Writhing across the slippery bed of needles, as single-minded as a sidewinder, Anna struck out again, connecting this time with his shin. The man bellowed in rage and fell back on butt and heels. No time to rise and shine. Knowing she had more strength in her legs than her upper body, Anna propelled herself after him. Crablike, snakelike, scuttling like a scorpion, hoping like any low and little thing to strike quickly enough and with enough venom to survive one more day.
McCaskil retreated. He hit the fallen flashlight and the beam spun, a drunken beacon, then stopped, spotlighting the two of them. McCaskil had the thirty-ought-six, a Weatherby, Anna noted from habit, raised to his shoulder, the barrel pointed between his knees past the toes of his boots at her face. Even a madman would not miss at this range.
“Easy, Bill. You’re okay, Bill. It won’t work. Rory’s gone; a witness. You can’t do it, Bill. Give it up, Bill.”
Joan was talking: smooth, calming as if to a wounded and wild beast. She was doing, saying all the right things, using the man’s name, trying to bring him back to himself.
It was too late. Whatever indicates reason, an indefinable inner light in the eye, had gone out in Bill McCaskil. Shadows scraped up from the cockeyed light, making of his nose a mountain that eclipsed one side of his face from the piecemeal sun. His upper lip, long, well formed, the skin darkened with a week’s growth of beard, curled up exposing teeth that shone white and feral. With that small movement McCaskil’s face ceased to be human and Anna knew he was going to kill her. She did not want Bill McCaskil’s to be the face that went with her into eternity. She turned her head, looked at Joan Rand.
A roar shattered the tableau, so close, so visceral, the wild rage of the world and of the mind gathered into a sound so dark and awful, the night itself seemed to have turned on them. Mingling with it were terrible screams and the hopeless sound of a David being torn to pieces by a Goliath of fur and fury.
“Rory!” Joan cried.
McCaskil jumped. The rifle barrel moved an inch off center. Anna grabbed the barrel and kicked at his knee. Bones loosened by the thunder of the bear, McCaskil let go. Anna yanked the rifle from his nerveless fingers. Dragging it, she crawled away in an undignified but necessary retreat. Close fighting was not for the small of frame.
The horrible roaring deepened, intensified, and Anna found herself crouched, gun across her knees like a frightened hillbilly. Breathing past the primal terror, she forced herself to her feet, braced her back against a tree to stop her shaking and to take the weight off her weak knee. McCaskil made no attempt to rise, to run, to finish killing Anna or to be killed by her.
The roaring went on and on pinning him to the ground, Anna to the tree and Joan to the tiny patch of earth her bonds had made her home for too long.
The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. Anna’s arms were quivering, the rifle hard to hold. Thin whimpering percolated through the new-made stillness: hers, McCaskil’s, Rory’s, Joan’s—it was impossible to tell.
The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. Anna leveled the Weatherby at the manifestation and waited somewhere beyond fear, just this side of insanity.
Ripples of gold unsettled the shadow, catching the imperfect light of the flash. Out of the woods padded the great grizzly, beside him the crying boy with the smile of a saint. On the bear’s other side walked Rory, the same Rory whose screams had indicated he was snack food.
The spinning effervescence of a fairy tale snatched up Anna’s brain. This bear was with them, of them, glittering gold protector of babes lost in the woods. A dozen stories of wild things become human, princes enchanted, curses fulfilled, were physically manifest and Anna was ensorcelled, charmed, turned to wood and bark like a recalcitrant wood nymph. Her limbs could not move. Her voice had locked itself away deep in her throat.
“Don’t shoot him,” the boy said, as if Anna could have destroyed that much beauty even to save her own worthless hide. “His name is Balthazar.”
“How do you do?” Anna croaked idiotically. To her amazement the bear raised a single huge paw to shake and she laughed, sounding, at least in her ears, a little on the hysterical side.
Recovering from the bear theatrics—given that Rory’s skin was still whole and he was in it, that’s what the roaring must have been—McCaskil crawled toward the enclosing ring of darkness. The bear’s enormous head swung toward him and an echo of the bone-melting roar rumbled in his chest.
“Keep that goddamn bear off me,” McCaskil cried, his voice ragged from yelling.
“Balthazar doesn’t like him,” Geoffrey said. “When we were little he used to tease us something awful.”
We. The boy and the great bear had grown up together. Staggered by the unreality of the scene, Anna found herself wondering if they were brothers.
Enough of her training survived this onslaught of otherworldliness that she continued to watch McCaskil with one eye and half of a reeling brain. He feared Balthazar more than he feared her or the Weatherby.
“You can’t let that bear come after me,” he said. “That’s illegal.”
Anna said nothing. Should the bear eat William McCaskil, her greatest concern would be for the animal’s digestion.
Her head hurt, her knee was killing her, she was very tired. Overriding these fleeting discomforts was a bear of legend not ten feet from her. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, play with him, listen to the stories he might tell. It crossed her mind to let McCaskil go. His nerves shot, his rifle taken, he was of little threat to a party of five souls, particularly when one of them weighed over a thousand pounds and came from the factory equipped with an astonishing arsenal of edged weapons.
Ruick would pick McCaskil up in the frontcountry or the Montana state police would nail him eventually. Maniac turned craven, the man actually looked rather pathetic oozing toward the woods and temporary freedom. Being captured by a crippled-up lady ranger would only add to his humiliation.
That thought brought with it the tug of petty revenge that pulled Anna back to a sense of duty. “Stay,” she ordered McCaskil.
“You can’t shoot a man if he runs. Not unless he’s a threat to life. I read that,” McCaskil said, but he made no move to test the theory.
“You qualify,” Anna said flatly. McCaskil had given up. Anna did not think she was fooled. She’d seen it enough times: the deflation as the tension of keeping up the fight, or the lie, or the act was given over. Still, she did not lower her guard. Cleverer people than she had been tricked, and died because of it.
Rory found the wire cutters and freed Joan. Joan held the flashlight and Anna the rifle while McCaskil bound his own hands and feet with more of the plastic disposable cuffs Geoffrey found in his pack. Balthazar, the great golden bear, sat on huge haunches, ancient eyes watching like a primitive god.
The sense of unreality was such Anna felt giddy and could not stop herself from being flippant and cracking jokes. Tension still on but terror fading, the others, with the exception of William McCaskil, caught her mood and the dark between the trees took on a mad-tea-party feel.
Checking McCaskil’s bonds, Anna had to force her discipline, school her mind to pay attention to detail, to take seriously the business of catching and keeping a felon.
When their makeshift camp had been made as safe as plastic ties could make it, Joan righted McCaskil’s stove and boiled water for hot drinks. Anna would have traded her boots for a good dollop of brandy to give her tea backbone but was grateful for the beverage even without it.
Given the homely activity of serving tea and cocoa, normalcy might have been expected to return but for the fact that a huge bear sat among them, his dark eyes following their puny movements, his pale golden belly round and Buddha-like under paws the size of serving platters.
“We’ll talk,” Anna
said when the rushing of the stove was silenced and she’d once again checked on McCaskil, cuffed and chained to a tree with the links that usually served as Balthazar’s lead.
“Your name is not Mickleson-Nicholson, but Geoffrey Micou, isn’t that right?” she asked.
The boy sat with his arms around his knees looking weary and relieved and terribly sad. He wasn’t as old as Rory, maybe fifteen. The silky brown hair was greasy, flattened against his skull by a ball cap that Balthazar had gotten hold of and was in the process of dismembering with delicate nips of his inch-long canines.
“I’m Geoffrey Micou. I just—just made up that other name.”
“Carl G. Micou was your dad?” Anna asked and he looked surprised. The line about old age and treachery winning every time came to her mind. Geoffrey was at an age where he could still believe each and every one of his thoughts was new, unique to the world. He had yet to learn that all the stories have already been told. What remains is to choose the story one likes best and live that.
“We found your truck and trailer—your dad’s truck—” Anna explained. “The tags were registered in the name of Carl Micou.”
“Oh.” Geoffrey sounded disappointed, magic losing its charm once the trick is explained. “That was what we used to move Balthazar. Dad had it made over.”
“I know,” Anna said. “The ranger found omnivore food in it.” She didn’t add that, until recently, they hadn’t known it was omnivore food. It served her purposes to appear omniscient. Besides, it was fun.
“He fucking stole him.” McCaskil dripped his acid into the circle. “That bear’s mine.”
Joan turned to him. In lieu of her traditional campfire candle, they had put McCaskil’s flashlight butt-down in their midst, needing the security of watching their prisoner and, for Anna at least, the unending awe of watching the bear. In the dim fallout, Joan’s face was hard, its customary softness hidden away from the man chained to the tree.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “We don’t want to talk to you. We don’t care what you think or feel.” Her voice was so devoid of humanity Anna was made cold. McCaskil must have jumped way over onto Joan’s bad side when he took a shot at Rory.
McCaskil subsided.
“I did steal him,” Geoffrey said with a fond look at his monolithic companion. “Nobody should own a bear like Balthazar. He’s not just a thing.”
“You’re my map boy, aren’t you?” Joan asked.
Geoffrey blinked a few times, long dark lashes settling like feathers below wide-set hazel eyes. Then the sense of what she was asking came to him. “Yes, ma’am. I thought if I knew where the food was, I could take Balthazar there and teach him to eat it.”
“Reintroduce him to the wild,” Anna said, thinking of the looting of glacier lilies, the mining of cutworm moths. “Why the park? There’re plenty of places in Canada and Alaska.”
“You don’t let anybody shoot them in the park,” Geoffrey said simply.
“Ah.” The logic was indisputable. One does not take a friend to live where murderers are waiting to take his life.
“Why didn’t you ask for help?” Years of motherhood and carrying pain for children ached in Joan’s voice.
“You’d’ve said no,” Geoffrey answered. “Everybody would have said no.”
Neither Anna nor Joan was naïve—or dishonest—enough to argue with him. The bear belonged to somebody else. Geoffrey was a kid. He would have been blown off on several accounts.
“That bear’s my property,” McCaskil felt bound to pipe up. Reassured by the company of others, safe from the bear and, in a strange way, safe within his bonds from the responsibility for decision or action, William McCaskil was recovering his equilibrium. Anna liked him better mute and cowering.
“Can’t have pets where you’ll be living for the next fifty years,” she said.
Anna guessed the bear really did belong to William McCaskil if it was legally obtained as a cub. The brochure had listed the owners of Fetterman’s Adventure Trails as George and Suzanne Fetterman. McCaskil had been born to a woman named Suzanne. Anna’s bet was Fetterman was Suzanne’s second husband, McCaskil’s stepfather. Hence the use of Fetterman as an alias. He’d have been grown when Geoffrey was young but evidently visited Mom often enough to torment a little boy and a little bear. McCaskil must have inherited Adventure Trails when old man Fetterman died.
The thought process rippled quickly through Anna’s mind. It could be verified easily enough. At present she chose not to speak of it. She didn’t wish to give William McCaskil the right of anything.
“Mr. McCaskil was going to sell Balthazar,” Geoffrey said.
“I found a home for him, a nice ranch in British Columbia where he would roam free,” McCaskil said virtuously.
“Boone and Crockett,” Anna snapped. “Balthazar would have been shot as a wild bear by some slob hunter for a trophy. What were they offering? A hundred thousand? Two? That must’ve seemed a fortune to a small-time fraud like you. Or could you get more because Balthazar would stand and roar on cue, add to the drama? Even charge and attack without any real risk to the hunter. You’re a son-of-a-bitch, McCaskil. Be nice and shut up or you will be shot trying to escape.” As a rule, Anna refrained from abusing prisoners in her custody. The venom she poured out on McCaskil was tied directly into the loss and outrage she felt looking across the flashlight at the quiet miracle eating a red ball cap and thinking of him destroyed for the sake of a little entertainment and bragging rights.
“Mr. McCaskil told me that’s what he was going to do,” Geoffrey said. “He said I could visit Balthazar’s head after it was on somebody’s wall. He said that to me. That’s when I took Balthazar. I wrote you from the road,” he told Joan. “I’ve got a laptop and a cell phone back where my stuff’s at.”
“Does the bear—Balthazar—do whatever you say?” Rory spoke for the first time. Anna covered her mouth to hide her smile. The envy was heavy in Rory’s voice. What boy, what person of any age or gender, wouldn’t want a twelve-hundred-pound omnivore as friend and backup?