Nevada Barr - Blood lure

The ninth book in the Anna Pigeon series, 2001

I needed a great deal of help with this book, help that was generously given by the staff at Waterton-Glacier National Peace Park. Special thanks must go to Dave Mihalic, my guide and inspiration, Butch Farabee, my landlord and friend, and Kate Kendall, who answered countless questions. Jack Potter, Steve Frye, Gary Moses and Larry Fredrick, I am grateful for your time, wit and expertise. Fred Van Horn, I thank for information; Barry Wollenzien and Ron Goldhirsch for showing me the park routines. Thanks also to Joan and Geoffrey for the loan of their auras, and Bob because he is Bob. Here at home I thank Dave Wetzel of the Jackson Zoo for telling me about the care and feeding of grizzly bears.

With the exception of a nine-week-old Australian shepherd puppy, sniffing and whining as if he'd discovered a treasure chest and sought a way inside, everyone was politely pretending Anna didn't stink.

Under the tutelage of Joan Rand, the biologist overseeing Glacier's groundbreaking bear DNA project, Anna had spent the morning in an activity so vile even garbage men had given her wide berth, holding their noses in awe.

Near Glacier National Park's sewage processing plant, behind an eight-foot chain-link fence sporting two electrified wires, and further protected in an aluminum shed the size of an old two-holer outhouse wrapped in six more strands of electrical fencing, lay the delights the excited black and white pup whiffed: two fifty-gallon drums filled with equal parts cows' blood and fish flotsam, heated and left to steep for two and a half months in what was referred to as the "brew shed."

Joan, apparently born without a gag reflex, had cheerfully taught Anna how to strain fish bits out with one hand while ladling red-black liquid into one-liter plastic bottles with the other.

"Fingers work best," Rand had said. "Pure research; the glamour never stops." With that, she had flashed Anna small, crooked, very white teeth in a grin that, in other circumstances, might have been contagious.

Standing now in the offices of the science lab, the puppy beginning to lick her boot laces, Anna was glad she'd not succumbed to the temptation to smile back. Had she done so, her teeth would probably be permeated with a god-awful stench that could only be described as eau decarrion,the quintessential odor of Death on a bender, the Devil's vomit.

"It wears off." A kindly woman with shoulder-length brown hair looked up from a computer console as if Anna's thoughts had been broadcast along with her smell. "It just takes awhile. Have you worked with the skunk lures yet?"

"That's for dessert," Anna replied grimly, and the woman laughed.

"That's the lure of choice. Joan says they roll and play in it like overgrown dogs. That lure is so stinky you've got to pack it in glass jars. Goes right through plastic."

Anna thought about the blood lure, the skunk. Both had been painstakingly researched, other scents tried and discarded, till those most irresistible to grizzly bears had been found. And she was going to be carrying these scents on her back into the heart of bear country in Montana 's side of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, nothing between her and the largest omnivores in the lower forty-eight but a can of pepper spray.

The puppy woofed and put portentously large paws on her shins, his black-fringed tail describing short, fat arcs. "You want to roll in me, don't you?" Anna asked. He barked again and she quashed an urge to pick him up, defile his soft new fur with her tainted hands. Turning away from the importuning brown eyes, she studied the color photocopies of Ursus horribilisthumbtacked to a long bulletin board situated over a conference table: the muscular hump between the shoulders developed, it was thought, to aid in the main function of the four-inch claws-digging. Fur was brown, tipped or grizzled with silver, earning the bear its name. Mars were rounded, plump, teddy-bear ears; teeth less sanguine, the canines an inch or so in length, well suited to their feeding habits. Grizzly bears ate carrion, plants, ground squirrels, insects and, sometimes, people.

Anna thought about that. Thought about the olfactory enticements she would carry, handle, sleep beside at night.

Stepping closer, she studied the pictures of massive heads, long jaws, paws that could topple a strong man, claws that could disembowel with case, and she felt no fear.

Members of the bear team, who monitored bear activities in the park and settled bear/visitor disputes, and the Glacier rangers routinely lamented the fact that the American people were such idiots they thought of these wildest of animals as big cuddly pets. One man had been stopped in the act of smearing ice cream on his five-year-old son's cheek in hopes of photographing a bear licking it off.

Anna was too well versed in the critter sciences to believe the animals harmless. She fell into a second and equally dangerous subspecies of idiot: those who felt a spiritual connection with the wild beasts, be they winged, furred or toothed. A sense that they would recognize in her a kindred spirit and do her no harm nullified a necessary and healthful terror of being torn apart and devoured. This delusion didn't extend to the lions of Africa. One couldn't expect them not to eat an overseas tourist; everybody enjoys an exotic dish now and again. But American lions, American bears

She laughed aloud at herself. Fortunately she wasn't fool enough to put interspecies camaraderie to the test and never would she admit any of this to anyone. Least of all Joan Rand, her keeper, trainer and companion for the nineteen days that she was cross-training on the Greater Glacier Bear DNA Project, gleaning knowledge that could be put to use to better manage wildlife in her home park, the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.

"Ah, my stinky little friend, your vacation package is ready," Joan said as she emerged from an inner sanctum. Rand was American by birth, French-Canadian by proximity, and she sounded precisely like Pepe Le Pew, the cartoon Parisian skunk, when she chose to. Anna laughed. Joan would remember Pepe. She was near Anna in years, somewhere in that fertile valley of middle age between forty-five and fifty-five.

Anna had liked Joan right off. Rand was on the short side-five-foot-two-and stocky, with the narrow shoulders of a person who couldn't carry much weight and the solid butt and thighs of somebody who could hike a Marine drill sergeant into the ground.

Anna liked the quickness of her mind and the gravelly quality of her voice. She liked her humor. But in the two days they'd lived and worked together, she'd not felt an ease of companionship. It seemed she was always looking for something to say. Mostly silences were filled with work. Those that weren't had yet to become comfortable, but Anna had hopes.

The bear researcher dropped the skunk accent, adjusted her oversized glasses and said, "Take a seat. This is Rory Van Slyke. He's our Earthwatch sherpa, general dogsbody and has promised, should a bear attack, to offer up his firm young flesh so that you and I might live to continue our important work."

Rory, the individual to whom Joan referred, smiled shyly. In her years with the National Park Service Anna had only had occasion to cross paths with the Earthwatch organization once before. Some years back, when she was a boat patrol ranger on Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, Earthwatch-an independent environmental organization funded by donations and staffed by volunteers-had been working on a moose study with the National Park Service. They had the unenviable task of hiking cross-country through the ruggedest terrain of a rugged park seeking out dead and rotting moose, counting the ticks on the carcasses, then packing out the really choice parts for further study. They did this not merely voluntarily, they paid for the privilege, suggesting that the altruism gene was not a myth. All of the Earthwatchers she'd met, including Rory Van Slyke, were young. Probably because the work they did would kill a grown-up.