The gunshot spat out somewhere along the trail.
Danny still held her fingers to his lips but the gesture was automatic and deadened. There were two more shots. He stood up, sheltering her with his body as he gazed toward something he could not see.
"What is it?"
He answered without looking at her. "I don't know."
"Hunters?"
"No. It's out of season. Target shooting maybe. We're not the only people up here."
"Should we do something?"
When he turned toward her finally, the tension creases were there again in his face, and she saw him reach toward the pack that held his gun; it was an unfinished gesture—his hand stopped before it closed around the checkered grips.
"No. There's nothing to do; it's got nothing to do with us."
But it had.
The red stranger came back; she saw the sun glinting off his hair and turning it into a torch among the leaves as he approached. He was running, easily and fluidly, and she felt not danger to him, but danger from him. She lifted her hand in warning, but Danny wasn't looking. The big man was so close to her that she could see rivulets of sweat oozing from the auburn hair that curled around his ears, but he was shouting not at her, only to her husband.
"Grizzly! My God, it's a grizzly!"
II
She waited. High in the pine tree where the men had boosted her, her arms encircling the thick trunk, slippery fingers laced together. She feared falling; her legs trembled and the limb beneath her feet bent toward the ground. With
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the slightest movement, it creaked and shed showers of drying pine needles to earth. The gummy sap smeared her face where she pressed against it and she thought of blood. She could not see where the men had gone, and heard only crashing far off in the woods that grew fainter each moment, leaving her as isolated as she had ever been. She had clung to her husband, pleaded with him not to go away with the stranger, but he had shaken her off as if she were only an irritant. Then both of them had lifted her with their huge hands and pushed her into the branches. Danny had said, "Climb! Damn it. Climb!" And she had cried out to him,
"Come with me. Come with me!" even long after he had disappeared. She knew nothing of guns, but she doubted the power of the blue-black, snub-nosed gun he'd held, or of the weapon in the other man's hand. They were children's toys against the thick pelt and hide of a grizzly. Together, the three of them, they could have waited the animal out in the trees until someone came to help them. She felt frustrated rage at both men for deserting her, for risking everything in her world. She prayed. She offered up sacrifices to God if only He would allow Danny to come back to her. Her own life. She agreed to die at fifty—then at forty—if she could have him again. She would be a better person, please God, and see that they tithed everything they had. She vacuumed all her sins up from her mind and cast them out. Gossip. Pride. Pettiness. Avarice. Jealousy. She was jealous; she would be no longer. Please God—Please God—Please God—Please God. She repeated the litany aloud, unaware, until her mouth was dry and her lips started to crack. She did not know how long they had been gone; her watch was someplace down on the ground with their supplies. She tried to count seconds and chart minutes, but it seemed senseless anyway because she had no idea how far they had had to go or what they meant to do if they ran into . . . it. It seemed an hour to her since she'd settled into her perch, and there were nerve buzzes along her arms from lack of circulation. She tried to change position, but her foothold dropped farther toward the ground, and she could picture
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herself sliding down the limb helplessly, her hands clasping air and dry needles.
Nothing had really changed. That was the important thing to remember. Danny had gone off with his gun to do something. Danny went off with his gun every working day, and the only real difference was that now she knew the moment of his approach to danger. Their gear on the ground below her was somehow comforting, familiar possessions, the coffeepot still breathing a small geyser of steam. The tube of Danny's sleeping bag resting next to hers. The frying pan, its dregs turning hard and crusted with the last coals of their campfire. She would have to soak that or scrub it with sand to get it clean. Tonight, she could fry fish in it—if Danny caught any.
If he comes back. Don't think that! Thoughts could become real if she let them. Prayers skittered and fell away before she could hold onto them, but the fear stayed.
There was a soft rustle in the weeds below her and she looked down and saw a tiny mottled brown and white bird rise, its tail feathers clean as new snow, a ptarmigan. The birds were all around her, taking flight from their hiding places and winging to the branches high above her. But one bird flew straight to her as if she had called it aloud and settled on a branch a few feet away.
She took it for a sign of hope.
There were two men out there. Big men—with guns and branch-clubs, competent to scare off the bear; wild creatures ran from humans if they had an escape route and there was all the mountain for it to flee. The beast was probably already gone, and Danny and the stranger were waiting only to be sure it was well gone before they came back for her. She tried to picture them beyond the pale of trees that cut her off from them, resting now, lighting cigarettes or cigars, laughing at their victory.
But she did not believe it. The hopeless dread that consumed her was familiar. When Doss died and his flesh mingled with the burning barn timbers, she had watched from the gravel road. She did not know at that moment
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which of the canvas-jacketed men was trapped inside when the roofline sagged as if melting and then imploded on itself, could not have known that the anguished, too-late shouts of warning were for Doss. But she had felt it in her stomach and in her heart's thudding. Our Father who art in Heaven—Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—And when she could not call forth any other prayers from her numbed mind, Bless this food, oh Lord we pray and Now I lay me down to sleep,
The little birds came closer to her, almost a dozen of them waiting. If she dared unclasp her hands, she could reach out and touch the soft breasts. But with the first booming shot they lifted off their perches and left her alone. With the second shot, its blast treading on the echo of the first, she felt warm urine sluice down her legs and heard it patter on the needle carpet beneath the tree. Her hands slipped from the branch and she fought to hold on against a dark tide of dizziness. They were not as far away from her as she had thought; the shots seemed to come from just beyond the first bend in the trail. There was a time that was quiet again, stiller than before, or maybe it only seemed so because the shots were so loud. She held her breath and listened to nothing. And then there was a kind of thrashing sound but she was not sure if it came from where the shots had, and that was followed by something screaming that seemed neither animal nor human. A yelp that grew and grew until it split the air, and finally diminished to a choked whimper. She thought that it could not be a man's sound; a man's voice could not reach that pitch. It did not come again. She had to go to them. She could not be safe when something awful was happening to Danny. Maybe to Danny. She prayed that the red man had screamed and not Danny. But she could not move. Her hands would not let go now; the flesh between her fingers had grown together, hand-to-hand like a vise. Vomit crept up her throat and 147
pushed over her tongue, filling her mouth until she leaned almost lazily away from the trunk and spat it out. If she leaned just a few inches further, she would fall. She wondered if she could hope to die if she fell, or if she would need to climb higher so that she could be certain of it. And yet she could not seem to move at all.
There were no more sounds. The birds came back and the sun rose higher in the sky as if the world were still alive. Everything was the same as before Danny had walked away from her.
Any minute now, he would come back. She watched for him so steadily that she forgot to blink, and her eyes burned.
Someone was coming back to her. The faintest break of snapping twigs first, and then steady footfalls on the trail bed and crackles of underbrush. She kept her eyes on the trail and concentrated on her husband's face so that she would know him when he appeared. She thought first that she did indeed see him, and then the sun touched the red man's auburn hair, and she saw that it was not Danny at all.
He walked easily, neither hurrying toward her or away from something dangerous behind him. She would not look at him, but kept her eyes just over his left shoulder so that she could see her husband when he too rounded the trail, but he seemed to be a long way behind. The big man searched the trees quickly until he spotted her and he ran toward her in loping strides and climbed next to her, standing on the same branch and enveloping her body in his. His chest was damp against her bare back, and she remembered the red-red-red on his T-shirt that she had meant not to see while she was watching for Danny.
His mouth bent down and whispered against her hair.
"Mrs. Lind . . . Joanne . . ."
She tried to move away. "No. I don't want to talk now. I don't want to listen to you."
"It was bad, Joanne."
"No."
"I got back to you as soon as I could." 148
"No. I don't want you here. I want you to go back and get my husband." He waited a long time before he spoke. "I can't do that."
"Then I'll go. Let me down. Don't hold me. Don't touch me. I'm going to get him." A voice was screaming, and she did not recognize it was her own.
She tried to slide free of him, and he held her faster, pinning her against the tree's trunk.
"You smell," she said. "And I don't want to be here."
"I'm sorry. I can't let you down because it's very dangerous and I have to keep you safe."
He was suffocating her. She pushed back hard against him with her buttocks and heard him grunt, but he still pinioned her fast.
"Let me go. Let me go, you fucking bastard!" She never said that. "You filthy, lousy, stinking fucking bastard. I'll kill you if you don't let me go, and I don't want to listen to you or see you or ever see you again."
She saw his hand splayed out next to her face, thick brown fingers with tiny red hairs on them, and something else that seemed bad to her—dried brown segmented streaks like broken worms that flaked away when his fingers moved. She could not remember the word for it. She turned her head and sank her teeth into the heel of his hand and he shouted and slammed her forehead into the tree, and she remembered the word was blood.
She bit him again and again and each time he knocked her head forward until she was exhausted and bright red blood streamed down his wrist. She leaned her cheek against the bark and closed her eyes. His voice was a buzz, full of metallic sounds that were not words. When she finally understood him she wished she had not.
"He's gone."
"Where did he go? Where? He should have come back for me."
"No. I mean he's gone. He's dead."
"No."
"I shot the bear, but I don't think I killed her." 149
She was silent.
"Did you hear me? Did you understand?" "He needs me." Her words were very careful now because if she could speak clearly, he would let her go to find Danny. But he was insane and had to be dealt with cautiously.
"You see, he belongs to me and I have a right to go and help him. And then we'll let him rest and we'll all go down the mountain together and it will be all right. But you have to let me go because you're too strong for me to fight."
"He's dead, Joanne. Believe me, I checked him very carefully before I came back here. It was very quick and he doesn't feel any pain now,"
"You don't understand." She tried to be patient as she would with a child or a retarded person. "We came on a vacation together and we were having a really good time until you came. I don't mean to be rude to you, but you don't belong with us. I forgive you for banging my head, but you have to let me down now."
"He's dead, and you can't go down there until I'm sure it's safe." "No."
"He's dead." "No." "Dead."
"Please don't talk to me anymore." Her voice was so weak that most of it was lost in the wind that stirred the limbs around them, and then she was silent.
He waited for her to move or to say something more, but she was frozen, immobile as the tree itself. It was an hour before she began to weep, softly at first and then with ugly retching sobs that were more animal than human. He held her tenderly high up in their green-blue thicket of pine needles; she seemed unaware of his erection, his groin pressing against her buttocks. When she had cried her throat raw, he told her that it was finally safe for them to climb down to earth. He steadied her and helped her place her nerveless feet and hands and then lowered her to the ground as gently as a leafs dropping, dangling her with one
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hand. She seemed weightless. She sagged and rocked quietly while he gathered up their gear.
She knew, finally, that there was no place she could go where she might find Danny, and there was no use to fight the big man, and no use not to. There was simply no use for anything. She was tired, more tired than she knew a human could be, and she was amazed that she could stand and move when he signaled to her that it was time for them to go. Her legs had no strength but they obeyed her brain's command to move forward. She had forgotten his name. There was something. What was it? Something she had to ask him. "Stop," she called. "Stop, please." He turned his large head to her, waiting. "What?" "Do you know me?" He seemed not truly surprised, but a bit off balance. "What do you mean?"
"Do you know me?" "I met you last night, remember?" "Oh—yes. Last night, we .. ." "Is that what you meant?"
The tree-green kept coming at her in waves, and then pulling back and it was hard to focus on anything and keep it bracketed in her vision. She was confused. She looked down at her own body and was surprised to see that she was a woman and not a child.