Nevada Barr - Blood lure

Unzipped zippers didn't mean Rory was unharmed. They only indicated he'd not been dragged from his tent. Several scenarios, equally grim, presented themselves in Anna's brain. Panicked, the boy might have fled the tent. Maybe the bear did chase him when he ran. That would explain the abrupt end to the bear's attack on their tent. Anna had heard nothing to indicate Rory'd made a break for it, but then she couldn't swear she hadn't had her hands over her ears like a little kid. Rory might have been outside the tent when the bear arrived, taking a leak or whatever. If that was the case, he might have gotten away. Then again, he might have made a noise or a movement that drew the bear away from camp and down upon himself.

These alternatives to salvation-by-zipper would occur to Joan soon enough. Anna wasn't sure how she'd react. The frantic call of "Luke!" still resounded in Anna's skull bones. Motherhood was an alien world. Who could predict which forms of insanity were fostered there?

"Hot drinks," she declared, naming the universal panacea for all wilderness ills.

"Shouldn't we… We've got to…" Joan cast vaguely around for an action. Logic won. "Okay."

Glad to be doing something, Anna headed to the far side of what had been their stargazing rock and now looked unsettlingly like a sacrificial altar, to where they'd hung the bear-pack. Each step closer to the black beneath the trees drove fear up into her innards. Beyond fear: a rudimentary, gut-wrenching terror of the dark and the ravening beasts that have awaited there for tens of hundreds of thousands of years. To give in to it would be to crawl into a cave in her mind that she never wanted to visit again. Once was enough. She'd seen those cold blank walls in Mississippi when a man had beaten her nearly to death.

Narrowing her mindscape to the next few seconds and the task at hand, she forced fear to a level that didn't impede her functioning. Eyes and ears open for movement from the woods, she and Joan kept up a running patter, meaningless, to provide a level of human noise a bear- a normal bear-would find off-putting.

As she loosed the rope from the tree trunk to lower the bear-pack, a moment's panic knifed through her: a sudden vision of herself, arms laden with food, becoming an irresistible target, the shadows in the wood coalescing, the gleam of teeth, a rake of claws.

Breathing it out as if it were poison, she blew the image away and watched the red pack, colorless without the sun, separate from the greater darkness overhead and descend to the ground.

Once past the idea that the aroma of Constant Comment tea would bring certain death rushing from the trees, they began to enjoy the hot drinks working their dependable cure. The night was no less cold, the ruin of the camp no less stark, but sitting in the warmth of down bags, their backs against the solid reassurance of the rock, both Anna and Joan felt less afraid. Anna was able to let her thoughts off such a tight leash, and Joan's motherhood was being shoved back into its box by the scientist and researcher. Neither spoke of Rory Van Slyke. Until the sun rose he was in the hands of the gods. Or the belly of the beast.

"You're hurt," Joan said. "Your arm."

Anna looked down her right shoulder and remembered the pain slicing through it in the tent. In the feeble light of the setting moon it showed only as a black stain on the pale sleeve of the gray turtleneck she slept in. She'd not felt a thing since. Too much adrenaline in her system. Now that Joan called attention to it, she was aware of a burning sensation.

"It's not deep," Anna said.

"Only a flesh wound?" Joan laughed and it made Anna feel better than even the hot tea had.

The role of caretaker slipped over the researcher's own fears. She found the flashlight and shined it on Anna's arm. The jersey was torn and there was some blood. Joan set the flashlight on the rock, the beam pointed toward Anna. Pinching up the sleeve she said, "May I?"

"Tear away."

Joan tore open the sleeve over the wound. "Thanks. I've always wanted to do that. So dramatic."

Using water still warm from the stove, she washed the scratch clean. Anna watched with surprising disinterest. The events of the night left her with a detached feeling of unreality. Like shock,she warned herself and took another drink of hot sweet tea.

"You're right," Joan said. "It's not bad."

With the blood wiped away Anna could see it was shallow and only three or four inches long. Enough to break the skin and tear down a few layers but nothing more.

Obediently she held her tea in her left hand and let Joan clean the wound with peroxide, smear it with antibiotic ointment and dress it with gauze. It was the right thing to do. Bear's claws, she assumed, weren't sterile weapons. Left to herself, though, Anna might have ignored it. Lethargy: another sign of shock. Delayed onset. Bizarre. Anna drank more tea.

"I've been researching bears for twenty-one years," Joan said as she finished putting way the first-aid supplies. "Since I graduated from the University of Minnesota. Black bears, brown bears, polar bears, Kodiaks. I even petted a koala bear once, though they are not members of the family. And I've never experienced anything like this. It was like the bear was having a psychotic break."

People went insane every day. Hospitals were built all over the world to house them. Animals didn't. It went against nature. The unnatural was more frightening than murder, mayhem, flood or famine.

Anna sipped. They sat shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, both staring out over the toes of their sleeping bags at the crushed and pillaged tents. "Do bears get rabies?" Anna asked, her wound suddenly more interesting. In Guadalupe Mountains National Park, she had dealt with a rabid skunk. In Mississippi she'd had to put down an infected porcupine. When she was eleven years old, she'd seen her dad shoot a rabid dog, an Airedale that seemed nearly as big as a camel to her child-sized eyes. Rabies sickened an animal until it became vicious. The movie version of a blood-crazed creature hell-bent on human flesh was largely a myth, but such was the misery an infected animal suffered, they did become deranged.

"That's a good question," Joan replied. "I don't see why not. Their nervous systems are not so radically different from a dog's or a human's. But every time there's a bear attack, we check and I've never heard of it happening. Probably because of their size. Bats, dogs, skunks-nothing bites bears."

"This bear sounded sure-footed," Anna noted. She was thinking of the staggering gait of animals far enough gone with rabies to exhibit strange behavior patterns.

"Your arm, did he bite you or scratch you?" Joan asked suddenly.

"I was wondering when you'd think of that," Anna said. "I don't know."

"If you start frothing at the mouth, can I shoot you?"

"No gun."

"I'll be creative."

They thought about that for a while, Anna reliving remembered footage from Old Yeller."I wish we'd gotten a look at the bear," she said after a while.

"We may yet," Joan said. Put in the future instead of the past, the concept wasn't nearly so attractive.

They waited through the false dawn in silence. By half past five the light grew strong enough to again think about the boy and the bear.

Both tents were destroyed. Anna and Joan spread them out to assess the damage. The shredding was excessive for any animal not seeking a food reward. Multiple rips two and three feet in length cut down from dome to ground in seven places on Rory's tent and one on theirs.

The ground around the tents had been dug up. A stuff sack containing fencing tools was torn to pieces, the tools scattered in the grass. Rory's day pack, clothes and sleeping bag had been dragged from his tent and littered the clearing.