Free Blood Lure by Nevada Barr Page B

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 criss-crossed 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