Nevada Barr: Blood lure

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, Anna dug deep to find something nice to say. "It doesn't stink," she ventured.

"That's right!" Joan said as if Anna was a very clever student. The researcher dropped her fanny onto a rock, letting the stone take the weight of her pack as she squeezed free of the shoulder straps. "The smell of the DNAmite-"

"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," Anna contributed.

"Be grateful for DNAmite," Joan said. "We've tried Runny Honey made of blood, fish and banana, and Blinkie's Demise with fish blood and fennel oil. My personal favorite, Cattle Casket Picnic in a Basket, a succulent mix of blood, cheese essence and calamus powder. Then there was one with Vick's VapoRub-Licorice Whip with blood, anise and peppermint."

"DNAmite is sounding better all the time," Anna said.

"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. Anna followed suit.

"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 fennel oil, smoky bacon-areal winner-then sweet cherry and now, last round of traps, bears with jaded palates, we bring out the piece de resistance:skunk."

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."

Anna laughed. She'd never heard anyone say "harumph," though she'd read it a time or two when she was working her way through the old dead English authors.

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

Anna hadn't coupled Joan Rand with the activity of rolling heads, but watching her face, she had little doubt the threat was not empty. Clearly, incompetence was not tolerated in pure research. Anna made a mental note never to screw up.

"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?" Anna asked. "The DNAmite?"

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 Anna's mind: a bucolic scene of bears depicted in human poses picnicking in the woods, indolently pursuing human entertainments. She'd always found the picture disturbing. "I was told dead bears, bears that have been skinned, look like people," she heard herself say, and wondered where the comment had sprung from.

Joan hesitated before responding. Her usually clear greenish eyes narrowed and clouded briefly. Anna got the feeling she'd been out of line but couldn't guess how.

"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.

Anna realized what the problem was. Joan suspected her of trying to creep-out the Van Slyke boy for the sheer evil fun of it. "Oh," she said and closed her mouth to reassure the researcher that her motives were pure.

Joan handed out latex gloves, envelopes and pens from where they were cached in her pack. Anna and Rory were set to work collecting the hair while she took scat samples from the many opportunities with which ecstatic bears had provided her.

Approximately every foot along the wire was a barb. Wearing gloves so as not to contaminate the samples, Anna carefully plucked the fur free of each barb and deposited it in its own small envelope. Rory then sealed it and wrote the date and location of the trap on the back. Using an alcohol-based disinfectant, the metal was then cleaned to remove any remaining tissue or hair cells, and they moved on to the next barb to repeat the process. When they were done collecting, the wire would be rolled up and packed out to be reused at the next trap site.

The trap they currently worked had been extremely successful. Nearly every one of the rusted points was tufted with fur. The chore was tedious. The footing uneven. The deerflies hellacious. Still Anna preferred it to the soulless air-conditioned patrol car she'd spent her days in for too many months.

"You're good at this," she said to Rory, because she was feeling generous and it was true.

Despite Mother Nature's considerable aggravations, Rory worked with a quiet diligence Anna found admirable in a boy his age. The patience he exhibited with the fussy and exacting nature of their task was admirable in a person at any age.

"My dad-Les," he corrected himself, or punished his father, "and I used to put together airplane models when I was in grade school. When he used to do stuff."