Blood lure

Chapter 4

Luke!" Joan screamed the name of her younger son, the one who bore such a striking resemblance to the Van Slyke boy. Dropping the flashlight, she fell to her knees and began digging frantically through the collapsed tent, clutching at the lumps of his pack and boots as if they were severed parts from his torn body. The courage and control she'd exhibited when the danger was merely to herself were gone. She was reacting as a panicked mother might.

"Joan," Anna said, then more sharply: "Joan!" The researcher was beyond the reach of human voice. Anna waded into the mess of fabric and aluminum tubing, knelt and grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her tight, pinning her arms to her sides. For an instant she thought Joan was going to fight but the solid reality of the embrace brought her down from panic. She tried to get up. "Stay," Anna commanded.

"The bear must have dragged him out, taken him into the woods," Joan said. She sounded stunned, incredulous, but no longer out of control. Anna let go of her shoulders but kept a firm grip on her hands. Joan fell back and they sat face to face, knee to knee on Rory's tent.

"Maybe not," Anna said. She'd been hoping for calmness, rationality, but her voice shook, tremulous and childlike. "Do bears do that?" she had to ask, Night of the Grizzliesnotwithstanding.

"Not often," Joan said. "Rarely. Almost never." She was reassuring herself. Anna let her.

A quick glance at her watch told her it was at least three hours till dawn. The faint light of the clearing, seemingly so bright after the inside of the tent, would not penetrate the thick canopy of forest. Had the bear dragged Rory into the woods to feed on, there was a chance the boy was still alive.

An even better chance he wouldn't stay that way long.

Pursuing a grizzly into the forest in the dark, a grizzly already enraged by something and now, perhaps, with food in the form of Rory Van Slyke to defend, was the rankest madness. If the bear took the boy, they would most likely find his corpse half eaten and buried in a shallow grave raked out of the duff. If they found him at all.

Not going after Rory was going to be one of the hardest things Anna had ever done. Because, if he was still alive and they could find him, there was a chance-always a chance- that they could frighten the bear away before it killed him.

Crazy to try and save him.

"Stay here," Anna said, retrieving the flashlight from where Joan had dropped it. "It's too dark to find anything, but I can check the edges for-for anything obvious."

"I'm not staying."

Anna could delude herself sufficiently to put her own life at risk but not so completely she could endanger anybody else.

"You've got to," she said. "If Rory ran off, then comes back and we're both gone, he'll freak. You know he will."

"If Rory ran, the bear would have chased him," Joan said stubbornly. "That's what they do."

Anna couldn't remain still any longer. "You'll stay?"

"I'll stay."

"I'm not going far. Not out of earshot."

Cold and cutting, a new wave of fear met Anna at the edge of the clearing. Standing beside the tiny stream, moonlight silver on the grass, the music of water over stones in her ears, she stared into the ragged, unremitting night beneath the fir trees and she could not move.

Since she was a child Anna had felt a kinship with animals. She'd never been afraid of them. As she grew, she came to respect their ways and not tread on their taboos, putting them and herself in danger. The animal that had circled their tent, ravaged their camp, was different. Though it went against logic she felt, on a level too deep to argue with, that it had been toying with them. The circling and circling, the sudden rage, the fury of the violence, the abrupt cessation, as if a malevolent plan were behind it.

Walt Disney lied. It was the Brothers Grimm who had the right idea: witches baked little girls, stepmothers poisoned them, bears ate them.

"Get a grip," she whispered, dizzy with the nightmare she'd just dreamed. "A bear's a bear's a bear." It crossed her mind that by demonizing the animal, she might just be seeking an excuse not to step across the stream into the woods.

"Make noise." Joan's shout woke Anna to her responsibilities.

"Right," she called back. The objective was not to sneak up on the bear but to frighten it away should it still be in the vicinity.

"Rory," Anna called and, "Hey, bear," indiscriminately as she pushed under the draping branches of the first fir. Between cries she listened. There'd been no special reason she'd entered the woods at this point. In darkness, if the bear had left any mark of its passage over the meadow, she'd not seen it. She just had to start somewhere.

Anna had been working wilderness parks for many years but held no illusions about her own powers. Better outdoorsmen than herself, without compass or a view of the stars or horizon, would get lost in these woods at night. Keeping the clearing in sight on her left, she worked her way around the edge of the meadow. A complete circuit revealed nothing. It was too damn dark.

"Anna," Joan called.

"Here." She flashed her light toward the camp and stepped out of the trees. The search was as futile as she'd feared it would be. Joan's hail gave her the impetus to give it up.

"The bear didn't take him, at least not from his tent."

Joan was so cheered by her good news Anna hesitated but had to ask. "What makes you think that?"

"The zipper. Look."

Anna crossed the small clearing. Joan held up the tattered remnants of Rory's tent and rain fly. "Both unzipped. Bears don't do zippers. No thumbs. No patience." She laughed, the burden of the boy's life lifted from her. At least for the moment.

So bleak had been Anna's thoughts, she resisted the optimism as she might a trap. "Rory could have been sleeping with them open," she said.

Joan gave her a look that even in the ghost light of the moon glowed with mock scorn. "Yeah. Right."

"Right." Of course he wouldn't. Mosquitoes had disappeared around eleven when the temperature dropped below their comfort zone, but Rory would have been closed up tight, keeping the scary outside out. Thin, man-made cloth against four-inch god-made claws; an illusion, only, of safety.

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.

Having gathered what they could find of the young Earthwatcher's belongings, they took inventory: the clothes he'd worn the previous day, his boots, baseball cap, three and a half pairs of socks, four of underpants, shorts, T-shirts, tennis shoes, water bottle. Everything he would logically have carried was accounted for. The only items missing were the sweat pants and shirt and a pair of soft flat-soled black slippers, the kind for sale in any Chinatown, that he'd worn the night before.

If he had escaped the bear, the wilderness could kill him if they didn't find him fairly soon. Dressed in pajamas and slippers and without food, the nights in the fifties, he would have a rough time of it. Had they been in the desert, his time would be even shorter. Glacier's high country had water. If he was lucky and didn't panic, he wouldn't die of thirst.

Joan radioed park dispatch. In short, efficient sentences she gave them the information they'd need to plan the search for Rory Van Slyke. Radio traffic built in volume as one ranger after another was dragged out of bed by the phone and called in service over the radio. Come sunup, the search was park business as usual. Anna and Joan would begin from the campsite. Six members of the bear team from the frontcountry would start in on horseback. The ranger stationed at the backcountry cabin halfway down to Waterton Lake would head up their direction.

Given the night's events, odds were good Rory was either dead or would be found close to camp in fairly short order. The machinery was set in motion because if he was truly lost or alive and injured, time was the single most important commodity they had to offer.

By six-thirty it was light enough to track. Anna had little confidence in her abilities in lush woodland; the bulk of her experience had been in the desert. But their quarry weighed an estimated four hundred pounds. That would help. Joan Rand was not an experienced tracker in a general sense, but she had been following bears by track and spoor most of her adult life.

In the clear gray light, unencumbered as yet by the shadows of the rising sun, the two women stood by the rock, day packs full of food, water and first-aid supplies.

"There." Joan pointed southwest.

"I see it." Faint elongated depressions, which would vanish as soon as the sun's heat reached the dew, formed an irregular line in the grass between the circle of trees and where they'd packed up the scrapped tents; the bear traveling through high grass.

Moving slowly, one to either side of the ephemeral trail, they walked, eyes to the ground.

"No scat," Joan said.

"Is that odd?"

"Everything about this bear is odd. Pooping-" Anna found comfort in the silly non-scientific word. "-is one of the ways bears let you know they've staked a claim. Often at sights of severe maulings, especially if the bear has fed on the victim, you find a big pile of poop. We solved a bear murder case three years ago. Got DNA samples from the poop and, lo and behold, they matched up with hair samples we'd taken the year before from another bear/human interface. So we knew we had the right bears and weren't just killing them to make the victim's family happy."

"Bears plural?" Anna asked. Could there have been more than one bear in their campsite last night?

"Mother and two two-year-old cubs. We had to kill them all. They had all partaken of the feast." Joan seemed to remember that maybe this time Rory Van Slyke and not some nameless stranger was the main course. She shook her head as if ridding herself of bad thoughts. "Anyway, I thought our bear might have left a mark, is all."

Not conversant with how grizzlies left their calling cards, Anna said nothing.

Items from Rory's tent were dropped along the way as if flung aside by a spoiled child. "Flashlight," Joan said, stooping to pluck the named item out of the grass. She held it up to the first rays of the rising sun. "Teethmarks."

"The bear took a flashlight?" Anna asked stupidly.

"I doubt it."

A bear wouldn't take it, wouldn't carry it. Rory would. The bear would have taken it from Rory. Maybe as the boy batted at him with it. Anna took the plastic cylinder from Joan's hands to see the marks for herself. "No blood," she observed. "That's good news, I guess." The optimism was forced. There wouldn't necessarily be blood. Not at first. She dropped the flashlight back in the grass. There'd be time to police the clearing later. As it fell, a tiny sound escaped Joan's lips as if this tossing aside of Rory's possession was in some way a slight to Rory himself.

In the morning light the woods weren't nearly as formidable as they had been the night before. At the higher elevations the undergrowth wasn't as dense. Trees were tall and widely spaced, the ground between waist-deep in fern.

Hope of tracking the bear or the boy was quickly laid to rest. No scat, no hair, no blood; the big animal had slipped invisibly into its element like Br'er Rabbit into his briar patch. Likewise had Rory Van Slyke disappeared, either carried in the bear's jaws or of his own volition, the soft, slick soles of his Chinese slippers leaving no trace.

Anna did find a peculiar bit of wood, a two-by-two of mahogany or cherry about ten inches long and polished until the edges were rounded. Because it showed no signs of weathering she knew it had come from Rory's tent. No teethmarks scarred the surface, so it was a good guess the bear hadn't carted it into the forest. What it was or why Rory needed to tote it with him on research treks or when fleeing from, or being abducted by, enormous omnivores, Anna hadn't a clue.

They spent two hours searching the woods around the camp. Calling Rory's name repeatedly they hoped to scare off the bear if it was still nearby, or scare up a response from a lost or injured boy.

Their homemade racket was assisted by the almost constant commentary from Joan's radio. The usual business of the park went on: an illegally parked horse trailer on the north side, a rockslide east of the weeping wall, but most of the talk regarded the search.

The number one-oh-two came up repeatedly. "District ranger?" Anna asked.

"Chief and, till we get a new one, acting superintendent."

Since her promotion and move to Mississippi, district ranger was the position Anna held. As was true in many middle management jobs, district rangers had tremendous responsibilities. It was they who were called upon to search, to rescue, to handle law enforcement situations beyond the field rangers' capabilities. Though they were the ultimate authority available when the chips were down or the proverbial shit hit the fan, they had very little authority in the greater NPS hierarchy. The first hint of real power was reserved for the chief rangers.

"He any good?" Anna asked.

"Harry Ruick? He's good," Joan said. "Sides with the bears when the public isn't clamoring."

"And when they are?"

"Pours experts on them."

"Does he usually go out on searches?" Some chiefs stayed active in the field, but more often than not they didn't. Several times a year they'd make some sort of publicized trek of the brass into the backwoods for management reasons but, particularly in the bigger parks, chief ranger had become an administrative position.

"Not usually," Joan admitted.

The search wasn't three hours old and already the big guns were rolling out. Harry Ruick was guessing Van Slyke was dead.

By eight o'clock a light rain began to fall. August's warmth was co-opted by weather and altitude. It had yet to reach sixty degrees. The low ceiling of clouds would keep out any assistance by air. Rain was light and the wind calm, but visibility on Flattop had dwindled to nothing.

Joan radioed Ruick, who headed up the team, and told him they had nothing. He advised them to eat, rest, stay warm and meet the team on West Flattop Trail around noon, when horses and searchers should be arriving.

"Rory's father and stepmother are camped at Fifty Mountain," Joan said into the radio. "Has anybody been sent to inform them?"

"We'll work on it," Ruick promised and Joan left it at that.

They followed directions, eating as much as they could, resting, then hiking down to the trail. The day shared its misery, cool and rainy: warm enough that rain gear left one overheated and sweating, cold enough to give a severe chill if one got thoroughly wet. A day without a whole hell of a lot to recommend it, as far as Anna was concerned.

Shortly before noon they met up with the search party and led them the three quarters of a mile back to their camp.

Ruick hadn't wasted his time in the saddle. On the ride up he'd worked out the search area and the pattern to be used. The area around the clearing from where Rory'd disappeared was divided into quadrants. The search pattern, Anna noticed, was tight and intense. Ruick was looking for a body or an injured person, not a young man still able to cover any amount of territory.

Anna and Joan went with the chief ranger on the section west toward Trapper Peak and south to the precipitous descent into McDonald Creek. As often as not, park higher-ups went soft. Some went down this road out of laziness; even more did so because in their mountain-climbing, water-rafting youth, they'd trashed knee and ankle joints. Like aging football players, they found themselves stove in and going to fat in their middling years. By midafternoon Anna was wishing one of those fates had befallen Harry Ruick. He was no wunderkindrocketed up to the exalted rank of chief while still a lad; Anna put him in his early fifties. His dark hair was grizzled, and through the open neck of his uniform shirt, it looked as if the thick pelt on his chest had gone completely white. He wasn't a tall man, but built, as Anna's father might have said when waxing uncouth, like a brick shit house: squat, thick and rock-hard.

Ruick set a brutal pace and showed Anna and Joan the compliment of never doubting they could match it. Unencumbered by weight-they carried little but their own drinking water-they did.

Drizzle turned to rain and back to drizzle half a dozen times. The three of them ran rivers of sweat. Rain gear was pulled off and stuffed in packs. Rain washed sweat away and water streamed off their faces and arms. The woods dripped, their silence moving from mysterious to oppressive. Ruick led them down ragged slopes toward McDonald Creek through thickets of alder ten and fifteen feet high and so dense they crawled on hands and knees till mud caked their undersides.

They found no trace of Rory Van Slyke or the bear.

Radio traffic from the other three quadrants, two east into the burn, the other northwest across West Flattop Trail, let them know the hunting had been no better for the other team members.

Just after six that evening, they took a break and ate the sandwiches the team had packed in on the horses. Ruick was as wet and dirty as Anna. And, bless his heart, had the grace to look every bit as tired. "One more hour," he told them. "Then we're getting into dark. One more hour and we'll head back to your camp." Anna lowered her eyes to her cheese sandwich so he wouldn't see the relief in them.

Joan didn't suffer Anna's vanity. "Good," she said. "My dogs are barking." University of Minnesota, Anna remembered. Dogs were feet, barking was tired. Where that strange code fit in with lutefisk and Lutherans she'd never discovered.

Harry Ruick radioed the rest of the team with the quitting time, then they pushed themselves up for another hour of calling and crawling and swearing at the dogged weeping sky.

The last hour did not pass quickly. Time was slowed by a compulsion that had developed in Anna forcing her to look at her watch every few minutes. Finally Ruick said, "That's enough," and they turned back. The search technique he'd opted for was meticulous and labor intensive, the ground they covered rugged, rife with hiding places. As a result, they'd traveled less than three miles from the campsite.

When they were nearly to the clearing, the rain stopped.

Clouds were thinning in the west, letting in a flood of orange light that lifted Anna's spirits as much as the thought of dry clothes and hot cocoa.

Joan was not similarly cheered. She wasn't sufficiently self-centered for rescue work, Anna decided as she watched her, head down, slogging along in Harry Ruick's wake. If Anna had to guess, she would have said Joan wasn't thinking of dry clothes and hot drinks, but of a boy who was facing a cold wet night without them. Or a boy who would never need them again.

"One-oh-two, two-one-four." Joan and the chief ranger's radios came to life in stereo. Two-one-four was Gary Bradley, one of the frontcountry bear-team guys. Anna had met him when they'd gathered before the search and come to know him by proxy, eavesdropping on their radio conversations. Gary was young and bearded and idealistic and interchangeable with a thousand other seasonals who gave up security and the American Dream for an intensely private dream of what the world could be.

Ruick drew his hand-held from its cordovan leather holster on his belt. Anna hadn't noticed before, but the back of his hand was crisscrossed with scratches and jeweled with bright beads of blood where thorns had broken the skin. The sight of blood reminded her of her own wound, the groove dug in her shoulder by the grizzly bear. She half hoped it would leave a scar. The story would be well worth the disfigurement.

"Go ahead, Gary," the chief ranger was saying into his radio.

"We got something here you better come look at."

"What have you found?"

"We're up near Kootnai Pass, off West Glacier Trail half a mile. How far away are you?"

"Maybe three miles. We can get there before dark."

"I'll have Vic wait on the trail."

Ruick replaced the radio on his belt and picked up the pace.

Gary Bradley wouldn't say what they'd found over the public air waves. The only thing that made people that circumspect was a corpse.

Anna sighed. So much for the cocoa.