Why not a bear?
Like those suffering from lycanthropy, could the psychosis go so far as to drive the sufferer to seek to live as a bear would live, eat as a bear would eat and kill as a bear would kill?
Anna thought back on the night she and Joan had been visited. Neither of them had seen an animal, merely heard what they believed to be an animal. They had only Rory’s word for it that there’d been a bear and Rory was not exactly the poster boy for mental stability.
A deep and rotten core of fear opened in Anna, making her nauseated. She and Buck had been siphoned off to assist Ruick. Joan was alone in an isolated camp with Rory Van Slyke, an excellent candidate for the Bear Boy.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Anna said, calming herself. Rory could have done many things but he couldn’t have come to the cirque with a navy stuff bag, and it had not been he who had been digging lilies. The altitude, the solitude, a long day’s work were scrambling her thoughts.
Creating a trancelike state induced by self-hypnosis that allows the fears and wish-images of the subconscious mind to be accessed by the conscious mind.
Anna’d heard Molly say that in a lecture at Yale once ten years before. Then, she’d thought it a wonderfully phrased crock of shit. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“Werebears,” she said out loud to mock herself out of the heebie-jeebies.
It didn’t work. The missing flesh so carefully cut from the face of Mrs. Van Slyke—a person using a knife rather than teeth and claws to pull the edible flesh from the prey? An absorbing if macabre theory. Much that was known didn’t fit with the werebear tale: the specificity and tidiness of the flesh removal, caching the flesh, stealing film, moving and hiding the body.
Anna put it from her mind and concentrated on trying to track the individual with the shovel. Shovel: that was a reassuring indicator of sanity. A person so far gone with mental illness as to imagine himself a bear by night would surely dig with his hands.
Six o’clock; time was up but Anna was not finished.
Clearing her mind of everything that was not visible on the ground, she slid easily into the tracker’s zone, a quiet place where one could wait for as long as need be for the minutest sign to come clear. The shovel dig was fresh, not more than twenty-four hours old.
The fine layer of silt on the bottoms of the overturned stones was dry on the surface but, when scratched, still retained vestiges of moisture beneath. Overturning the stones carefully, she saw that the moths licked up by real bears had here been scraped off by human hands. The trail the fingers left during the harvest was clear. The navy bag had told Anna the gatherer of moths had visited this site. Had he used the bag to store his moths to eat later? Did he eat the moths, as the bears did, al fresco, one rockful at a time?
There was no way to tell which end of the linear dig was the beginning and which was the end. Anna stood a moment choosing the most logical direction from which the digger might have come. The same way she had, south from Highline Trail. She began with the opposite end of the line of disturbed talus, the end from which he had most likely departed. Squatting on her heels, she focused loosely on the ground and waited.
The low angle of the sun was perfect for tracking. And besides herself and bears, the digger was probably the only human who’d walked here for maybe years. Had conditions been otherwise she would not have been able to track over such an inhospitable surface.
A tread mark in the dust half obliterated by what must be the print from an enormous padded paw. A scuff, straight and smooth that could be made only by the side of a shoe—leather or rubber. Four yards farther on a veritable signpost: a single slab of talus overturned by the edged tool. Why that one, Anna couldn’t guess. It must have looked particularly mothy to the guy.
A puffing, like a small steam engine straining uphill, broke her concentration. Before she looked she knew what it was. She’d heard it the night of the bear visitation. Fear, sudden, new, remembered, washed down from throat to belly to bowels.
The bears had come to feed.
17
Breathing in slowly,
Anna calmed herself. The breath didn’t come easily. Her chest had tightened into a straitjacket of muscle. The second attempt provided better results. Fortified with oxygen, she slid her eyes in the direction from whence the sound had come. On the far eastern side of the cirque, about halfway up, a sow with two cubs, new this year, watched her. The sow was swaying back and forth, weight shifting from paw to paw, head moving in slow arcs. The cubs, less focused, divided their attention between Mom and Anna ready to do as they were told.
Anna was down on one knee, close to the ground.
Be big,
she remembered.
Stand, wave your arms above your head, make loud noises so the bear will run away,
she’d been told.
Don’t make eye contact; stand in profile, be as nonthreatening as possible,
she’d been told.
Sit down, stand up, fight, fight, fight,
the old high school cheer rattled through her mind and brought with it an almost overpowering need to giggle. Almost.
Don’t run.
That was one consistent rule.
She breathed again and felt, to her surprise, the fear that gripped her loosening its hold. These were real, honest-to-God bears, bears in broad daylight doing the things bears were supposed to do. Far less terrifying than the half-mad half-man, half-beast imaginings she’d allowed herself earlier. Less terrifying than the bestial slashings that came in the night.
She looked away from the trio to her escape route, the trail she’d been following toward the western side of the cirque. She was nearly there, maybe a hundred feet, then an easy scramble up a rocky escarpment eight or ten feet high. Beyond that was fifty yards of scree and then the beginning of the scruffy pine belt that marked treeline. Not that trees would save her. None were substantial enough to climb should she be so lucky as to reach them.
Anna’s life now existed at the whim and pleasure of the sow. Realizing that produced an odd calm. When there was nothing to be done, one was free of the responsibility to think of how to do it. Risking a moment of eye contact, she gave the sow an almost imperceptible nod, conceding the field of battle, and returned to her tracking. Minutes passed before her concentration reasserted and she could see again. Her eyes, the ones in the back of her head, saw the sow charging, but her ears heard nothing. Anna forced herself not to look, to move slowly, close to the ground as before, seeking out signs left by the human digger who had been here before her.
When she reached the low escarpment and was as yet undevoured, she chanced another peek. The two cubs were cavorting in the talus. In the strong evening light she could see the startling pink of their tongues as they licked moths from the bottoms of rocks their mother had turned over for them. Momma Bear wasn’t digging but paced back and forth between her cubs and Anna. At either end of her path, when she stopped to turn, she looked in her direction.
A bargain seemed to have been struck. If Anna went quietly away, she would be allowed to live. It was a good deal and she took it, crawling as unobtrusively up the escarpment as possible, to disappear momentarily from the bear’s sight behind a natural ridge no more than two feet high.
Once safe out of sight, reaction set in and Anna realized she’d not given over to the she-bear with quite the Zenlike equanimity she’d thought. Relief rushed through her until she felt mildly hysterical, wanting to laugh and cry with equal intensity. In the end she did neither, just lay in the weakening rays of the alpine sun, letting small wordless prayers of gratitude drift from her mind to whichever god looked after bears and lady rangers.
Niceties observed, she turned her mind back to more earthly pursuits. Time had abandoned its petty pace somewhere between her first notice of man-tracks and the last farewell to the family of grizzlies. Two hours had slipped by like the shadows of westward flying birds. In thirty minutes the sun would be down. Already the light had faded to the point where tracking was becoming more difficult.
It was time to stop, to find a camp for the night, but Anna kept on. Following trail had an addictive aspect not unlike that of eating Doritos.
One more, then I’ll stop,
Anna found herself promising each time she found a partial print, a scuff, a wrinkle in the scree that told of a shod footfall.
Below Cathedral Peak the mountain flared, enough earth collected to sustain plant life and provide a walking surface for animals and people. The individual Anna followed had taken the path of least resistance, traveling downhill on the tree-studded skirt at an oblique angle to the peak.
On this surface, despite the failing light, tracking grew suddenly easy. Everywhere the person stepped on the sharply angled ground a mark had been left. Anna moved forward at a footpace, stopping only twice when a clear bootprint presented itself and she paused to photograph it. At last there was some genuine information: waffle tread cross-training shoes, a man’s size ten to ten and a half, not new, with a distinct wear pattern on the inside of the heels as if the shoe’s owner was slightly knock-kneed.
Keeping to the curve of the mountain, she followed the prints into the stunted forest of pine. Shadows merged and light diffused but the trail remained clear. Anna forgot the coming darkness.
At a small stone abutment, rust-faced with lichen and darkened with a brow of trees so dwarfed and twisted by the weight of winter snows that they more resembled mutant shrubs than stately pines, the trail ended abruptly.
For a moment Anna was still, her eyes searching, her senses on full alert. At the base of the rocks was a cleft, three feet wide and perhaps that high; the entrance to a small cave. The twisted arms of a squat pine tree partially obscured it. A place where grizzlies might den or lunatics hide. Awakened from the narrow dream of footprints and broken needles, she became aware of how little sunlight was left, how cold the air had become, how lonely the place where the trail brought her. Her intention was to follow and find, not to confront. For that she would want backup in the form of many burly rangers. Discreet departure was the wisest course of action.
An alien noise penetrated these thoughts. It was the merest whisper of sounds, needles sliding over one another or the shush of fabric against bark, but it shrieked against Anna’s heightened senses with the force of a gale through high wires. “Shhh,” she breathed to herself, though all that moved or sounded within her was the rapid beat of her heart. Noiselessly she crabbed away from the den’s mouth to put her back against the rock. The sound had not come from inside but from down the hill, opposite from the direction she’d come.
The sun was long gone. The light that remained was of the clear gray quality that reminds one that the sky is not a blanket of blue benevolently spread over the earth but only the beginning of cold and impossible distances. Acutely feeling her isolation and vulnerability, Anna thought to free her radio from her pack, call in her position. She should have done it hours ago. In the all-absorbing grip of tracking, she had forgotten. Now she found herself afraid to move, to make the unavoidable noise of finding and calling. If she was invisible, unnoticed, she could not be hurt
Dread of being trapped in an external frame pack heavy with drinking water and a sleeping bag galvanized Anna and she unsnapped the harness at chest and hips and, letting the rock take the pack’s weight, slid out of it. Five seconds scraping and a muffled thump and she was free. Breathing heavily as if she’d performed a terrific feat of strength and endurance, she listened again, desperate to hear over the machinations of her own heart and lungs.
A skittering watery sound of pebbles moving brought her head up an instant before a fine rain of rocks fell from the top of the incline she’d taken refuge against. With it came a huffing grunt and the heavy grind of moving stone.
Cautiously, she stepped out from the massif and looked up. Twenty yards above, something dark and lumpish, not yet a bear but, in the dull gray evening light, not entirely human either, was curled down, shoulder against a boulder three or four feet high and that much across.
The rain of pebbles stopped, and in the sudden silence Anna saw the boulder give up its tenuous hold on the unstable mountainside and begin to roll, dislodging smaller rocks as it passed. The abutment she stood near was too low, not vertical enough to provide shelter from a landslide, even a small one.
Perhaps she could not run from bears but running from people was almost always a good idea. No time to think or to retrieve pack, water or radio, she fled headlong down the mountainside, angling away from the vertical, hoping the rock would roll straight. Crashing sounds of her own progress mixed with the crashing of the rock and she could not tell if the entire mountain was coming down upon her, or if her half-man half-beast had followed the rock and was upon her heels. One sound did cut through the rest. The unmistakable report of a gunshot. Just one, just once, but it lent her a burst of speed that the onset of avalanches and grizzlies could not.
Anna never looked back, never fell and never stopped until she was deep in the dwarf forest and had reached the ledge atop the cliff dividing the high country from the more hospitable climes significantly below treeline.
There she collapsed. A furtive look back showed no pursuer. The gnarled trees were steeped now in a night that seemed to generate beneath their branches and move upward to darken the sky. Crawling into a crack in the rocks that topped the crumbly cliff face, she covered her mouth and nose with both hands to muffle her breathing. Stilling herself, she listened.
With the abdication of the sun, the wind had picked up, whistling from the valleys, complaining as it crossed the ragged rocks where she’d gone to ground. Between the breathing of the mountains and that of her own belabored lungs she was deafened. Frustration and fear tried to get her to poke her head out.