Blood lure

Not every aggregation was fed on every day. Like everyone else, bears had their trends and preferences. This site had not been monitored since 1995. Glacier researchers prided themselves not only on the quality of their studies but on completing them in the least obtrusive ma

The observation A

Having reached the headwall of the cirque unharmed, A

Content she was alone and would not be providing anyone an afternoon snack, she put aside the glasses and slid off her rock. Fascinating as bears' lives were, she had not spent the day scratching up a mountain in search of that, but of traces of a person carrying a navy-blue stuff sack. Tracking over a stone surface, even soft argillite, was not a promising prospect. She would have to hope for luck and, if the gods were smiling, litter.

Working slowly, her attention divided between the ground and a horizon that could suddenly bloom with bears, she moved along the base of the massif. There were abundant samples of bear scat but she found nothing that looked to be fresher than two or three days. The scats were thick with the tiny fragmented exoskeletons of the moths, the only part of the insect that provided no nutrients. Joan would be disappointed, but A

The excavated ovals had been licked clean but A

A thought surfaced, so ugly it stopped her in her tracks. Bear researchers would come here. Men or women with an overweening interest in Ursus horribilis.They would be able to move through the park unremarked. They would be the ones who would wish to remain in Glacier regardless of who they'd killed because the bears were here, their work was here.

A

Had she accidentally or otherwise been photographing a Glacier bear researcher doing something for, against or to a grizzly that they oughtn't, and then was killed because of it and the telltale film stolen?

The train of thought, rattling along the track at breakneck speed, derailed suddenly, upset by the same old questions: Killed her with what? Carved her face why? And what could a researcher be doing that was so vile that an observer must die lest she tell? People could harass the bears but it was the harassers that came out the worse for wear. For a chilling moment A

Murder by bear? Could someone who knew what he was about creep into a camp at night and salt it with love scent or blood lure in hopes of enticing disaster?

Sure.

Could Rory have done it?

Easily.

Joan Rand, huddled in the night, matching A

A bear could be attracted in that ma

Because in doing what they were doing they would discover what hewas doing.

A

Like Carolyn Van Slyke was with her camera?

Like A

The wind grew a little colder, the cirque a little more isolated. A

The puzzle she'd been so assiduously working on began to deconstruct. How, if at all, did Bill McCaskil with his borrowed coat and his history of financial fraud fit into the picture? There was money in research. Where there was money there could be con men trying to get it. Those sorts of evils transpired in offices over phone lines. The perpetrators didn't actually go into the woods where the work was being done. There was no money at that end of the stick.

Thinking was getting her nowhere, and sitting motionless in the wind, she was getting cold. A

A

The magic hour was approaching. Bears sicsta'd from thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred hours, Joan had said. A