapping locations out on paper in the cozy confines of the office has very little relationship to where you can actually put them when you get out into the rocky, cliffy, shrubby old backcountry.

“Once the trap wire is strung, we pour the elixir of the gods—that’s this blood-and-fish-guts perfume you are pretending not to notice on us, Rory—into our new trap and leave for another couple of weeks. While wandering around up there we’ll also cover the Flattop Mountain Trail from below Fifty Mountain Camp to the middle of the Waterton Valley and the West Flattop Mountain Trail from the continental divide to Dixon Glacier. Bears are like us: they like to take the easy way when they can. So we’ve located and marked a number of trees along the trail system that they are particularly fond of scratching their backs on. We’ll collect hair samples from these, as well as any samples of scat we happen across.”

The lecture was for Rory. Anna had heard it before when Joan and her boss, Kate, explained the daunting task of data gathering for the DNA project, the inspiration of Kate Kendall, a researcher working jointly with the USGS—the United States Geographical Survey—and the NPS. From the hair and scat collected, the DNA of individual bears would be extracted. Modern techniques used by the lab at the University of Idaho would establish gender, species and individual identification of the animals sampled. With this information, it was hoped an accurate census of the bears could be established, as well as population trends, travel routes and patterns. This trapping system had been designed to give every single bear at Glacier an opportunity to be counted.

“We’ll be out five days,” Joan finished. “Leaving tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”

No one spoke for a moment, the three of them gazing at the map as if at any moment it would begin to divulge its secrets.

“Hey,” Joan said, breaking the silence. “Maybe we’ll see your folks, Rory.”

The young man whuffed, a small expulsion of air through the nostrils that spoke volumes, none of them good, about how he viewed the proximity of his parents. Anna looked at him from the corner of her eye. Down was gone from his cheek, recently replaced by a beard so fair it glistened rather than shadowed at the end of the day. He was seventeen or eighteen at a guess. Very possibly on his first great away-from-home adventure. And Mom and Dad found a way to horn in.

Just to see if any of her surmises were in the ballpark, Anna said, “How so your folks?” and prepared to listen with an expression that would pass for innocent with the unwary.

“Mom and Dad are camping at Fifty Mountain Camp for a week. Mom got this sudden urge to get back to nature.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Anna needled, to see what kind of response she could scare up. No sense smelling stinky if one couldn’t be a stinker.

“Mom’s kind of . . . ,” Rory’s voice trailed off. Anna didn’t detect any malice, just annoyance. “Kind of into the family thing. Sort of ‘happy campers all together.’ She knows I won’t see a lot of her, if at all. She can always amuse herself. And of course Les had to come if she came.”

Now there was malice. A pretty hefty dose of it for a lad so green in years.

“Les?” Anna prodded because it was in her nature to do so.

“My dad. Carolyn’s my stepmother.”

Had Anna for some unfathomable reason chosen to go forth and populate the earth with offspring of her own, it would have cut her to the heart to hear herself mentioned in the tones Rory used when speaking of his dad. The kinder notes, poured out upon the stepparent, would have been just so much salt in the wound.

“I doubt we’ll even see them from a distance,” Joan said. “This itsy-bitsy chunk of map I’ve been pointing at represents a whole lot of territory when you’re covering it on foot.” There was a slamming-the-iron-door quality to her dismissal of the domestic issue that made Anna suspect her of being a mother in her other life. If she had another life. In the forty-eight hours Anna had known her, Rand had worked like a woman buying off a blackmailer. It wasn’t that she lacked humor or zest, but that she pushed herself as if her sense of security was held hostage and only hard work could buy it back.

A classic workaholic.

Anna’s sister, Molly, had been one until she’d nearly died; then, at the ripe age of fifty-five, fallen in love for maybe the first time. Molly was a psychiatrist. She could tell Joan that no amount of work would suffice. But if Joan was a true workaholic, she wouldn’t have time to listen.

Personally, Anna loved workaholics. Especially when they worked for her. In a sense those laboring to save one square inch of wilderness, rescue one caddis fly larva from pollutants, were in the deepest sense public servants. And maybe, if the gods took pity and the public woke up, these rescuers would save the world, one species, one coral reef, one watershed at a time.

 

Anna’d organized a
backpack so often it took her no more time than a veteran airline pilot packing for a four-day trip. The five liters of blood and guts were secured in a hard plastic Pelican case. Rory would carry that. Anna and Joan split the rest of the equipment between them: fencing staples and hammers, vials of ethanol for scat samples, envelopes for hair, a trap log to record the salient facts of the sites, like where, precisely, in the two million acres of Glacier each four-hundred-square-foot trap was located so the next round of researchers could find it. The skunk lures, five in all, weighed next to nothing. Wool, permeated with the scent purchased from a hunting catalogue, was stuffed in film canisters and stowed in a glass jar. That went in Anna’s pack. In under two hours everything was arranged to Joan’s satisfaction.

The women spent the remainder of the evening at a scarred oak table in Joan’s dining area going over BIMS—bear incident management systems reports. Joan lived in park housing and Anna felt peculiarly at home. There was a sameness to the quarters that engendered a bizarre dreamlike déjà vu.

It wasn’t merely the prevalence of the Mission ’66 ranch-style floor plans: three bedrooms, L-shaped living area and long narrow kitchen circa 1966, the last time the NPS had gotten major funding for employee housing. It was the décor. Rangers, researchers and naturalists, from seasonal to superintendent, could be counted on to have park posters on the walls, a kachina or two on the shelves, Navajo rugs over the industrial-strength carpeting and an assortment of mismatched unbreakable plastic dishes in the kitchen.

The predictability of the surroundings had dulled Anna’s natural curiosity. Remembering now her suspicion as to her hostess’s family leanings, she took off the drugstore half-glasses she’d finally admitted to needing for close work and looked around the compact living area.

On top of the television, between a Kokopelli doll standing on an
ojo de Dios
and the skull of some large canid, were framed school portraits of two boys, either fraternal twins or very close in age. Both were stunningly beautiful, a pedophile’s dream-come-true.

Thinking of the children in those terms brought Anna up short. Dark thoughts, dire predictions, a view of the world as a dangerous and dirty place was an occupational hazard of those in law enforcement—even park rangers, whose days were spent in beautiful places populated by largely benevolent if occasionally misguided vacationers.

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, “Are 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 pedophilic 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.’”