Nevada Barr: Blood lure

A member of the bear team assigned to handle bears that clashed with visitors gave them a lift partway up the famous Going to the Sun Road that cut through some of the most scenic country in the park, a road made in the 1920s and '30s, when labor was cheap and so was wilderness. He dropped them off at Packers Roost, a horse and hiker staging area at the bottom of Flattop Mountain.

Unlike some of the parks Anna'd worked, Glacier was a pristine rather than a rehabilitated wilderness. Most of the land had never been logged, mined or grazed. The trees were old growth, the land scarred only by the natural phenomena of fire, flood and avalanche. An unusual departure from this purity was the old fire road they followed to the beginning of the ascent.

Because it had once been cut clear of trees then left to heal, it had a fairy-tale quality. A wide swath of delicate green moss grew in from the road's edges to a narrow trail kept barren by foot traffic. This living carpet was starred with tiny white star-shaped flowers. Overhead, feathery branches of fir and cedar closed out the sun. A tenuous heady perfume, found only in the mountains of the west, scented the air. With each breath, Anna was transported. As she walked she enjoyed flashbacks to the southern Cascades at Lassen Volcanic and to the tip of the Rocky Mountains in Durango before they let go their alpine greenery and flowed into the red mesas of New Mexico.

Those native to Montana had been complaining of an uncharacteristic heat wave that was pushing temperatures into the eighties, but Anna, having so recently fled a Mississippi August, reveled in the cool and the shade.

Joan went first, followed by Rory. Anna took up the rear. Over the years she'd found by slowing down and dropping back a little, she could slip free of the chatter zone and enjoy the solitude of the hike. And, here, the silence.

Nothing stirred. No birds fussed above or scratched in needles and leaves. Insects didn't buzz. Squirrels and chipmunks didn't clatter through the treetops scolding her for trespassing. She wondered if the western forests had always been so preternaturally quiet, or if her ears had merely become accustomed to the ongoing concert of life that played in the woodlands of the deep South.

Or perhaps there was a great toothy predator that had momentarily struck dumb the lesser beasts of the forest.

Anna waited for a titillating frisson of fear to follow the thought, but it didn't. Fire ants: now they put the fear of God into her. Not grizzlies. Rory, she could tell, was not so sanguine. On the ride up, the bear-team guy had regaled them with the story of an attack he'd worked on two summers before. Three hikers had been mauled in the Middle Fork area-the southern edge of the park.

Joan, kindly disposed to the damaged hikers but clearly protective of the accused bear, had given her take on the events. Once or twice a year a bear mauled a visitor. Usually the person was not killed. Grizzlies, Joan told them, did not customarily attack with the idea of eating one. Grizzlies kept their cubs with them two or even three years. With the exception of humans and the great apes, they were the animals who spent the most time educating their young. They taught them how to survive, where to find springs in dry years, what plants to eat and where they grew. A female grizzly didn't bear offspring until she was six and would only have five to ten cubs in her lifetime. This made her extremely protective of them. When she perceived a threat, whether another bear or a hiker, her goal was not to eat it but to teach it the meaning of fear.

Seldom would she charge a group of four or more people. The threat to her and hers was perceived as too great to overcome and she would run away. That was why the park suggested backpackers never hike alone.

The bear under discussion had been surprised by two hikers, charged them, mauled them-"Couldn't be too bad," Joan said, "they walked out"-then fled up the trail and smack into unfortunate hiker number three.

"Nobody died," Joan pointed out. "If the bear wanted them dead, they'd be dead. If the bear wanted to eat them, they'd be dragged off and eaten, their remains cached in a shallow hole and covered over for later. Ergo,the bear did not want to kill them. Ergo, the bear did not want to eat them."

From the look on Rory's face, all he'd heard was "kill them and eat them." Since they'd been on the trail he'd been peering into the woods like a man being stalked.

If a bear had been watching or following, there was no doubt in Anna's mind that they'd never know it was there. Because Glacier was blessed with a heavy snowpack in winter and afternoon rains throughout the short summer, it lacked the open, cathedral aspect of the woods on the eastern slope of the Sierra or the southern tip of the Cascades. In Glacier, the forest floor was thick with dead and down trees, never burned, never logged, fallen in places as thick as pick-up sticks in the child's game. Fern, huckleberry, bearberry, service berry, the shoulder-high broad-leafed thimbleberry, and a plethora of plants Anna couldn't put a name to, tangled in the cross-hatching of rotting timber.

A bear wanting to hide would do so.

Following her thoughts into the woods, she realized for the first time what an arduous task it was going to be fighting through the underbrush off-trail to service and reset the traps. Selfishly, she was glad they were covering the high country. Some of it would be above tree line. A good chunk was encompassed by the burn left from the 1998 fire. The going was bound to be somewhat easier.

Lost in thought, she rounded a bend in the trail and nearly walked on the heels of Rory Van Slyke. Next to "never hike alone" on the rangers' list of safe behavior in bear country was "stay alert." So far Anna was oh-for-two.

"Here's one," Joan was saying when Anna bumbled into the meeting. "This is one of the hair trees we've marked. This yellow diamond is what you'll be looking for." She pointed to a piece of reflective plastic that had been nailed to the tree about as high as the average person could reach with a hammer.

"We also number them to be sure we know exactly which samples came from which tree. The numbers are behind the trunk at the bottom. We want to notice these trees but we don't want to advertise them to every hiker down the pike."

"What's the barbed wire for?" Rory asked at the same time Anna noticed segments had been stapled to the bark in an uneven, widespread pattern.

"That scratches them a little deeper is all. Pulls out some of the under-fur that's more likely to have a little bit of tissue clinging to it so that we can more easily get a DNA sample."

"Doesn't that make them mad?" Rory's concern at an enraged grizzly in the neighborhood was clear on his face.

"No," Joan reassured him. "They like it. We didn't know if they would or if they would abandon the wired trees. But they seem to actually prefer them. See the tracks?"

Worn into the moss from the paws of many bears following the same path from the rubbing tree to the trail were two prints made larger by repeated use.

"Cool, huh?"

Anna agreed it was cool.

Rory asked, "Does pepper spray really work?"

"It's the same stuff we use in law enforcement," Anna told him. "It's made from the essence of red-hot peppers. I guess it would work on bears. Unless they've developed a taste for Mexican food. Then I think it would only serve to whet their appetites."

Joan shot her a look that was not without humor but made it clear that tormenting Rory was not an acceptable form of entertainment. "We're not going to get ourselves into a situation where we have to find out," Joan said firmly.

"Rory, you're an exception to the rule. Most boys love bears. I actually get fan mail because I am the Bear Lady at Glacier." Joan's voice was pleasant as ever, but it was clear that in harboring fear of bears, Rory had impugned them and the researcher's feelings were hurt. "One boy e-mails me every couple of days. He's drawing a map and has to know where the bears go to eat at any given time."