Nevada Barr: Blood lure

"Used to? What does he do now?" Anna asked, ready to change the subject if he brought up any touching stories of cripples or lingering illness. No sense getting to know him that well.

Rory's coarse blond hair, not yet as sweaty as Anna's, fell from underneath the brim of his ball cap. He pushed it back and she noticed how small and fine-boned his hands were. He probably fought against being perceived as delicate or wimpy. There was something in his silences that could be attributed to an attempt at toughness. "Les is a low-level number cruncher," he said with an unbecoming sneer.

Careful not to lose any, Anna brushed three hairs from a gloved fingertip into the envelope he held pinched open. "Low-level number cruncher" sounded like a quote. Anna wondered who had called Rory's dad that and why the boy had embraced the derogatory term.

"What does your mom do?" she asked, hoping for a little more enthusiasm to pass the time.

"Mom's cool," Rory said as they crabbed over half a yard to the next section of wire. "She's a lawyer."

"Trial lawyer?"

"Divorce. We live in Seattle. Carolyn's my stepmother. My real mom died when I was five. Dad married Carolyn a couple years later. She doesn't take shit off anybody."

Rory meant that as high praise indeed. Anna could tell that not taking shit was of great importance to him. At eighteen that boded ill. Refusing to "take shit" translated in Anna's experience to taking pride in the character flaws of impatience, intolerance and insecurity. Any law enforcement officer who refused to "take shit" was not doing his job. Or at least not well.

"Speaking of taking shit…" Joan came up behind them. "Got four superb samples. Come look at this one." She had tucked the vials into their padded carrying case so Anna could only assume she wanted them to follow her back to the source. Rory rose from his knees in a single fluid movement. Anna pushed belatedly up from hers, none too excited about exerting herself in the mad-dog-and-Englishman sun to go look at bear excrement.

Joan had squatted down on her heels, Rory in like posture at her elbow. Content not to toy with gravity any more than need be, Anna remained standing.

"Looky," Joan said. "This bear's been into something he oughtn't." Poking through the excreta, she turned up a couple of reddish fragments. "Paper. Maybe he got into a pack. Or an outhouse. It's illegal, but people sometimes still dump their trash down the toilets at the camps rather than carry it out. Bears go after it. Or he might have got into garbage. See this? Probably tinfoil."

Joan pondered that a moment. Anna slapped at the flies trying to skinny-dip in the sweat at her temples. "Did you read anything in the BIMS about bears in garbage, campsites, anything like that?" Joan asked Anna after a moment.

Anna hadn't.

"Ah, well," Joan said. "Could have been a backcountry outhouse the rangers haven't checked in a couple of days." She looked worried. One of her four-hundred-pound charges had misbehaved. The concern wasn't misplaced, considering what penalties humankind often extracted from other species for even the slightest infractions.

Joan stirred around in the pile some more. "These lumps, dog food or horse pellets is my guess. Bears don't have what you'd call careful digestion. Food passes through them almost in its original form sometimes. See? You can see the edge of this pellet. Hardly dulled. Grizzlies have a terrific range but it's a safe bet this fella got his ill-gotten gains here in the park. This trap is far enough from any of the borders; for it to be going through his system here, he'd've got it locally, so to speak."

Researchers lived in the details. Anna accepted this preoccupation as necessary but couldn't embrace it as her own. "Must be," she said and went back to her furgathering.

The new trap to be set up in cell sixty-four was plotted on paper just under three miles as the crow would fly from the old trap. Dismantling the traps and setting them up was the work of an hour or two. Getting their decidedly uncrowlike selves to the next destination was the time-and-energy-consuming part of the job.

Anna's body was as tired as it had been the first day out but it was settling into its wilderness mode. Aches dulled or vanished as muscles began to realize no amount of whining was going to deter her. She began thoroughly enjoying herself. On the west side of Flattop, still in the burn and away from improved trails, lakes, glaciers or much else that would recommend it to tourists, the isolation felt complete. They followed game trails where they could and scrambled over the broken serrated stone of the sheared-off mountain where they had to.

Hidden gardens occasionally appeared with such sudden and unexpected beauty they ratified Anna's belief in magic. On some of the steep and rocky hillsides, where the soil was too thin to support trees, the fire had leapt over, leaving the stony steps unburned. White and gold rocks, rimmed round with purple butterwort, Indian paintbrush and feathery yellow stonecrop, created magnificent tumbles of color in the desolate landscape.

At one such oasis, where they broke for lunch, Joan pointed out an area that had been dug up, the charred soil turned over in a rough square, eight feet on a side.

"Bears digging glacier lilies," she told them.

Glad to be free of her pack with a few minutes to do as she pleased, Anna wandered over to where the dirt was disturbed, hoping to find some good tracks. Instead of bear prints, she found boot prints and, in the dig itself, the sharp-edged marks that could only be made by a shovel.

"I think I know what our Geoff Mickleson-Nicholson was up to," she called back. Joan came to join her and Anna pointed out what she had found.

"Son of a bee," Joan said. "Somebody's sure been digging them up. No proof it's our guy."

"Hah," Anna said rudely.

"It happens," Joan said.

Anna knew that. People routinely-and illegally- supplemented their gardens by digging up rare or merely desirable plants on park lands. Though why anyone would come so far to dig the plants and go to the effort to pack them out was a mystery. There were plenty of places near the Going to the Sun Road where a reasonably stealthy individual could get all the lilies he wanted and dump them in the waiting trunk of his car.

"People are stinkers," Anna said philosophically.

"People don't know any better," Joan said charitably.

"They're just weeds," Van Slyke offered and was nonplussed by the severe looks he got from both his elders.

"Lecture, after dinner tonight," Joan forewarned him. "Be there."

She radioed the site of the disturbance and the extent of the damage to dispatch so it could be passed on to law enforcement. It crossed Anna's mind to tell her to give them the description of the young hiker they had met, but she didn't. The crime wasn't worth the investigation. And, too, Joan had liked the boy with the beatific smile. Earlier in the year, when Anna had first reported for duty on the Natchez Trace, she'd worked the murder of a child-a girl, really, sixteen. The experience had ruined her taste for making the world a little darker for any reason.

Because the burn had denuded it of trees, leaving them no way to string the wire, the second trap couldn't be put where it had been marked. Joan found a place nearby that would suffice. At the confluence of three game trails, tried and true paths through the broken country sure to be favored by bears, they strung their wire around the snags of several white pines and the branches of an alder.

A tall snag, looking as sere and crippled as a mummy's fingerbone, thrust up near one edge of the enclosure. Joan, working as carefully as if she were handling nitroglycerine, took one of the film canisters containing the skunk lure from the glass jar and perforated the hard plastic with an ice pick so the love scent could broadcast its charms.