Blood lure

Chapter 21

John Brown, A

Dispatch notified Joan of A

Civilization, much as she'd looked forward to it, had proved a disappointment. The sense of order, safety and rationality she had fantasized 21 about had not been forthcoming. In place of safety she'd found dullness and isolation. Order and rationality had consisted of scribbling the crazy parts down on report forms and filing them, imposing not order, but an appearance of order. People so desperately needed an illusion of control to give them courage to get up in the morning.

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Unfortunately, this cultivated mind-set was only half useful. It was good to see what was. But it was her job to figure out what it meant. She had failed at her job. That others had failed too was of little comfort.

Heading into the wilderness with thoughts such as these muting her senses, she found she was disappointed in the out-of-doors as well. The realization was so alarming she stopped walking and stood in the heat of the sun. She'd grown disenchanted with the natural world because it had been behaving in what seemed an u

This way madness lies,she thought and took some time to realign her brain. For twenty minutes she stood sweating in the heat of the switchback noting only the breezes, the color of thimbleberry, the feather-light scratch of needles against the sky. Finally, having found her way back into her own skin, she walked on with a lighter load. Expectations abandoned, now whatever occurred, however strange, would be as nature intended. Everything would make sense. That she could not see the pattern was a fault within herself, not an aberration within the natural world.

Joan and Rory were waiting for her at Fifty Mountain Camp. They looked and smelled as if they'd been in the bush for three days and A

"Are you going to college, Rory?" she asked abruptly in the midst of their reunion.

"What? Yes, next year," he replied as the questions soaked in.

"University of Washington in Seattle?" she demanded.

"No. I'm going to school in Spokane. I got the grades to get in."

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"If Rory's future is settled to your satisfaction, perhaps we might go?" Joan said and smiled with her lovely crooked teeth. Her exceedingly round cheeks pushed her glasses up.

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"I'm glad you're back," Joan said as Rory helped her on with her pack. "We've been needing a treat."

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The previous day Joan and Rory had dismantled a hair trap beyond the burn area to the south at a confluence of two avalanche chutes. The barbed wire was rolled and the samples secured. Rory took the hard-sided case with the blood lure and the love potion. Joan had the samples from the last two traps. Flattered to be welcomed and glad, after so long spi

Enough daylight remained that they could hike to within striking distance of where the new hair trap was to be and set up camp. Joan in the lead, they set off northward across an expanse of glorious green meadow littered with immense squared boulders. Wildflowers, late blooming because winter had held on overlong, spangled the grasses and occasionally a rare pond, tiny, midnight blue and seemingly as deep as an ocean, gleamed darkly in the undulations left by a retreating glacier.

Rory, healed by the good mountain air or exposure to Joan Rand's idiosyncratic brand of sanity, followed Joan, chattering away like a healthy teenager.

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Beyond the meadow the trail dropped off steeply, leading down into the valley that would eventually widen out to hold the splendor of Waterton Lake. The first mile was of switchbacks carved through rock. As it descended, the foliage thickened. Trees grew taller and mountainsides of ripe huckleberries slid away in old avalanche chutes above and below the trail.

"Great bear country this time of year," Joan hollered back. "They come for the huckleberries. So make a joyful noise. We don't want to startle anybody." Joan acted on her own direction by belting out the first line of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in ascratchy alto.

The light, gold with late afternoon, drenched hillsides shoulder-deep in wildflowers of every hue, pushing out from cracks in the rocks. They hiked and they sang and A

As they crossed a wide, flat shank of hill, the trail a narrow ribbon carved from the slope with pick and shovel, Joan pointed out where they would go in the morning to set up the next trap. There was no break in the ragged alder skirting. When they left the trail they would fight their way up an avalanche chute to where it converged with another, smaller chute on what Joan promised was a flattish spot.