Blood Lure Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 marvelously 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