Blood lure

Cautiously, she stepped out from the massif and looked up. Twenty yards above, something dark and lumpish, not yet a bear but, in the dull gray evening light, not entirely human either, was curled down, shoulder against a boulder three or four feet high and that much across.

The rain of pebbles stopped, and in the sudden silence A

Perhaps she could not run from bears but ru

A

There she collapsed. A furtive look back showed no pursuer. The gnarled trees were steeped now in a night that seemed to generate beneath their branches and move upward to darken the sky. Crawling into a crack in the rocks that topped the crumbly cliff face, she covered her mouth and nose with both hands to muffle her breathing. Stilling herself, she listened.

With the abdication of the sun, the wind had picked up, whistling from the valleys, complaining as it crossed the ragged rocks where she'd gone to ground. Between the breathing of the mountains and that of her own belabored lungs she was deafened. Frustration and fear tried to get her to poke her head out.

She hadn't the strength to run any farther. It was too dark to climb safely down the treacherous wall of argillite. She had nothing to defend herself with but sticks and rocks. Taking a lesson from bu

Nothing. Nothing proved nothing. She settled herself in as best she could. Haste, not comfort, had dictated her choice of hiding places. The crack into which she wedged herself was hardly large enough to hold all her parts. Definitely not large enough to hold them in any configuration that wasn't torturous. Still, she was grateful to have it and in no great hurry to venture back into the woods in search of better.

Darkness wove its imperfect cover. South-facing, the cliff collected heat from the day and, though A

She listened. She dozed. She felt sorry for herself and angry by turns. She dozed again. A crack, a snap, two pieces of wood banged together or the dream memory of a gunshot woke her. Listening only made her ears ache. She drifted. In a dream, she heard the soft padding of a huge bear outside her temporary tomb, dreamed it so close she could hear the questing whuff-whuff and smell its breath. Dog breath,she dreamed, foul and familiar.

Thirst became an overriding factor around three a.m. She'd fled without water. The run had cost her. Here and there throughout her career, A

Determined to stay in hiding till first light, she passed the hours wiggling fingers and toes and resolutely not thinking about liquids in any form. Near five o'clock the quality of darkness at the mouth of her hidey-hole began to change. Despite the dire misgivings she'd had, the sun was going to rise again and she was going to be around to see it.

Fumblingly, she found her feet and pushed to a standing position, head and shoulders above the lip of the ledge. From this rabbit's-eye viewpoint she took stock of the black and gray predawn world. No gunmen lounged nearby waiting to blow her head off. For once the wind wasn't blowing. The silence of the morning was so absolute that, had it not been for the cracking of her joints as she unfolded, she would have suspected she'd gone deaf overnight.

Nowhere was the sound of birds waking, water ru

As she realized again her thirst, a water bottle materialized. It had been there all along but in the grainy morning light she'd not noticed it. Like a mirage in the desert it stood alone and upright not ten feet from where her head stuck up out of the cliff's top. By itself, sitting on a slab of rock the wind had swept free of needles, it looked like bait in a clumsily laid trap.

She'd carried no water on her helter-skelter run down the mountain. She'd neither dropped it nor, in her haste, forgotten. While she'd slept, someone had crept close to where she was hiding and put it there. Something had visited her. Who would try and crush her with a boulder, take a shot at her, then track her to her lair to leave water? Before fear could take over, it was gone. Anyone, anything, who brought water must be a benevolent spirit. Unless the water was poisoned. Absurd. Surely it would be infinitely easier to smash her skull with a chunk of argillite while she slept than to poison water and leave it for her to find.

Having visually searched the still-empty area along the cliff top she looked again at the bottle. It was hers, taken from the pack she'd abandoned. Near the top, written in red nail polish, the most indelible of all marking substances, PIGEON was printed in block letters.

A sense of unreality swept over her. It was so strong her vision blurred and she reeled in her cramped space, her pelvic bones rapping painfully against the stone. Like a bad comic, she did a double take then rubbed her eyes with her fists. But when she looked again the apparition was still there, bizarre in its homely mundane form.

Thinking of the Lost Boys and the poisoned cake, Hansel and Gretel and gingerbread, A

Teethmarks. A