Blood lure

"How you do?" A

"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 A

"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. A

"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. A

Just to see if any of her surmises were in the ballpark, A

"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," A

"Mom's kind of…," Rory's voice trailed off. A

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

"Les?" A

"My dad. Carolyn's my stepmother."

Had A

"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 A

A classic workaholic.

A

Personally, A

A

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 A