"Blood lure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barr Nevada)

Chapter 3

By the time they reached the vicinity of the first hair trap, too little light and too little strength remained for anything but setting up camp.

With the departure of the sun, the mountain grew cold. The thin, dry air did not retain heat. Horseflies and deerflies took themselves off to wherever it was they went during the dark hours but the mosquitoes remained, a cloud of mindless hunger hovering over the camp.

Despite their carnivorous attendance, Anna hauled water from a startlingly beautiful creek, a ribbon of green that cut through the burn scar, sparked by a joyous multitude of mountain wildflowers. Staying clean in the backcountry was an arduous undertaking, results obtained for effort put forth seldom satisfying, but for Anna, it was a necessary if she was to maintain anything close to good cheer. Tonight's ablutions were brief as every square inch of flesh was assaulted by flying proboscises the moment it was exposed.

Too tired for culinary frills or witty conversation, the three of them ate their freeze-dried lasagna, then crawled into their sleeping bags. Rory was restless and noisy in the tent beside theirs; Anna lay next to Joan, scratching insect bites and wondering if all earthly paradises had been infiltrated by something wretched, all ointments incomplete without the requisite fly. Yet she was uniquely happy. From time and use, cloth walls and hard ground had come to symbolize a freedom that loosed her mind and soothed her soul in a way she'd never been able to duplicate between cotton sheets.

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."

"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.

While she strung it up in the top of the snag, Anna and Rory foraged down the still-green slope of the ravine for downed wood. When they had a pile a couple feet high and twice that in diameter, they came to the moment of truth.

Desirous of proving himself on the battlefield of the thoroughly revolting, Rory volunteered to do the honors. Anna and Joan watched as he uncapped the liter bottle of blood lure and poured it over the wood. The liquid was black and thick. Out of self-preservation, Anna had forgotten how unbelievably strong and unremittingly vile the smell was. The makers of stink bombs could take a lesson from bear researchers.

The trap set, the three of them departed as quickly as they could. Rory walked beside and just behind Anna, Joan taking the lead since she was the only one who knew where they were going.

"I think I got some on my hands," Rory said.

"Oh, ish," Anna said unsympathetically. "Stay away from me."

"No. Seriously. I think I got some on me."

This time she heard the panic in his voice and stopped.

Rory's face was tight and young with fear. His eyes had gone too wide. Anna could see a narrow line of white between the pupils and the lower lids. She enjoyed tormenting young people as much as the next person, but fear, real fear, could not be ignored. "This is really bothering you, isn't it?"

He stopped beside her. He clasped his hands around the shoulder-straps of his pack to stop their shaking then let go suddenly as if afraid the taint on them would spread to his equipment. "No big deal," he said, the need to hide his fear as great as the fear itself. "I just thought if I got that smell on me… well, you know."

Anna could think of no way to deal with Rory's obvious terror of wild animals. She realized some of what Joan had taken for orneriness earlier had been her knee-jerk attempt to kid him out of it. At a loss, she let her sight turn inward. A picture came to mind. She had been very small. A rotten boy, Daryl Spanks, a boy terminally infected with cooties, had put them all over her tuna sandwich at the end-of-year school picnic.

Mrs. White, her first grade teacher, had not told her how silly she was being. Instead, she had taken the sandwich and painstakingly picked every single cootie off of it.

"Let's have a sniff," Anna said and shrugged out of her pack.

Rory put out his hands palms up in the universal pose of inspection. Anna sniffed both arms carefully up to the elbow. "I don't think you got any on you," she said finally. His eyes had lost their panicked glaze but he was still wound too tight for comfort.

"Just to be sure," Anna said. She dug her liquid soap from her pack, doused his arms with her drinking water and made him lather and rinse twice. Fear was a killer. Anna had seen people die of it when their wounds weren't anywhere near mortal. Rory wasn't in that kind of trouble, but fear distracted. That in itself was a danger with off-trail travel.

The second rinse completed, she conducted another sniff test. "If there was any residue, that got it. Smell."

Rory smelled his arms. The cooties were gone.

"What are you guys doing?" Joan called. She'd turned around, discovered she was alone and backtracked.

Alarm returned to Rory's face. This time it didn't take an adept to divine the cause. He didn't want his boss to know he was a weenie.

"Rory had a splinter," Anna said. "We got it out."

Rory could no more thank Anna for this face-saving lie than she could have run a four-minute mile. Instead, he offhandedly helped her on with her pack and she understood the gratitude implicit in the gesture.

They followed the rim of the canyon inhabited by Continental Creek. Though they walked always through the black and dusty shadow of the old fire, the ravine had escaped the flames. By contrast the growth in it seemed the more miraculous and verdant.

Late in the afternoon they came out of the trailless country to the improved and maintained West Flattop Trail. Travel became so carefree, had her pack been lighter, Anna would have skipped. Nothing like a little hardship to bring about appreciation of the finer things. Two hours before sunset they hiked out of the burn. Fir trees closed around the trail, breathing cool, clean air and a reassurance of peace the burned area lacked.

They camped off trail, midway between the next trap they would dismantle and the site where they hoped to set the new one.

Joan had picked a lovely place half a mile off West Flattop in a small meadow ringed with fir and pine. A stream no more than a foot wide with silky grasses growing nearly over the top of it, so tiny it did not show on the map, cut through one edge of the clearing. In the startling way of glacier-carved country, near the stream, apparently fallen from the sky, was an immense slab of gray-and-sand-streaked stone.

The beauty of the place did as much to knit the raveled sleeve of care as sleep might and they stayed up late, lying shoulder to shoulder on the rock, watching for falling stars and telling the inconsequential truths strangers thrown together in the woods often do.

There was no discrimination between male and female, old and young, they just existed, unimportant and free under the infinity of Montana 's sky. Anna told them of her new sweetheart in Mississippi, a southern sheriff who moonlighted as an Episcopal priest. And who had a wife who refused to grant him a divorce. Mississippi took the sacrament of marriage seriously. There were only three reasons a person could get a divorce without his or her spouse's cooperation: adultery, felony or mental cruelty.

"I think it'd be mental cruelty to make somebody stay married to you who didn't want to," Rory said, sounding as if he spoke from experience.

Rory talked about his stepmom, telling them of this great joke she'd pulled on Les: telling everybody at a party that he had a penile implant and making cracks all evening about pumping things up.

That brought on an extended silence as Anna and Joan tried to figure nut what the funny part was. Rory seemed to need them to laugh with him but neither managed it.

Joan talked about wanting a dog and how life in the parks made that an impossibility. Had she been able to hear the loneliness underlying her wish, she probably wouldn't have told them, but with their backs on good mountain rock and their eyes full of nothing but stars, they had slipped free of the social taboos not to feel too much-and never let on if they did.

It was after midnight when they finally crawled into their sleeping bags.

Without warning, Anna's eyes were open, blind and useless in the claustrophobic dark of the tent. Something had signaled an abrupt end to sleep. A sound. Cracking. Wood on wood or a twig snapping under a heavy foot. Or hoof. Or paw. Perhaps Rory, up in the night to answer the call of nature. Though the poor boy was so afraid of critters he'd probably suffer till morning in the imagined safety of his tent. Not for the first time, Anna wondered why a young man still frightened of the monsters under his bed would pay to work in bear country.

Not yet concerned, she waited for the sound-the quality already forgotten, left in the sleep it had so rudely jerked her from-to come again, attach itself to meaning so she could call off the internal watchdogs and close her eyes.

A soft exhalation, the sigh of the wind or a ghostly child penetrated the tent wall, then brushing, gentle, the sound a soft-bristle brush would make on nylon. Anna had heard it before when furry denizens had come to visit in the night: skunks, raccoons and, once, a porcupine. The noise their coats made rubbing against fabric as they explored her campsite.

Tonight's brush was painting strokes high on the tent wall. Deer. Elk. Bear. Anna felt the first tingling along her spine as a race memory of untold millions of years of being hunted by night stirred deep in her primitive brain.

Making no noise, she reached over and touched Joan.

She woke quickly. "What-"

"Shh." Anna listened. Though she could see nothing of her tentmate and no longer touched her, she could feel Joan's tension, along with her own, charging the atmosphere inside the tent.

Shushing, susurrating sound. All around them now as if the animal circled the tent. Not once. Not to probe and, curiosity satisfied, move on. Circle after circle. No sound but the soft brushing and the periodic gusts of air, voiceless woofs. A bear. Grizzly. Black. Full grown. Shoulder touching high on the domed wall of nylon.

With each circuit, Anna's Disney-born sense of oneness with her fellows of the tooth and claw faded. It was replaced by the lurid pen-and-ink illustrations she remembered from a sensationalized account of two women killed when she was in college, both dragged from their tents, mauled, killed and fed on in Night of the Grizzlies.

She pushed her lips as close to Joan's face as a lover might and barely breathed the words, "What's it doing?"

"Don't know," Joan whispered back.

The circling stopped, as if at the thread of sound the two women spun between them. A silence followed, so absolute in the perfect darkness of the tent, Anna felt dizzy, as if she were falling into it. Her senses stretched: blind eyes trying to see through two layers of tenting, deaf ears trying to hear movement beyond the insubstantial walls.

A barely audible rustle as Joan pushed herself up on her elbows sawed across Anna's nerves with the impact of sandpaper on a sunburn. No second hand to measure it, time did not tick by but pulsed, expanding and contracting like the air in her lungs as Anna forced herself to breathe.

"Do you think-" she whispered.

A snap of wood.

"Shh."

A growl broke the night above them and both women screamed. The growling increased in volume and moved down the length of the tent. On this circuit the bear leaned in, no longer brushing but caving the tent walls in with its weight. Formless, terrifying, Anna felt the nylon push hard against her shoulder, the side of her head.

Hands-Joan's-fumbled over the front of her sweatshirt, closing on the cotton. "Down," she was hissing. "Fetal position."

Anna's training came back to her. Play dead. Try and protect the soft white underbelly. Curling in on herself when every ounce of her being urged her to break out of this North Face sarcophagus and run, actually hurt, stomach and leg muscles trying to cramp.

The growling ebbed and flowed but remained in one direction as if the animal stood outside the front-zippered fly talking to itself, deciding whether they were to live or die.

Anna flipped through her brain looking for anything she'd done to attract the animal, to hold its attention for so long. Nothing. Under Joan's watchful eye she and Rory had put everything that could be of any interest whatsoever to bears into the red bear-pack: lip balm, insect repellent, sunscreen, deodorant, toothpaste, virtually anything liquid and/or scented. Even if it was sealed in glass, Joan insisted it go in the bear-bag, which was hung with the food fifteen yards from camp.

The mental listing was cut off. The bear was roaring, raging. "Holy shit," Anna said. Her own voice scared her. "Is it hurt, you think? Wounded?"

"God, I hope not," Joan said fervently.

A blow struck the tent then and they heard nylon ripping.

"Shit," Anna said.

"Quiet."

Nylon tearing. Roars that cut through the dark and tore into Anna's bowels. Joan breathing or crying on her neck. Her, gasping or sobbing on Joan's.

Noise from without went on for what seemed like forever but was probably only half that long. Crashing. Roars. Fabric ripping. Thumps as if the bear threw or batted things from one place to another. Swooshing and flopping. Digging. Bass gutteral grunts pushed out with the sound of frenzied destruction. Impacts against tent and earth as if the beast tore at the ground.

"What in hell?" Anna whispered.

"Beats me," Joan whispered back.

Soul splitting, a roar broke close and vicious. Blows began falling first to one side of the tent then the other. Anna felt a cut through to her right shoulder.

Blood. Now there would be the smell of blood.

The lightweight metal tent frame collapsed with a second blow and Anna felt weight slam down on the back of her neck. Habit or instinct, she threw her arm over her face and pushed down tighter around Joan.

The animal had gone mad. The deep-throated anger of nature turning on humankind. Then came crunching and a prolonged rustle. Rolling on the downed tent? Burrowing through the thin stays in the fabric? A high wild roar, a shriek in gravel and glass.

"Rory," Joan whispered.

"Shh."

A crack. Maybe a tent pole, maybe a peg jerked from the ground by the elasticized cord and shot into a tree.

Abruptly everything stopped. Deathlike stillness. Anna was dizzy with the quiet. The rage of the attack ended as a candle's light is ended when the wick is pinched.

Nothing moved: not Anna, not Joan, not the bear. For what seemed a very long time, Anna waited, muscles in body and mind drawn tight, waiting for the slash of claws to rake blood from her back, the smell of an omnivore's breath before the puncturing canines pierced skull and bone.

The crunch never came.

Fear did not diminish but increased. The fear that if she moved, even so much as an eyelash, if her pulse fluttered or her skin twitched, the narrowly averted disaster would be brought down upon them. Either Joan felt the same way or she'd fainted.

After a while Anna thought she heard the passage of a large creature a few yards away. Maybe the bear had crossed the meadow soundlessly and now pushed into the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.

"Gone?" Anna whispered. Her throat was dust-dry. The word came out as a croak that sounded scarcely human.

"Wait," Joan replied.

Handfast like children lost in the wood, Anna and Joan lay in the wreckage of their tent. Anna could feel the nylon fallen over the side of her head and neck. A cold draft came in through a tear someplace.

Unmeasured, time passed. With no new horror to stimulate it, the fear response began to wane. Anna's heart rate dropped, muscles unclenched, breathing slowed and deepened. She began to be embarrassed by her hold on Joan's hand and pulled free.

"I've got to move," she whispered. "See what's going on."

Joan thought about it so long Anna feared she was going to have to prove insubordinate their second night out. She couldn't lie there any longer, unable to see, to move, to think.

"Okay," the researcher said at last. "One at a time. Move slowly. You see the bear, stop. Stop everything. Just lie wherever you are."

"Got it."

"Don't fight."

"No." "Don't run."

"No."

"Okay."

Trussed in tent, fly and sleeping bag, Anna found escape impossible without some squirming and thrashing. An unpleasant image of her cat, Piedmont, waiting in total stillness till an unwitting mouse or squirrel thought in its silly little rodent brain that the world was safe once again. Then, as the helpless nitwit began to creep from its hidey-hole, Piedmont would pounce. The ending was seldom a happy one for anybody but Piedmont.

With each twitch and rustle she made as she turned her body around and pushed her way feebly toward the end of the tent that held the zippered entrance flap, Anna was reminded that it was infinitely better to be predator than prey.

The front of the tent had suffered the worst. Poles were bent or broken but still strung together by the elastic cord running through the sections of hollow tubing that fitted together to form the tent's infrastructure. The result was a laundry basket of funhouse corners and shredded walls.

Without a light, finding first the tent zipper then the fly was proving impossible. Spending more time head-down in the suffocating folds of night and nylon was unthinkable. Anna was not yet so far gone that she slept with her Swiss army knife in her pajama pocket. She regretted that inconvenient sign of sanity.

Then she discovered that the bear had done for her what she could not do for herself.

A long gash had been opened through tent and fly. Resisting the impulse to fight her way clear of the entrapping ruin of fabric, she pulled the nylon open a finger's width and peeked out.

After the pitch dark of the tent, the clearing, lit by a half-moon and stars, appeared as bright as a staged night for actors. When she'd satisfied herself the bear was gone, she crawled out.

For a long moment she crouched just outside while the shakes took control of her body. She felt like laughing and wanted to cry. Breathing deeply to dispel the hysteria, she let it pass. Having pushed herself to the balls of her feet, knuckles down in a runner's starting position, she turned a slow circle, searching the black woods pressing close-surely closer than when they'd retired for the night-seeking any sign of movement or sound.

Finding none, she said, "All clear." It came out in a weak kitten's mewl. Clearing her throat, she said it again. Better.

"Help me," Joan's muffled call came from within the pile.

Anna held the tear open, and within a moment Joan wiggled free, caterpillar from cocoon.

"Rory!" they both called at once.

"Flashlight," Anna demanded and Joan grubbed in the tangle for her day pack.

"Rory!" Anna called again.

His tent was in worse shape than theirs. In the colorless light of the moon, it lay like a ripped and punctured balloon. Anna grabbed handfuls of nylon. "Rory," she called a third time.

Joan had found the flashlight but Anna didn't need it to know Rory was gone.