Blood Lure (6 page)

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 out 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 already 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.

A barely audible rustle as Joan pushed herself up on her elbows sawed across Anna’s nerves with the impact of sandpaper on a sunburn. No second hand to measure it, time did not tick by but pulsed, expanding and contracting like the air in her lungs as Anna forced herself to breathe.

“Do you think—” she whispered.

A snap of wood.

“Shh.”

A growl broke the night above them and both women screamed. The growling increased in volume and moved down the length of the tent. On this circuit the bear leaned in, no longer brushing but caving the tent walls in with its weight. Formless, terrifying, Anna felt the nylon push hard against her shoulder, the side of her head.

Hands—Joan’s—fumbled over the front of her sweatshirt, closing on the cotton. “Down,” she was hissing. “Fetal position.”

Anna’s training came back to her. Play dead. Try and protect the soft white underbelly. Curling in on herself when every ounce of her being urged her to break out of this North Face sarcophagus and run, actually hurt, stomach and leg muscles trying to cramp.

The growling ebbed and flowed but remained in one direction as if the animal stood outside the front-zippered fly talking to itself, deciding whether they were to live or die.

Anna flipped through her brain looking for anything she’d done to attract the animal, to hold its attention for so long. Nothing. Under Joan’s watchful eye she and Rory had put everything that could be of any interest whatsoever to bears into the red bear-pack: lip balm, insect repellent, sunscreen, deodorant, toothpaste, virtually anything liquid and/or scented. Even if it was sealed in glass, Joan insisted it go in the bear-bag, which was hung with the food fifteen yards from camp.

The mental listing was cut off. The bear was roaring, raging. “Holy shit,” Anna said. Her own voice scared her. “Is it hurt, you think? Wounded?”

“God, I hope not,” Joan said fervently.

A blow struck the tent then and they heard nylon ripping.

“Shit,” Anna said.

“Quiet.”

Nylon tearing. Roars that cut through the dark and tore into Anna’s bowels. Joan breathing or crying on her neck. Her, gasping or sobbing on Joan’s.

Noise from without went on for what seemed like forever but was probably only half that long. Crashing. Roars. Fabric ripping. Thumps as if the bear threw or batted things from one place to another. Swooshing and flopping. Digging. Bass gutteral grunts pushed out with the sound of frenzied destruction. Impacts against tent and earth as if the beast tore at the ground.

“What in hell?” Anna whispered.

“Beats me,” Joan whispered back.

Soul splitting, a roar broke close and vicious. Blows began falling first to one side of the tent then the other. Anna felt a cut through to her right shoulder.

Blood. Now there would be the smell of blood.

The lightweight metal tent frame collapsed with a second blow and Anna felt weight slam down on the back of her neck. Habit or instinct, she threw her arm over her face and pushed down tighter around Joan.

The animal had gone mad. The deep-throated anger of nature turning on humankind. Then came crunching and a prolonged rustle. Rolling on the downed tent? Burrowing through the thin stays in the fabric? A high wild roar, a shriek in gravel and glass.

“Rory,” Joan whispered.

“Shh.”

A crack. Maybe a tent pole, maybe a peg jerked from the ground by the elasticized cord and shot into a tree.

Abruptly everything stopped. Deathlike stillness. Anna was dizzy with the quiet. The rage of the attack ended as a candle’s light is ended when the wick is pinched.

Nothing moved: not Anna, not Joan, not the bear. For what seemed a very long time, Anna waited, muscles in body and mind drawn tight, waiting for the slash of claws to rake blood from her back, the smell of an omnivore’s breath before the puncturing canines pierced skull and bone.

The crunch never came.

Fear did not diminish but increased. The fear that if she moved, even so much as an eyelash, if her pulse fluttered or her skin twitched, the narrowly averted disaster would be brought down upon them. Either Joan felt the same way or she’d fainted.

After a while Anna thought she heard the passage of a large creature a few yards away. Maybe the bear had crossed the meadow soundlessly and now pushed into the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.