Crack in the Sky (68 page)

Scratch cried out as she reared back suddenly and smacked him with a monstrous paw, as if he were no more than a bothersome badger she was trying to dig out from beneath a rotted log. The fire around his lungs was so great, it felt as if his ribs had been torn loose from his chest as he was hurtled to the side on the sandbar.

Waugh!

Again she bellowed as he blinked grains of sand from his eyes, dragging his cheek off the ground, finding her resting on all fours a few yards away, turned to look at her cubs. Calling to them noisily with those jaws, that curving muzzle drawn back to expose the rows of monstrous yellowed teeth.

The moment the two cubs started his way, Bass shoved onto a hip, his chest refusing him a deep breath, his back burning, hot one instant, icy cold the next as the wind slashed across it. If he could run now, he might stand a chance of getting to the rifle a heartbeat before she got to him. Just spin around as he cocked the hammer, fire as she settled upon him again—

Then he knew it was too late already. That flicker of time’s candle to consider what to do and how to do it had already cost him his chance.

Just take her with his own bare hands.

When she spotted him rising to his knees, coming shakily to his feet, she wheeled fully on him. Then twisted her head to locate her cubs the moment before they bounced against her.

Enraged, her hump hair stiffened. The sow batted the first aside, backhanded the second, sending them both sprawling away toward the cutbank, yelping and whimpering as they tumbled to a stop, licking at their bruises. Then she slowly turned on the trapper, wobbly on his two legs.

He tried to blink the sandy grit from his eyes, clear the dry shreds of cobweb from his head as she flexed her back, shifted her feet, planting them squarely as she rose on those huge, haunches. Then she too stood on hind legs. And windmilled at the air with those long, deadly instruments, her claws bared, glinting in the last rays of the sun.

Just take her with his own bare hands.

And for the first time he realized his hands were not empty.

In the terror of her first strike, he must have gripped on to what he had been holding with the might of a trap’s jaws. In his left hand remained that chunk of willow limb
a little thicker than his own thumb, already sharpened at the end.

And in his gritty right hand was the bone handle attached to that curved, ten-inch blade of Mexican steel.

Tottering on her hind legs, the sow lumbered forward, closing those last few yards, towering over the puny human by more than a foot in shaggy, silver-tipped height. Sawing her arms back and forth, she pounced the last two steps and blacked out the sky once more as her awful roar deafened all sound from his ears.

His back burned anew as she clutched him into her with one great paw, burying his face in her chest. Lunging with all he had in that weakened left shoulder, Titus sank the sharpened end of the branch into her thick hide, sensing the point pierce that heavy layer to plunge on into the muscle, shoved on past bone. He felt her jerk as the willow spear went home, driven deep within her lights.

Knowing in that next instant it was not enough to kill the she-brute.

Again she raked at him, and again. Her shaggy forearms only brushing, bruising, battering his shoulder blades and the small of his back as she struggled to rake him with her claws—but she held him too close to get at him. Too close, right there against her: smothered, trapped against the beast that was about to finish him off.

Gagging, Bass could smell nothing but the rank odor of her damp hide, the milk going sour at her two shriveled dugs.

Knowing by this time of the season she was likely giving up nursing the two cubs, teaching them instead to feast on plants and small animals, ants and that meat of whatever big game presented itself to them.

Meat. Four-legged or two. Including a hapless trapper.

As he felt her crush his chest with a fiery pressure, the sow straightened to full height, dragging his feet off the ground, shaking him helplessly against her great stinking mass. He dangled in her grip, his legs flopping like one of his sister’s sock dolls.

How he needed a breath of air. Just one breath more.
Sensing his supper rise against his tonsils, Bass gasped, sickened by the dank sour-milk odor of her as he drew back the butcher knife and plunged it into her chest.

Too low!

But instead of drawing it out, with both hands clamped around the wet, sticky, warm handle, he sawed the blade to the side savagely. Hearing her grunt with each new plunge of the blade within her gut.

Feeling the rumble of each of her battle cries, feeling each of her painful groans as they reverberated within her chest and rattled against his cheek, he even sensed her cries shake the handle of that weapon he gripped with white knuckles. Then he himself echoed the sow’s dull roar that shuddered beneath his eye pressed deeply against her stinking fur.

The bear hooked a claw around his hip and raked back. He felt the sudden cold as the legging gave way and the breechclout with it—his hide laid bare to the bone across the top of his hip.

He heard a shrill cry coming to him in the midst of that muffled, dark hole of her massive being where she had herself wrapped around him—just as surely as if she had swallowed him whole. And he realized that inhuman cry was his.

Then, as the cry faded, Scratch heard a new, strange sound.

One thunderous thump echoed through her body, and he listened to her whimper like her cubs when she had batted them aside in fury. Pulling back one mighty arm from the grip she had on him, Bass could suddenly see shafts of rosy alpenglow, slivers of trees and brush suspended against the sky overhead. And smell glorious air.

He shoved back against the other paw for leverage and yanked the knife free of her. Swinging it up in a short arc, Bass buried the long blade right below her jawline. She nearly shook him free, nearly tore his grip from that bloody handle as she shivered and whipped her head from side to side to rid herself of the torment.

Scratch attempted to saw the knife to the side but encountered bone. Instead he yanked the weapon free once
more, rocked back, and plunged it in. Back out and in again. Out once more, just enough to give himself some leverage against that grizzly foreleg that gripped and raked and pummeled him—then back in with all the strength he could muster. Sensing his will seep out of him with each new thrust. Turning, twisting, screwing the blade brutally an instant before he jerked it back out.

Waugh-gh-gh-gh!

With her roar garbled by her own blood, Bass felt the beast falling, pitching forward with him beneath her. Helpless, he twisted and screwed at the knife’s handle as his face was buried again. Sealing out all light, suffocating him. Shutting off the rest of the world.

She had swallowed him whole.

The grizzly had won, and now she was devouring his soul. Not just what wreck was left of his body. But feasting on his very spirit. Like an evil specter come lunging out of a ragged tear between his world and its own—lunging through to devour him and drag his soul back to its world of eternal despair.

Better to be dead than seized and hauled back through that crack in the sky by this evil spirit.

Suddenly he felt his leg being pulled, yanked. The wounded, bloody hip yelped in pain as his ankle was twisted brutally.

Certain it must be the cubs, feasting on his flesh now that their mama had killed him. Believing these last few seconds of his life would be even more torture than those last painful moments of their battle—for now he realized he had lost to this demonic creature. Now he knew the cubs were going to gnaw on his bones, and the sow would ultimately drag his soul back to where her evil seed was whelped.

Of a sudden he felt the cold air slap his face, sneak in to tickle his bare flesh where the long, curved claws had raked the buckskin shirt to ribbons at his back. How cruel the breeze was to brush over the riven muscle across his hip. So cruel to tease him with its cool, fresh breath here the moment before he would breathe his last, the moment
before his heart would stop and he would be no more than wounded soul.

Knowing he had lost and was now a captive of that evil beast come through the sky to his world seeking new prey.

She was picking him up, seizing his head, peeling his upper body out of the sand, ready to hurtle with him back across the grass and the sandbar and through the willow, back to where she had emerged right out of the twilight, right out of the air itself…. He blinked at the sand tormenting his eyes—how he wanted to stare this beast in the face, look it in the eye as she seized dominion over his soul.

One last look—

“Mr. Bass!”

Swimming right above him, the great creature’s face spewed its fetid breath down across his cheeks. Hot breath—unlike the cool touch of the evening breeze.

“Mr. Bass!”

A dream this was. Feeling himself shaken by the creature, believing it was all part of the great evil to see McAfferty’s face swimming above his.

“Arrrghgh!”
Scratch groaned, flailing his arms helplessly at the beast.

His arms were quickly pinned and the face came right over his once more. Shaking his shoulders. “Mr. Bass—it’s Asa! Asa!”

Again he tried to fight the evil of its lie.

“For the love of God, Mr. Bass … the bear is dead! We killed it. I killed it. God knows
you
killed it too.”

Somehow he managed to sputter the word, “A-asa?”

“Yes. It’s Asa, Mr. Bass. Praises be to heaven for your deliverance!”

Whether it truly had been heaven’s intervention as Asa believed, or it had been the two rifle balls McAfferty deftly fired into the base of the sow’s head at close range, along with those savage blows the white-hair delivered with Bass’s own tomahawk found beside that pile of unpeeled willow limbs … there were times in those next
few days when Scratch wasn’t all that sure he was grateful for that divine deliverance.

As much pain as the simple act of living on brought him, it might well have been better to go under then and there to that sow grizzly.

Had it not been for his fear of losing his mortal soul to something monstrously evil, something he knew he could never fathom—simple man that he was. Were it not for his fear of a life everlasting wherein a man whimpered helplessly before the great unknown … he might well have given up and crossed over that last divide in those next few hours.

“Damn, but this ain’t good,” McAfferty muttered again and again as he hovered over him on that sandbar, down on his knees inspecting Scratch’s wounds up and down. “This … this ain’t good. A bear … chewed up like this … it ain’t no good, Mr. Bass.”

He had passed out with the pain when Asa had attempted to free his other leg from under the grizzly’s carcass. Then he came to again, groaning in pain to find McAfferty pulling off his capote to lay over him.

“Damn them evil abominations gathered round us!” Asa growled.

Titus closed his eyes and listened for a moment as McAfferty trotted away up the sandbar, moving off from the cutbank in a hurry; then all was quiet.

It was full dark by the time the white-head nudged him awake as gently as he could, snagging Bass under the armpits and raising him off the sand, painfully dragging Scratch a matter of yards to the crude travois he had hurriedly constructed back at camp from some strips of rope and rawhide and a buffalo robe. Despite the curly softness of the thick hair, Bass felt the hard pinch of the hemp rope beneath his ripped and torn flesh at his back, across his hip, behind one ear as Asa laid him out on the Crosshatch web and pulled a blanket over him.

Without a word Asa went thin-lipped with determination, then turned aside as Bass’s eyes fluttered closed and he passed out again. How merciful unconsciousness can be at times, giving a man relief when he has reached a point
where he can no longer bear up under the pain. How blessedly merciful.

In those next few days he tolerated the brutal bathing of his crusty, grit-coated wounds, as well as surviving the constant chatter from the partner who had saved his life this second time. Now he was beholden to McAfferty. No longer were they square. Bass listened to what he could of the man’s preaching, to his praying over him, to his rambling fire-and-brimstone cant.

“‘And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath into you, and ye shall LIVE!’”

And in the midst of those terrible days Scratch heard Asa try to explain to them both what that run-in with the sow meant in terms far too theological for a simple man like him to understand, much more metaphysical than anything he had ever heard Asa McAfferty preach before.

“You done right with that she-bitch of a grizzly.”

He kept his eyes closed. “Right?”

“Leave’d your knife in ’er.”

“Damn! You’re hurtin’ me—”

“Gotta keep some of these here wounds open,” McAfferty interrupted unapologetically, “or they’ll grow shut with the p’isen inside.”

“What p’isen?”

“’Nough evil already around us for a man to worry over that you don’t wanna have evil shut up inside ever’ one of your wounds, Mr. Bass.”

“Asa.”

“Yeah?”

“I … I took the knife out.”

“Knife was in ’er when I pulled you free,” Asa grumbled as he continued his ministrations with that water he heated at the edge of the fire. “That’s all that counts. Leave the knife in the bear: it’ll bleed ’em out inside.”

“Leave the knife in,” Scratch repeated, his puffy lips so swollen and dry from fever that they had cracked. “Leave knife in.”

Bass remembered how day after day it seemed the man talked of nothing much more than the same topic.
Instructing his wounded partner on the two places where you could place a lead ball certain to kill a grizzly.

“There be jest two places where a nigger can put his ball into a devil beast such as that to know his lead’ll do the trick certain. One be just under the ear. T’other—why that be just back and down of the front leg, Mr. Bass. Where the evil heart beats in that beast. Hide so damned thick, can’t allays count on the ball going in nowhere else to any account. I killed that she-bitch with two balls to the head, just under her ears. And I finished her off with your tomahawk. Nearly got her head cut clean off afore she fell over with you still wrapped in her arm.”