Marten here eat a lot of huckleberries in the fall. I would like to make a huckleberry based lure to use on them. If you just make jelly, or smash them up, they don't put off as much odor as they do just sitting on the bush in the sun. Any ideas on how to extract the most odor from them?

This is a pure guess but ethanol in cold weather would likely get more odor molecules airborne.

Those Wild blueberries don't have much smell. I would be curious to hear how it works out.

Many berries ferment after they fall off the bush/tree. I would think adding a small amount of vodka or Everclear to your smashed berries would give you an enhanced odor.

Ethanol is just one of the volatile compounds in overripe/windfall fruit and it is very evanescent compared to other, more tenacious fragrant chemicals that appear in fermenting fruit. Many of them are products of yeast and bacteria metabolism. To the animal, they signal the fruit/berries are ripe and worth eating, because both the animals and the microorganisms are interested in sugars. It makes more sense to partially ferment the fruit base to make it more attractive to wildlife rather than just add alcohol. I mentioned a substance called sotolon in another thread, which has a very tenacious and attractive sweet, nutty odor and is produced in fermenting fruit by yeasts (but also occurs in many other foods). Maple furanone is another such substance, with a very nice sweet smell, and there are many more.

Maple furanone? I have not seen this product anywhere. How does one obtain it?

Some perfumery making websites have it. There's a wealth of open access research papers in the Internet focusing on volatile compounds of pretty much everything, for instance, you can now easily find out what constitutes the smells of some key substances used in luremaking, such as essential oils and some animal glands, and see what they share in common, which can be very enlightening and fun to experiment with since some of these components are available and very affordable in pure form.

But my point here is, there's much more going on in fermenting fruit than just ethanol. I'm thinking that making a steam extract of partially fermented fruit is a good idea, just by using the simplest moonshine distiller. The resulting concentrated extract (a mixture of water- and oil-soluble volatile compounds) could be very interetsting to play with, to enhance and enrich some complex smells.