Blood lure

Against the wishes of both his son and Chief Ranger Ruick, Lester Van Slyke had hiked back to Flattop. He was taking up residence in his abandoned camp when A

Les was gray with the effort the twelve-mile walk had cost him-a coronary wandering around in shiny new boots. He carried an NPS radio, probably at the insistence of Harry Ruick. Other than that he seemed as ill-prepared for the rigors of camping as ever. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want to explain his persistence in remaining in the backcountry, didn't want to discuss his former wife's violent behavior. After a quarter of an hour she was glad to leave him in peace and start back the way she'd come, returning to the tiny meadow where she, Joan and Rory had first set up camp.

It was as it had been before the bear attack. New tents were pitched, not where the old had been, but on the far side of the flat rock as if Joan, or more likely Rory, had suffered an attack of superstition and decided the old pattern had to be broken. Food and other bear attractants were cached high in a tree. A different one from where Rory's stepmother's corpse had hung.

The researchers were not in evidence. A

He was further discomfited when she found the others and it fell to him to carry the heavy rolls of barbed wire and the researchers' packs to the site of the next hair trap. A

A day's hard work in rough country had put Joan in a good mood. The cobwebs left by generating reports and packaging samples for the lab were burned away.

"This trap was pretty paltry pickin's," she said. The heat from her face made her brow glisten and the top quarter of her glasses fog up. That and the alder leaves poking through her hair gave her a look of the clichéd mad scientist. "No scat. A few wisps of hair. But at least the love scent hadn't been torn down. This one must have been hung high enough." Joan babbled on happily about barbed wire, lab reports and other resource-manager-type details. A

The new hair trap was to be strung up less than half a mile from the old. Wire taut, love scent high and inviting, rotten wood piled and doused with the irresistibly vile blood lure, they finished near six that evening. The work cleansed A

In an unusual burst of intraspecies appreciation, she remembered the chipper fellow from Washington who had delighted her with his odd turn of phrase.

A

"Shall we tell her?" Buck asked.

"I think not," Joan said. "You don't know her like I do. She is exhibiting an uncharacteristic enjoyment in bipeds. It's a train of thought that would be a shame to derail so close to the station."

"Tell me what?" A

"She insists," Joan said.

" 'Boone and Crockett' are the ultimate word on trophy animals," Buck told her. "They have a whole rating system depending on the size of the animals. Well… the size of their heads. That's where the numbers come in."

"My little guy was talking about the elk dead?" A

"As he pictured him on the wall of his den," Buck confirmed.

The creepiness that had been temporarily held at bay by the advent of real work returned. Even apparent i

It wasn't until they'd been back in camp for an hour or more and been revived by an internal application of hot drinks that she spoke again and then it was of the dark subjects that had been consuming her mind.

Summarily banishing Buck and Rory simply because she did not wish to feel the impact of a stranger in the first instance and an adolescent in the second, A

"I don't know diddly about human forensic pathology," Joan warned her as they knelt like aging White Rock fairies on the edge of the stone.

"All evil is not human," A

"If not, it stems from humans," Joan said, either exposing a cynical streak A

A

Joan shoved her glasses up on her head the better to see close up and, fabric pinched delicately between gloved fingers and thumbs, she examined it in the cold and noisy light from the Coleman. After a minute of two of this she stopped, retrieved a large Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass from her day pack, said, "I wish I had my microscope," and studied the torn fabric for several minutes more.

"In my book, dust is dust is dust," she said at last and returned the navy stuff bag to A

"The yellow dust is different. I can't be a hundred percent sure but I don't think it is pollen. It looks more like scales, the weensy feathery scales you'd find on the wings of moths or butterflies."

A

"Something in the bag attracted butterflies? A lot of butterflies?" As she said it, A

"Not exactly. Above treeline we have incredible blooms of army cutworm moths June through September. The moths lay their eggs on the Great Plains and the caterpillars mature there. Then they migrate to the Rockies to feed. In the fall they go back. Lay eggs and die. There're not so many as there once were. They spray crops in Iowa, we lose moths in Montana. An argument for global environmental policies local politicians won't hear. Putting that together with the white dust, I'm guessing your bag was set down or dragged around somewhere above treeline on Mount Stimpson or Mount Cleveland or, oh, shoot, I don't know, one of them. We get aggregations of the cutworm moths from about twenty-one hundred meters in elevation up to about twenty-eight hundred meters. They like south and southwest faces." Joan took in the dark jagged ring of mountains cutting into the night sky around Flattop.