Chasing a Blond Moon(39)

The previous winter had been virtually snowless until March when five big storms swept down from the Canadian prairies. After the snow, the air warmed, it began to rain, and most of April the western U.P. was beset by floods. Over the winter, the snowfall had been so low that the DNR had not run any group snowmobile patrols. By the time the snow came, downstaters were starting to turn their minds to spring sports, and the Yooper economy had suffered another disastrous winter.

“Even Mother Nature seems to want to kill our economy,” he said. Some U.P. businesses were more dependent on winter tourists than their summer brethren. When the snowfall was down, the economy tanked.

“Maybe she just doesn’t want to share,” Grinda said. “You know how women can be.”

They both laughed.

“What’s this Doc Emmarpus like?”

“Earthy,” Grinda said. “I asked her to join us this morning. She’ll follow our sign.”

“Her grandfather couldn’t find his car in a parking lot.”

“Joe is one thing, Rosary is another.”

They started searching at first light. Working together, they were able to follow the animal’s trail, mainly because the cable trailing from it had nicked and scarred the branches and rocks it had whipped against.

It was just after 9 a.m. when they slid down into a cedar bottomland. It was dark and wet and Service grumbled as they crawled over logs and blowdowns. Several times they crossed well-traveled bear runs and saw scat piles, some of them fresh.

Service thought about how bears had prospered in the state, the population increasing nearly 50 percent to an estimated fourteen thousand animals over a ten-year period—and that estimate was now several years old. In the U.P. bears were everywhere, and often nuisances. The animals had done even better BTB (Below The Bridge), where they were now being reported as far south as the suburbs of Grand Rapids.

“Grady,” Grinda said. She was just ahead of him.

He saw her point to their right. There was a large white cedar branch about eight feet off the ground. Small brown plastic bottles were hung from the branch by wire. Such baits were illegal now, though they had once been lawful.

Service sniffed one of the bottles and made a face. “Anise,” he said. “Fresh,” he added, jiggling one of the plastic bottles to slosh the dark liquid around. Unless it was an airtight container, anise evaporated.

They both stood still and studied the area. Grinda lifted an arm and pointed. There were kernels of corn all over the ground. Bear baiters were supposed to bury and anchor their baits, either in holes or in hollowed logs, covering the bait sources with boulders or logs to discourage foraging deer.

“Dirty bait,” she said. This year Lansing had sent down a directive urging all officers to be aggressive on bait violations for bear and deer. Corn was outlawed for bear baits because if it got spread out or scattered around, it caused opportunistic deer to congregate and feed in herds. The regs against corn for bear baiting were designed in part to prevent deer from spreading bovine TB. More importantly, Chronic Wasting Disease had been discovered last year in southwest Wisconsin and had already moved into northern Illinois.

He knew CWD was a prion disorder, and that it was related to mad cow disease, but he had no idea what a prion was. The disease destroyed the brain and central nervous systems of stricken animals, and was thought to have come into Wisconsin from infected animals on a game farm. So far it had not appeared in Michigan, but Service and other officers felt it was inevitable and, when it came, there would be wholesale changes in all baiting regs, and no doubt some sort of massive panic to eradicate the disease by killing thousands of animals, as had been done in the region of Wisconsin where the disease had struck. The last figures he had seen reported more than nine hundred commercial game farms in Michigan; he knew for a fact that the state Department of Agriculture, which had the responsibility for policing them, did not pay a great deal of attention. CWD would come, either naturally across the border or from an infected animal imported from another state. So far scientists had shown no linkage between CWD and humans, but if that proved to be the case, the effect on the state’s herds would be catastrophic. He remembered TV reports of British farmers shooting and burning their cattle and shuddered.

No steel cable could be seen, but the broken condition of the soft ground beneath the branch made it obvious that something had been in a struggle there.

Grinda climbed up a tree. “The limb’s grooved,” she called down to him. “The cable must’ve been here.”

“If it snapped, there ought to be something left,” he said.