Blood lure

"You'd've said no," Geoffrey answered. "Everybody would have said no."

Neither A

"That bear's my property," McCaskil felt bound to pipe up. Reassured by the company of others, safe from the bear and, in a strange way, safe within his bonds from the responsibility for decision or action, William McCaskil was recovering his equilibrium. A

"Can't have pets where you'll be living for the next fifty years," she said.

A

The thought process rippled quickly through A

"Mr. McCaskil was going to sell Balthazar," Geoffrey said.

"I found a home for him, a nice ranch in British Columbia where he would roam free," McCaskil said virtuously.

"Boone and Crockett," A

"Mr. McCaskil told me that's what he was going to do," Geoffrey said. "He said I could visit Balthazar's head after it was on somebody's wall. He said that to me. That's when I took Balthazar. I wrote you from the road," he told Joan. "I've got a laptop and a cell phone back where my stuff's at."

"Does the bear-Balthazar-do whatever you say?" Rory spoke for the first time. A

"Pretty much," Geoffrey said. "My dad was Mr. Fetterman's animal curator. They got Balthazar when he was really tiny and I was about ten. We grew up together and I helped Dad train him and we'd do shows together. People liked seeing us, a bear and a little boy. After Dad died, Mr. Fetterman kept me on. I lived in his wife's old sewing room-Mrs. Fetterman had been dead a year or so before Dad went. I took over with Balthazar. He's a trained bear but he's not a pet," he warned and A

"Fucking menace," McCaskil growled. Balthazar growled back and McCaskil shut up. "How do you tell him what to do?" Rory asked. "Lots of ways. He responds to a few verbal commands.

He'll sit down and play dead to whistles. Some tricks he taught himself and just does them for fun when he's happy. He likes to juggle-kind of play catch really-with pinecones. Sometimes he just starts in to dance even when there's no music."

"I guess I'll pay closer attention to bizarre bear management reports in the future," Joan said, and A

Geoffrey went on, "For the show, Dad taught him to growl and stand tall and charge by different numbers of raps on pieces of wood. He picked the wood because the noise was natural and it would seem more real."

"We found one of your clacking sticks," A

Geoffrey looked away, fixing his eyes on the flashlight between them. "I'm sorry about that. I just wanted you to leave. Balthazar got into some kind of trap thing. A tree with wire around. It took me fifteen minutes to get him to leave. He'd got hold of a little thing that smelled like cherry candy up in the little tree and wouldn't stop playing with it, I figured it was one of those traps you'd told me about that day we met. I was afraid you'd find out somehow."

"Ah," Joan said. "And here I blamed the last team for hanging the love scent too low. Who could know?" She smiled.

Geoffrey continued with his story, "I was trying to teach Balthazar to dig lilies around there. We'd tried other places but there were other bears and they scared him. I thought if we did that-you know, to your camp-you'd be scared away."

Joan reached out. She must have thought better of touching Geoffrey because her hand stopped partway. "You can't scare away researchers by letting them know there's a subject in the neighborhood," she said.

"I didn't know that then."

Joan boiled more water. More hot drinks were made. Out of a sense of duty, A

Rory gasped audibly. McCaskil laughed. "They're going to shoot that killer bear," he said. "He'd've been better off with me. Maybe he'd've run off and lived." Geoffrey covered his face with both hands, a gesture both theatrical and genuine.

"A

A

"I'm okay with it," Rory said. Joan looked at him hard trying to see past strange shadows and high school bravado. Apparently she was satisfied.

"The woman who died was Rory's stepmother," she explained to Geoffrey.

The hands over the boy's face crawled up into his hair to become fists, strands of brown spiking out between the fingers. Whatever Micou felt floated to the surface where it could be easily seen by anyone with eyes. Perhaps growing up brother to a bear had denied him humanity's greatest defensive weapon: the lie.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." The words squeezed out through a throat full of tears.

"It's okay," the older boy said. "I've got my dad."

Fleetingly A

"Go on," A

"Go ahead with your story," Joan repeated, with more gentleness and better results.

"Balthazar and me had done your camp to scare you away. I knew you'd gone off," he said to Rory. "When Balthazar smashed your tent it rolled like a tumbleweed and we knew you weren't in it. That's why I let him play with it. We wouldn't have hurt anybody. Anyway, afterward we were both wired and shaky and ran back to the trail. I thought we should get a ways away before we hid out. We couldn't be anywhere there were people when it got light. Hide out till you guys left and we could come back for the lilies.