Free Mortal Fall by Christine Carbo Page B

creatures.”
    “When was the last time you saw him?”
    He thought for a moment, his face pensive, his eyes heavy-lidded. “A few weeks ago. But he left me a message the other evening on myphone. Said he and Ward were meeting for a beer—actually here—and wanted to know if I wanted to join them. I couldn’t, though. I was in surgery late that day.”
    “You call him back?”
    “Yeah, left a message later that night on my way home from the clinic thanking him and hoping to catch him another time.”
    “And which evening was that?”
    “That would have been on Tuesday.”
    “And a few weeks ago?”
    “I went with him to a trap he’d set up the South Fork. A wolverine had taken the bait and he needed me to implant a transmitter.”
    “The South Fork? Outside the park?”
    “Yeah.” Pritchard sat back and let his shoulders sink into the back of the barstool. “It’s a long story, and you probably already know about it, but lately the park’s been less, shall we say, enthusiastic about wolverine research.”
    I actually didn’t know that. “Less enthusiastic?”
    “Yeah, Bowman’s sick about it, but apparently he’s been getting orders from Rick Phrimmer to start phasing out the project. I guess they’re getting flak from Washington—that it’s costing too much and it’s getting harder and harder to get available grant funds.”
    I sat listening. Phrimmer was Glacier Park’s assistant superintendent. He worked with Ford doing mainly administrative duties to support park management and secure new funding for park projects. I didn’t know the wolverine studies were lacking funding, but none of what he said was surprising. I’d done enough work for Ford involving DC’s politics. And all park employees knew that when Glacier was established in 1910, it housed about a hundred fifty glaciers. Now, our warming climate had reduced the number to twenty-five and they were shrinking about four times faster than they were just fifty years before. The last one is expected to disappear in less than a few decades. And as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t something to shrug about. Glaciers cooled air masses and without them, we had an earlier onsetof spring and higher soil temperatures on the slopes. Its run-off fed streams important to just about the entire ecosystem.
    “I didn’t know. I thought they were going strong,” Pritchard added. “Could be anything from the fact that Phrimmer has always had a thing against Wolfie to something larger, like the fact that the wolverine is an indicator species and like the polar bear, wolverines—at least to those talking about it—have kind of become a poster child for climate change issues. You know, with their survival so closely tied to the state of snowfields and cooler temperatures.”
    I knew that the wolverines relied on carrion preserved and refrigerated in the ice until it melted in the spring. Then they feasted on it through spring and early summer. Will brought my iced tea and I took a sip.
    “So Wolfie figured if he was eventually going to get shut out of the park, he’d better start setting box traps elsewhere. I believe he’d gotten permission from the station to set them into the Hungry Horse and Bob Marshall Wilderness regions. So far, with Sam’s help, they’ve put them along a twenty-five-mile range along the South Fork.”
    “So wow, Wolfie was really increasing his research efforts,” I said. “At least while he was still working the park.”
    “Yeah, well, not necessarily for long.” Pritchard frowned. “Like I said, Wolfie and I went to one of the traps where he’d gotten a signal that the trap had sprung.” He shook his head. “And when we got there to anesthetize the animal and implant the receiver, we found the trap rigged with another steel-jawed trap that was obviously put there to kill the animal. It had gotten a healthy female about two or three years old.”
    “You know who set it?”
    “Local trappers. Wolfie said it