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-areal 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.