Bear Bait (9781101611548) (22 page)

“No, it’s not paintings.” His chest felt like it was caving in on itself—was twenty-four too young to have a heart attack? He couldn’t wait to get this over with. “A couple of
her photos.” He glanced at his postcard like he was reading from it. “A marten on a log? And a full moon at Rialto Beach.” He’d been with Allie when she’d taken those. He understood what Ernest was talking about when the old man said he needed some of Allie’s things.

“I guess that’d be okay. They’re in her room.” He preceded Jack there, and now Jack realized why he’d never seen Ernest Craig around much before. His limp was painful to witness. No wonder the man had taken up whiskey. Allie said her dad was wounded in Vietnam but the VA had said his leg problem was not service-related; which was just what you’d expect of the feds. Plenty of tax breaks for the rich but no medical care for a man that couldn’t work anymore. That was why Allie had wanted to blow up the VA Building in Seattle.

Ernest took Allie’s incredible purple moonlight photo down from her wall, and then the one of the bright-eyed weasel that stole a chicken leg from their picnic at Marmot Lake. He handed them to Jack. Then the old man put an arm around his shoulders. Jack couldn’t keep the tears from spilling over, and they both stood there for a minute, pretending they weren’t crying, neither one looking at the other.

Jack had no idea what the others had planned for Eminenten, but he’d make his part spectacular. For all the soldiers who came home broken, and for all the ones that didn’t come home at all. For all the hardworking folks who got ripped off. For Allie and her dad.

AFTER
scouting the Marmot Lake area to make sure no surprises awaited her, Sam set up camp in thick woods beyond the burn zone, hiding her tent beneath the low-hanging branches of a red cedar. All evidence indicated that intruders had so far been active only near the lake shore. Her camp would be behind them, out of their sight. At least she hoped so.

It took her half an hour of throwing rocks and ropes over high limbs to string up a bear line and suspend her food from it. Then she set off, using her GPS to guide her from the lake to the coordinates where she’d left the illegal track days ago. If she’d had wings, it wouldn’t have taken long, but she had to divert around massive firs, battle through meadows of thigh-high ferns and salmonberry brambles, and wade glacier-melt creeks that made her whole body ache. As her private expedition entered its third hour, she had new respect for the hardy explorers who first hacked into the Olympic Peninsula in the 1880s. Although the area she was traversing had been logged twice, hiking off-trail was still tough going.

As she scrambled over a moss-encrusted log, she dropped her GPS locator, which slid into a pocket of rot at the cedar log’s base. She gritted her teeth. While she could reconnoiter roughly with her compass and map, she wanted to meet the track exactly where she’d left it before. She knelt, groaning a little at the pain from her injured knee. After digging under the log and jamming a splinter up
under a fingernail, she finally fished out the handheld. The screen was blank.

“Dammit!” She banged it on her thigh several times, pressed a few buttons. Finally, thankfully, the LCD blinked back on. Then she heard footsteps in the forest on the other side of the log.

She flattened herself on the ground. Poachers? She was not eager to feel bullets whiz by her head again.

A black and yellow centipede crawled through a miniature grove of orange gumdrop fungi a couple of inches from her nose. She closed her eyes, praying the creature wasn’t attracted to body heat. The steps neared her position. Small snaps and rustles came from several directions. Damn; it was a whole group. Now it sounded like someone was standing on the other side of the log. The skin on her back crawled with the expectation of a sudden blow. Another minute passed. She heard the crunching of twigs beneath heavy feet, not more than a yard away.

Raising her head, she chanced a look across the top of the log. Startled brown eyes stared back at her from a long mournful face. A drooping stalk of greenery hung from the elk cow’s mouth. They gazed at each other for a second.

Then Sam burst out laughing, although she knew she shouldn’t. Three long-legged calves grazed among more adults, not far away, and elk could be violently protective.

The cow snorted and wheeled around, starting a minor stampede. Sam concentrated on counting the herd before they crashed out of sight. Five cows or yearlings—hard to tell from their backsides—and three calves only a couple of months old. She jotted down the numbers and position in her notebook. When she continued her quest, her mood was much happier.

After fifteen more minutes, she met the tracks where she’d left them two days before, and then followed them forward into the woods. The vehicle clearly had four-wheel drive because the tracks went over rocks, mud, and uneven ground. She mourned two red-bellied salamanders flattened in a tread mark. A little farther on, a native pink-and-green
frog had been reduced to two dimensions by the right-side tires. The ruined plants were too many to keep track of.

Wouldn’t it be a piece of luck if Garrett Ford’s pickup tires matched the tread pattern on the ground? The man gave her the creeps. She wouldn’t be surprised to find he was behind all the
THIS LAND IS
YOUR
LAND
signs.

After a forty-five-minute walk, the rough road ended in the midst of a thicket where the tracks made a three-point turn to double back on themselves. At first she was turned around, but then she realized that the splash of brightness glimpsed between tree trunks far to the west had to be Marmot Lake, shimmering in the sunshine.

According to the GPS, she was now not even a half mile from her tent. In the midst of the three end points, where the same vehicle had clearly been parked multiple times, Sam found boot prints from two people, a large rectangular area where the grass had been flattened by something heavy, and an oblong rust red patch, thick with flies. Blood. Lots of it, now mostly absorbed into the ground. Her heart sank further as she found claw marks slashed through drying mud, and then, a couple of feet away, a clump of rough black fur.

Something terrible had happened to a bear here within the last few days. She scraped up some of of the blood-soaked soil into one of her sample bags in case the rangers wanted to test it. Then she walked a widening spiral out from the turnaround, sniffing the air for the scent of decay. No bear carcasses. No remains of bait piles. The poacher hadn’t been out just for the gall bladder and paws, but had taken the whole bear, meat and fur and all. Not that it made any difference to the murdered bear.

And—some consolation—she knew the victim hadn’t been Raider. This had happened more than twenty-four hours ago. But goddamn it, this was a protected area now and all the bears in it were supposed to be safe.

She couldn’t raise anyone on her park service radio. She was in a dead zone. A death zone. Feeling a little sick, she
jotted down the GPS coordinates and marked an
X
on her map, then headed back down the tracks. In a spot where the right wheel of the vehicle had dropped off a rock outcropping into a depression, she maneuvered a large pyramid-shaped rock onto the down side of the outcropping.

With luck, the driver would never see the rock, and when the tires inevitably dropped into the hole, the sharp rock would do major damage to the vehicle’s oil pan or transmission. Hopefully, the driver would be stuck here, clearly trespassing, with his vehicle covered in evidence of major criminal activity. Transmission fluid hemorrhaging from an illegal hunter’s pickup; now that was a nice image.

Her trap set as best she could, she hiked back through the forest toward the lake and her tent. It was evening by the time she got there. She called in her findings to the dispatcher, and then, after checking the mine shaft and seeing no changes in the depression there, she circumnavigated the lake, verified that the parking lot was empty and her truck still hidden among the trees. She found no signs of Raider.

She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Arnie she had a gun. Six months ago, Chase had given her a Glock pistol, saying she might need it someday. What she didn’t tell Arnie was that it was still hidden in her bedroom closet back in Bellingham. For the first time, she wished it were with her. She was planning to spend the night in an area crawling with illegal hunters. A place where a woman had been fatally attacked, if Lisa’s story of kidnapping was true. But she hated guns. Bullets traveled long distances and killed creatures not even aimed at, and Sam had survived for thirty-seven years without ever carrying a weapon. Her radio and cell phone worked here. If anything happened, she would be in place to observe and call for assistance. With luck, the element of surprise would be hers.

She lowered her food bag from the bear line, removed her dinner from it, and carried her meal to the lake shore. Hanging a pair of binoculars around her neck, she settled
onto a rock and munched her bagel and peanut butter as she watched night settle over Marmot Lake.

With darkness came a slight breeze. Water lapped gently against the rocky bank, a continuous whisper in the darkness. The soft breath of air was welcome against her sticky face, but the water’s murmur was a little bothersome: the noise could cloak human footsteps or the padding of a bear.

She raised her binoculars. Through the stand of slender vine maples at the far edge of the lake, she could see the dim outline of her NPS truck. No lights, no movement there. She traced the shoreline around which she had walked. A hundred yards away from the parking lot, a dim shape moved through the shadows. Tensing, she squinted. The shape was too big for a raccoon. Not solid enough for a bear. Big enough to be human. Or maybe two humans, side by side. She rotated the binocular dial but couldn’t sharpen the focus. A slender head and neck emerged from the tree line. The creature stepped hesitantly to the water’s edge, dipped its muzzle into the liquid. The blacktail buck raised his head, his large ears swiveled in her direction.

She continued scanning. In the growing darkness, detail was fast disappearing. The moon was rising over the mountains, but its light would be filtered through the tall forest for an hour yet.

Three ducks bobbed in the shallows not far away, quacking softly now and then. Mallards. The two drakes paddled close to the hen like teenage boys flocking to a cheerleader. Sam was reminded of the kids at the soccer game yesterday. Even though it was no longer mating season, the ducks definitely had sex on their minds. Maybe the kids did, too. Maybe Joe was right to worry about Lili.

She sipped from her water bottle and savored the gentle quiet. Small shapes flitted back and forth over the lake, skimming the air just a few feet above the water. Maybe swallows; but more likely, the little brown bats that nested in rock crevices and under the loose bark of trees. One tree
frog tested its throat, then another. The song swelled to a chorus of amphibian voices.

Sliding to the ground, she pressed her back against the rock, closing her eyes to soak in the night music. The symphony rose in volume, then suddenly stopped. A throaty
“hunh”
from the far shore punctuated the abrupt silence. Sam jerked her binoculars to her eyes.

A dark shape padded down to the water, waded into the shallows. An elongated head stretched toward the liquid, sniffed, then sank toward the surface. Raider! The bear curled his paw, swirling the water around him. He slapped at a tiny wave he’d created, snapped at the droplets that flew through the air from the splash, his teeth flashing white in the darkness.

A wild animal playing always made her smile. Raider looked fat. With a grunt, he sat in the water, raised the other forepaw. Spreading two-inch claws into a fan around his muzzle, he licked the leathery pad of his paw, nibbling delicately, as if trimming a ragged hangnail. A wounded foot?

A duck squawked. Raider rose on his hind legs and peered intently toward the sound. It was an eerily human posture, paws clasped to his barrel chest like some burly logger. He remained upright for only a moment, then sank back to proper bear form on all fours and climbed up the bank. Sam watched his bulky silhouette disappear into the shadows, content to see that he was limping only slightly.

She lowered the binoculars and leaned against the rock again. How had Raider been injured? It couldn’t have been their collision—had that really happened only yesterday? He might have had a squabble with another bear, or maybe it was just routine bruin clumsiness, a run-in with a thorn or a sharp branch. Or he might have been grazed by a bullet like the one that had barely missed her. The thought of the puddle of blood in the turnaround rekindled her anger.

She slapped a mosquito on her cheek. Her face felt gritty under her fingertips. The rest of her body was grimy, too. Sometime during the day the scab on her leg had broken;
the skin of her knee was once again glued to the fabric of her pants. She didn’t miss her bunk, but she sure missed the hot showers at the bunkhouse.

Nine thirty. No sign of intruders. The lake water was pewter silk in the waning light. She couldn’t resist any longer. She pulled off her clothes and waded into the shallows.

The water temperature was lower than she’d expected, but after the initial shock, its cool kiss was welcome. Placing her hands palms down on the smooth rock bottom, she extended her legs and stretched her weary muscles. Lowering her face into the water, she drank in huge gulps, savoring its earthy freshness. The heck with warnings about giardia. Right now, she was a wild creature of the night, like the deer, like the frogs, like the ducks, like the bear. She pulled the elastic band from her French braid and freed her hair, then sank beneath the surface and swam out into the brightness of the silvery moonlight. Liquid gurgled past her ears. Curious fish brushed against her in slippery whispers, trying to identify this huge new creature in their domain.

The deep water was cold. She blew the air out of her lungs and inhaled quietly, treading water. There was no sign of movement along the banks, no lights, no sounds but the symphony of tree frogs and lapping water. Turning onto her back, she floated, her thoughts wandering happily through the infinite beauty of stars and moon and water and plants and animals.