Blood lure

"Rory," A

A

"A

"Here." She flashed her light toward the camp and stepped out of the trees. The search was as futile as she'd feared it would be. Joan's hail gave her the impetus to give it up.

"The bear didn't take him, at least not from his tent."

Joan was so cheered by her good news A

"The zipper. Look."

A

So bleak had been A

Joan gave her a look that even in the ghost light of the moon glowed with mock scorn. "Yeah. Right."

"Right." Of course he wouldn't. Mosquitoes had disappeared around eleven when the temperature dropped below their comfort zone, but Rory would have been closed up tight, keeping the scary outside out. Thin, man-made cloth against four-inch god-made claws; an illusion, only, of safety.

Unzipped zippers didn't mean Rory was unharmed. They only indicated he'd not been dragged from his tent. Several scenarios, equally grim, presented themselves in A

These alternatives to salvation-by-zipper would occur to Joan soon enough. A

"Hot drinks," she declared, naming the universal panacea for all wilderness ills.

"Shouldn't we… We've got to…" Joan cast vaguely around for an action. Logic won. "Okay."

Glad to be doing something, A

Narrowing her mindscape to the next few seconds and the task at hand, she forced fear to a level that didn't impede her functioning. Eyes and ears open for movement from the woods, she and Joan kept up a ru

As she loosed the rope from the tree trunk to lower the bear-pack, a moment's panic knifed through her: a sudden vision of herself, arms laden with food, becoming an irresistible target, the shadows in the wood coalescing, the gleam of teeth, a rake of claws.

Breathing it out as if it were poison, she blew the image away and watched the red pack, colorless without the sun, separate from the greater darkness overhead and descend to the ground.

Once past the idea that the aroma of Constant Comment tea would bring certain death rushing from the trees, they began to enjoy the hot drinks working their dependable cure. The night was no less cold, the ruin of the camp no less stark, but sitting in the warmth of down bags, their backs against the solid reassurance of the rock, both A

"You're hurt," Joan said. "Your arm."

A

"It's not deep," A

"Only a flesh wound?" Joan laughed and it made A

The role of caretaker slipped over the researcher's own fears. She found the flashlight and shined it on A

"Tear away."

Joan tore open the sleeve over the wound. "Thanks. I've always wanted to do that. So dramatic."

Using water still warm from the stove, she washed the scratch clean. A

"You're right," Joan said. "It's not bad."

With the blood wiped away A

Obediently she held her tea in her left hand and let Joan clean the wound with peroxide, smear it with antibiotic ointment and dress it with gauze. It was the right thing to do. Bear's claws, she assumed, weren't sterile weapons. Left to herself, though, A

"I've been researching bears for twenty-one years," Joan said as she finished putting way the first-aid supplies. "Since I graduated from the University of Mi

People went insane every day. Hospitals were built all over the world to house them. Animals didn't. It went against nature. The u

A