Blood lure

Chapter 3

By the time they reached the vicinity of the first hair trap, too little light and too little strength remained for anything but setting up camp.

With the departure of the sun, the mountain grew cold. The thin, dry air did not retain heat. Horseflies and deerflies took themselves off to wherever it was they went during the dark hours but the mosquitoes remained, a cloud of mindless hunger hovering over the camp.

Despite their carnivorous attendance, A

Too tired for culinary frills or witty conversation, the three of them ate their freeze-dried lasagna, then crawled into their sleeping bags. Rory was restless and noisy in the tent beside theirs; A

Sleep curled down and she went willingly into freefall.

The trap they tended in the morning was in as awkward a locale as nature and researchers could devise. Glacier National Park was slashed with avalanche chutes. These cuts were scoured year after year when snow grew unstable in springtime and was carried by its own prodigious weight down these natural passages. Because snow and ice cleared the chutes of larger vegetation, the rocky soil had little to bond it to the steep-sided gorges. When rain followed snow, mudslides followed avalanches.

The only plants that could survive these inhospitable conditions were fast-growing, supple and ever-renewing. From a distance the chutes appeared as paler green pleats in a mountain-green robe: nearly barren, at best knee-deep in ground cover. Up close they were head-high in a riot of color: red paintbrush, lavender fleabane, hot-pink fireweed, white cow parsnip, lacy green false hellebore, the flashy red of chokecherries, white pearls of baneberry, rich purple huckleberries, fierce yellows of butterweed and arnica. Of these, the bears enjoyed all the berries, hellebore and cow parsnip. A veritable salad bar and a perfect place for the trap.

The trap itself was marvellously low-tech. Eighty feet of barbed wire was strung from tree to tree or, in this case, tree to rock to snag to tree, fifty centimeters above the ground. Inside this ephemeral corral was a litter of rotten pieces of wood strewn haphazardly about and a single sapling twenty feet high.

"What do you think?" Joan asked.

Such was the pride in her voice, A

"That's right!" Joan said as if A

"DNAmite?You're kidding," Rory said incredulously.

"That's what we call the blood lure," Joan admitted.

"A lot more civilized than what I'd call it," A

"Be grateful for DNAmite," Joan said. "We've tried Ru

"DNAmite is sounding better all the time," A

"Anyway," Joan went back to the original thought, "the smell goes off in a week or ten days. The love scent lasts somewhat less."

"The skunk in the film canister," Rory said. He too was divesting himself of his pack. A

"That's right!" Joan exclaimed. Two excellent pupils in one day. "Only this one was a sweet cherry scent. Every two-week round, we change this lure. Bears are terrifically smart. It only takes them once to learn something. And they teach it to the cubs, usually in one lesson they remember for a lifetime. The bears come for the DNAmite and have a good roll but there's no food reward. We didn't want to get them habituated to traps as food sources. So next time maybe they're not so interested when they smell the blood and fish. "That's why we've got the love scent; a little something new to pique their interest. We started with beaver castor, then fe

Free of her pack, Joan stood and shook each of her parts-feet, legs, hands, arms, trunk-like she was doing the hokeypokey. Ritual completed, she turned her attention to the trap. "The love scent's hung up high to broadcast on the breeze and to keep it out of reach so the first bear doesn't take it down-" She paused a moment, then muttered, "Harumph."

A

"Hung it too low," Joan said. "Heads will roll. Look. It's gone."

A

"Maybe a bear climbed up and got it," Rory offered. He'd felt the chill as well and tried to deflect the anger from the hapless hanger of scent.

"Grizzlies don't tend to climb trees," Joan said. "Not the adults. Cubs can climb some. This little tree is not big enough around to climb. No. If it had been hung properly, a bear couldn't get it, not unless he had a fifteen-foot reach."

"Where does the hard stuff go?" A

Rory snorted.

"Okay, okay," Joan said. "Let's just call it the lure. Now, that wonderful catnip of bears is poured on a pile of rotting wood in the middle of the trap. Or if the middle is ocupado, as in this case," she waved at a four-foot-high piece of rock nearly obscured in the brush that choked the enclosure, "at least five feet from the wire. We don't want 'em getting the goodies without squeezing under the wire first. We save that lure for last. Pour it, then get upwind before it permanently saturates our nose hairs. Take a look at this." Joan poked at a bit of the widely scattered pieces of rotten wood. "It's everywhere. Our bears must have had a regular jamboree."

A painting, "Teddybears' Picnic," came to A

Joan hesitated before responding. Her usually clear greenish eyes narrowed and clouded briefly. A

"That's so," Joan said. "It's unsettling. Not something I'd care to look at more often than I had to." She glanced at Rory. He'd lost interest in them and washed trail mix down with water.

A