“Naturally.” Anna unboxed her binoculars. Above the little lake, the land was sloped and thick with undergrowth. Nearer the water the bushes thinned out, creating a small natural meadow. The pine forest straggled down unimpressively, the trees thirty and forty feet apart.
“And you figure this Balthazar really was a high school student, not just some guy?”
“Maybe not high school but young. He never made any attempt to show me what he knew. The more education you get, the more irresistible that becomes.”
“Six or eight weeks ago,” Anna said as much to herself as Joan. “About the time George Fetterman was kicking the bucket.”
“Several more e-mails like that,” Joan went on. “Late July around then. Then no more for a week or so. Then the map idea comes up. The questions become very specific. Where the bears eat, when.”
“About this time we’re packing to head out for the first round of DNA traps. Same time as the truck and horse trailer are found abandoned,” Anna said.
“Yes. Near as I can figure.”
“And you told him . . .”
“Flattop burn, glacier lilies.”
“Then we go down with the dead woman and you’ve got mail.”
“I tell him Cathedral Peak for army cutworm moths. And, in a week or so, Flattop, west side, huckleberries.”
Rory pushed up beside them. “You think some guy is trying to trap a bear or something? Like to put in a side show?”
“Not exactly,” Anna said.
Rory came and went.
Napped in the last of the sun. Anna and Joan stayed where they were, raking the hillside with binoculars.
Once Joan nudged Anna and pointed. A black bear, nearly the size of a grizzly, ambled out from the scrub below the clearing. Through the glasses Anna could see its nostrils open and close as it checked for danger. By good fortune and foresight they were downwind. Dressed in muted colors, lying low on the rock, they watched it unseen.
A quarter of an hour later a small grizzly sow, probably not quite three hundred pounds, came from higher up. She was a rich brown, almost the same shade as the black bear who, like many of his compatriots, was black only in name, not in hue. With her was a single cub, one born this season. The cub ran after her, nipping and tugging at her ankles. Anna smiled as she and Joan simultaneously said “awww” under their breath.
Half an hour more and Anna was getting wiggly. Joan had spent so many hours in uncomfortable positions watching empty tracts of land that she’d slid easily into research time and moved not at all. But for the slow arcing of the glasses as she scanned the area, Anna would have suspected her of having fallen asleep.
Ten minutes before sunset, when down-canyon winds, the night breath of the mountains, was chilling the back of Anna’s neck, Joan whispered a prayer.
“Oh, my heavens,” she said. “He’s a god. I must apologize to the lab at the University of Idaho.”
“Where?” Anna demanded. “Where?”
“Shh. There. Twenty degrees west of the last tree. Closer in. There. Rory!” she hissed. “Wake up. Come up. Bring your glasses.”
Anna was scanning the huckleberry-choked hillside, seeing nothing but a blur. Then he was there, standing on his hind legs easily eleven feet tall, easily twelve hundred pounds and an incredible golden color. The rays of the setting sun struck him full on the side, the light flaring like fire on his pelt, running in sharp liquid flame over the pale guard hairs of his hump and the tops of his ears. “Jiminy,” Anna breathed. “Boone and Crockett, eat your heart out.”
“See him?” Joan whispered to Rory, who had belly-crawled up between them. “An Alaskan grizzly.”
The magnificent creature was no more than twenty yards from where they lay. He had been feeding on the huckleberries that grew thick through a low cut in the hillside, little more than a ditch, but sufficient to hide him from sight until he stood up on his hind legs.
“I see him!” Rory hollered, sudden and loud in his excitement.
“Shh,” Joan hissed, but it was too late. The great golden head turned in their direction. The nostrils flared and the huge paws twitched. Even at a distance of sixty feet, Anna could see the claws, four-inch nails, dull white against the slightly darker fur of the animal’s belly.
Brown eyes looked at the three of them, locked with Anna’s then the bear looked away, growled as if uncertain. His great forelegs swung, the incredible power in them rippling smoothly beneath the backlit hide.
The black bear, the sow, even the little cub stopped feeding. The black bear huffed and snorted, the sound an unhappy pig would make. For an instant it looked as if he would stand, meet the challenge. Then he chose the better part of valor, turned and loped away, quickly hidden by the ensnaring tangle of brush.
The cub squeaked and hopped in excitement and earned a stern cuff from its mother. Silence settled back, unbroken by the noises of foraging animals. Unbroken by the sound of breathing. Consciously, Anna stopped holding her breath.
Crack. Crack.
Not nearby but carrying clearly in the still air; the sound of twigs breaking, or of wood on wood. The sound Anna had heard the night the bear tore up their camp, the night she’d dreamed a bear stalked her hiding place in the rocks on Cathedral Peak.
Crack.
The great golden bear looked back at Anna’s rock and roared, a huge and awful sound that shook the hair on its chest and bared teeth red as blood in the failing light.
“You go,” Anna said quietly.
“Anna—” Joan whispered.
“You fucking
go!
Take Rory.” Anna didn’t—couldn’t—take her eyes off the bear. Behind her she heard hurried scraping as Joan and Rory slid down the back of the rock out of the bear’s line of sight. Anna doubted her vehemence had convinced Joan to leave. Rand would be intent on saving the boy. A fear of bears, faced with a bear of this magnitude, was bound to melt Rory’s mind.
“Don’t let him run,” Anna whispered. It didn’t matter that Joan didn’t hear her. Joan knew more about bears than Anna ever would. Except maybe what it felt like to be eaten by one.
Crack.
Again the bear roared and dropped to all fours, never once looking away from Anna.
Fleetingly she wondered if she’d been wise sending Rory and Joan away. Bears were less likely to attack groups. There were records of grizzlies attacking groups of three and four but it was less common than attacks on a single person.
But this wasn’t a regular bear. Joan knew it too—or sensed it. That’s why she’d gone.
For a moment the bear waited, huge golden paws flattening the grass, his great head swaying from side to side as tiny bear thoughts in his small bear brain shook into alignment. Anna had not moved. She could not decide whether to make herself small and nonthreatening or as large and imposing as possible. She had a hunch with this bear it wouldn’t matter a damn what she did. The need to run made her legs trembly. She ignored it. Not from bravery but because the image of the bear lunging at her back was too terrifying.
She slipped the can of bear spray from her belt. Coming from behind her was rustling, then a thump. Either Rory or Joan, like a Japanese maiden in a horror movie, had tripped and fallen while fleeing the monster.
The great bear heard it too. His head ceased to sway. A roar built in the massive chest as his eyes focused to the left of Anna’s rock. Springing to her feet she began waving her arms over her head. Large and imposing it was to be then, though at five-foot-four and one-hundred-twenty pounds, Anna felt woefully inadequate.
“Hey bear, hey bear,” she shouted.
Crack. Crack. Crack. A low whistle.
The grizzly charged. Never would Anna have believed an animal that size could move that fast. The sun dyed his coat red and the fur rippled as he came, beautiful and shining like that of a well-groomed golden retriever. Anna was so transfixed by the uncanny beauty she forgot to be afraid for a second, forgot to turn profile, forgot she was not supposed to look the animal in the eye, forgot she held bear spray in her right hand.
The bear came on, his powerful legs moving over the broken ground with liquid grace. Roaring was done. He was intent only on Anna. She could hear the labored whuff of breath. He was enormous. Rising from the low swell of ground her rock lookout topped, he towered over her.
“Not running, not running, not running,” chanted through her mind as she raised the can of bear spray, a fly swatter against an avalanche.
A scream cut through to her. Not her own. A sharp cry that made the bear flinch.
“Drop the pepper spray. God. Please.”
Anna had heard the voice before. Faith, not trust, opened Anna’s fingers and the pepper spray fell away. Curling down after it, she rolled up like a pill bug, her arms covering her ears, hands clasped over the back of her neck, knees pulled up to protect her more vulnerable parts. The fetal position. This was how she’d first been introduced to the world. Was this how she was going to leave it?
A blow that nearly uncurled her pounded into her shoulder and she felt herself knocked down the backside of the rock like a hockey puck off broken ice. Her kneecap struck stone. Anna felt nothing but the impact. Pain would come later.
Pressure. The bear was on her. She could feel the weight of his chest against her side. Fur, amazingly soft, pressed down on her bare legs. She felt the squash of the great arms as the bear tried to crush her or roll her over. Her face was buried in its pelt. Heat and smell and fur surrounded, suffocated. The bear was absorbing her, smashing her into its very being. Heavy hot breath smelling of huckleberries and things less pleasant washed over her face. Like a child, Anna squeezed her eyes shut whispering, “Go away, please go away.”
Crack.
The weight lifted. The animal growled, low and questioning, then roared and another blow fell. This one did unwrap Anna from around herself. She felt her legs fly out, her head snap back and she was rolling down the stony hillside. Her skull smacked against rock and she cried out. Her eyes flew open. She saw the bear and the darkness descending on her together.
Anna had not
expected to wake up; or if she did, to wake in the tradition of Jonah, in the innards of Monstro. First came thought, a sense of mind creeping forth from a place far more distant than sleep. She knew she was thirsty and she knew she was cold. Opening her eyes, she knew she was blind or had gone to a place where sight did not matter. It was as black outside of her skull as it had been within.
It wasn’t that Anna did not care, it was that she could not think, so fear didn’t follow. As she lay in the black she noted she was breathing. With that fragment of earthy information she began to assume she had not left the world she’d grown accustomed to. Surely in heaven, hell, purgatory, Valhalla or wherever, the incessant labor of lungs would no longer be mandatory.
Form came next, form in the darkness, shades of night. She lay on her side in a patch of stone exposed by an old avalanche twenty feet or more from the rock where she, Rory and Joan had sat watch. Night had come. If the moon had risen it was weak and distant. Only the faint light of stars separated the earth from the sky.
Confusion engendered by a bash on the head and waking in the dark was as brief as it was intense. Time, place and circumstances reinstated themselves. The bear had left her for dead. Possibly the fact she’d banged her head on a rock and gone unconscious had saved her life. A black bear, a bear who attacked not to intimidate and frighten off, but to procure dinner, would have taken a few pounds of flesh. Satisfied she was no longer a threat the grizzly had left her in one piece.
One battered piece. Without moving much, lest the bear had not gone away, Anna assessed the damage as best she could. No claw or bite marks. None. That was a surprise. Cuffed about as she had been, she thought surely she’d been cut. The only blood she found was below her left ear where she’d collided with a rock. Her head ached fiercely but the truly significant pain was in her knee. When she rolled to all fours and tried to push herself up she nearly cried out loud. Standing was actually an improvement, and though it hurt to do so, she was relieved to find she could put her weight on it. The joint was not damaged but the kneecap itself was either cracked or badly bruised.
Why hadn’t the bear clawed or bitten her? It was in the nature of beasts to use claws and teeth, to worry and strike and bite. The last she remembered before the bear had bowled her down the hill like a hedgehog had been the furry overpowering sensation that the creature was trying to embrace her.
Hedgehog . . . what had the report written in lavender ink said?
Bear activity: juggling a hedgehog. Observer activity: standing amazed.
Anna had been juggled, bowled and left, but for a chance accident, entirely unscathed.
Alive and well and standing amazed,
Anna thought and hobbled to a stone where she could sit down, the damaged knee unbent. The clearing was empty, no sign of the eaters of huckleberries. No sign of Rory and Joan. Anna looked at her watch. She’d been unconscious a long time, maybe twenty minutes or more. Another ten had been used up while she metaphorically put herself back together again. Where the hell was Joan? Why hadn’t she come back to see if Anna lived or died?
Because her head hurt and she’d been left in the dirt by a giant bear, Anna attempted to entertain the idea that Joan had abandoned her, run all the way back to West Flattop Trail intent on saving her own skin.
The story wouldn’t wash. Not only would it be out of character for Joan as a good woman to leave another to die, it would be out of character for Joan as a good researcher to leave a fantastically out-of-place golden Alaskan grizzly without photos, scat samples and much in the way of scientific contemplation.
Joan was around. If she hadn’t come back it was because she couldn’t come back. Anna felt the sickening boil of fear as she wondered if Joan had come back too soon. If the bear had left Anna to pursue more lively prey.