“Did you ever watch a dog
climb a ladder?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re lousy at
it. If we have to do any heavy climbing, they’ll hold him back,
and maybe stop him.”
“So this is where he’s
going to give up?”
“No,” said Jane.
“That’s what I used to think. I don’t believe that
anymore.”
Earl
followed T-Bone and Rusty into the deserted campsite at Goat Haunt.
The dogs streaked across the clearing and nosed the two sleeping bags
that lay in a pile on the ground. Earl hurried to the stone hearth
beside them and held his hand over it. He felt no warmth. He picked
up a pine bough from the nest they had made and stirred the ashes.
Sparks rose from glowing embers and ignited the pine sap on the
bough. He set it in the hearth to burn and watched his dogs.
The scent was fresh, probably no
more than an hour old, so the dogs were wide-eyed and impatient. He
sat down to rest and gave them a chance to investigate all of the
smells and sort out the trail. T-Bone kept dashing to the edge of the
forest and stopping to look back. Rusty went back and forth across
the campground methodically sniffing the ground, then trotted over to
join his brother under the trail sign.
Earl read the trail marker and
took out his map. They must have heard the baying of the dogs, got
up, and run. The question was, Why had they chosen the Boulder Pass
Trail? He traced the long, meandering line with his finger. There was
a fork in the trail at Brown Pass. The south trail swung down along
Bowman Lake, then Bowman Creek, to a patrol cabin and a road. The
north fork went at least twenty-five miles, then to Kintla Lake,
another patrol cabin, and a road.
They knew he was coming now, and
they had chosen to try outrunning him. He sighed. It wasn’t a
bad strategy. He had been on the trail all night while they had been
resting up. If they had not both been in reasonably good condition,
they would not have gotten this far.
Lenny was a problem. By now he
was hours behind, walking up the Highline Trail loaded like a pack
animal. Earl considered resting the dogs and curling up on these
sleeping bags while he waited for Lenny. But that way he would risk
losing his two targets. He studied his map. Even if he waited for
Lenny and set him on Boulder Pass Trail, Earl could be fairly sure
that Lenny and his supplies would be of no use now that they were
running.
Earl opened the two cans of dog
food that he had left, dumped them out on two flat stones, and
whistled. Rusty and T-Bone trotted over and ate. Earl found an
old-fashioned pump and pumped some water into the trough underneath
it for them. Then he filled his canteen, dropped in a
water-purification tablet, and sat down to eat jerky and trail mix.
Rusty and T-Bone licked the last of the meat from the stones, leaving
wet swaths from their tongues, then walked over to lap water and lay
down at Earl’s feet.
“Decisions, decisions,”
he said to them. That was it. Jane was presenting him with choices.
If she presented enough of them, one time he would make the wrong
choice and go tromping off in the wrong direction. He was not going
to do that. He hurried to the sleeping bags, gathered them up, walked
with them into the bushes, and tossed them there to keep the sight of
them from distracting Lenny. He covered them with the pine boughs.
Lenny would come up the Highline
Trail, see no sign that anyone had been here, and keep going north
beside Waterton Lake into Canada. When Earl wanted him, he would be
able to find him at the Waterton Township campground.
Earl emptied his pack. He
quickly assembled the A.W. rifle and attached the sling to it. He
clicked one box-style ten-round magazine into it and put one more
into the left side pocket of his jacket. He put the .45 pistol into
the right pocket and slipped his knife into his belt at the small of
his back. He put his map and compass into one breast pocket and then
filled the remaining spaces with jerky and biscuits. He slung his
canteen over his shoulder to counterbalance his rifle, then hid the
pack with the sleeping bags.
Earl tested the weight of his
load. He was twenty pounds lighter, with nothing rattling or slowing
him down. It was a gamble to set off on another unfamiliar mountain
trail with no more than this, but people always carried enough to get
them there and back, so he didn’t need to. After he had killed
them, he and T-Bone and Rusty could have a feast on whatever was left
in their packs.
He walked toward the trailhead,
then called over his shoulder,
“Jagen!
Hunt!” The
two big dogs bounded past him up the trail. Earl gave them a chance
to get a good head start before he, too, began to run. After a time,
he knew, the man and the woman would wear themselves out and see that
all the running was doing them no good. Then they would go to ground
and prepare to make a stand. He smiled. Nobody had ever ambushed a
dog.
It was ten o’clock before
Jane and Hatcher reached the fork in the path at Brown Pass. “This
is it,” said Jane.
Pete looked at the two paths
leading west and northwest. “Which is it?”
“Neither.” She
pointed up to her right at the high rocky promontory above them.
“That snow up there is on Chapman Peak. We climb from here.
We’ll have to go up about a thousand feet in a mile, moving
almost in a straight line until we get to the lower edge of the
glacier.”
She watched his eyes move
upward. Then he turned his head to take a longer look back up the
trail. “After you,” he said. It confirmed her suspicion.
He was trying to keep his back between her and the bullet. She set
off along the hard, rocky ground that began to rise in front of her
immediately. Let him be noble. She would be quick.
They climbed through the zone of
deciduous forest, up into the belt of pines and subalpine meadows,
each of them stopping now and then to look out over the green
treetops without appearing to be looking for anything specific.
By the time the sun was at its
midpoint they stood at the foot of the glacier. Pete looked up at the
field of ice above him as Jane studied the map. “You know what
I’d like right now?”
“An ice-cream cone?”
“A big box of dynamite.
I’d wait until this guy was standing right about here and roll
an avalanche down on top of him.”
Jane surveyed the bright, frozen
expanse. “It’s a dumb idea, but keep thinking. If he gets
close, we’ll have to do something.” She folded the map.
“We move west from here along the ridge.”
“What sort of landmark are
we looking for? I’d hate to miss it.”
“We won’t. It’s
called Hudson Glacier.”
They moved rapidly along the
jagged, rocky area below the crest of the mountain, their eyes down
to watch where they planted their feet. It was another hour before
Jane heard the bark of a dog, then a second dog answering. Pete
turned to look behind them, but Jane grasped his arm and pulled him
ahead.
“If you do see him, he’ll
already have seen you. The best hope is to keep moving.” This
time her voice was tense, tight in her throat. She had been wrong
again. The way up the mountain had not been hard enough. There had
been no stretch where a dog couldn’t scamper up, so the man had
not been held back at all.
She tried not to think about the
man, but it was impossible to keep him out of her mind. He must have
been up all night, and most of the day before. He didn’t seem
to need sleep, food, or shelter. He never gave up, he never guessed
wrong. He killed anyone who might be Pete Hatcher, and anyone who
might get in the way, and still kept coming.
A chill suddenly made the hairs
on the back of her neck stand. She had never actually seen the dogs.
She had heard howling in the forest as something followed their
scent. The rangers didn’t even allow anybody to bring dogs
through the gate into the park. She shook her head to get rid of me
feeling.
She knew she had climbed to
about nine thousand feet now, and the air must be making her giddy.
There were crazy, malevolent people, but their craziness didn’t
buy them the power to turn into dogs. They took shots at strangers
with high-powered rifles. That was what she had to worry about, not
old superstitions.
When they rounded the slope at
the foot of Hudson Glacier she began to feel stronger. If she was
maintaining their lead, then for a while the slope of the mountain
would be between them and the rifle.
They turned northward, moving
along the ridges, staying high, where there were plateaus with dead
grass and stunted trees. The north wind picked up as the sun moved
westward, blowing hard into their faces and making their progress
slower.
At two o’clock, she heard
the dogs again, and they seemed to be closer. She turned, but she
could not see them. She said, “Ready to run again?”
As she ran into the wind, her
steps were shorter, as though the air were catching her in midstride
and pushing her back. She and Pete leaned into it, trying to stay
low, but before long they were just scrambling over rocks and
climbing up steep grades, buying each yard with too much of their
strength.
At four fifteen, when Jane had
Mount Custer on her left and Herbst Glacier on her right, she looked
back and saw the man. He was little more than a small vertical line
of darkness against the horizon. She could see two more spots of
darkness ranging ahead of him, low to the ground. Jane took out her
binoculars and found him.
She watched as he stopped, then
sat on the ground with his knees bent, fiddling with something. At
this distance she could not resolve any of the details of his face.
Very deliberately he raised both arms in front of him at once. The
gesture seemed oddly familiar. When his head cocked to his right, she
shouted, “Get down!”
They both dropped to their
bellies, then heard the whip-crack sound as the bullet broke the
sound barrier above their heads. Jane counted seconds, listening for
the report of the rifle, but it never came. He still had the
silencer. She lifted her head a little and saw the man running.
“Let’s go,”
she said, and pulled herself to her feet She and Pete ran together,
side by side. She heard the whip-crack again, and this time she saw
chips fly off a boulder ahead of her as the bullet ricocheted into
the sky. There seemed to be no hope. Each time they ran, he would
shoot. Each time they stopped to hide, he would run closer.
“We’ve got to get
out of the open,” she said.
“Agreed.”
They ran to the west, moving
diagonally down the slope of the mountain. As soon as they reached
the first stand of scraggly pine trees, the shooting stopped. Twice
Pete let his momentum build up, tripped, and rolled, then stood and
ran again. They ran until the sun was beyond the western mountains
and the dim afterlight threw no shadows. They stumbled into a long,
narrow valley meadow with thickets of berry bushes as the light began
to fail.
The bear was a hundred feet
away, busily rooting on the ground, snuffling and grumbling to
itself. Jane stopped. Her mind seemed to explode into fragments that
scurried in several directions at once, looking for a way out. She
knew immediately that the enormous tan animal was not a black bear.
Its back had a big hump on it, and the profile of its face was
flatter, with the snout turned slightly upward. Jane remembered the
warnings on the little flyer she had picked up at the park entrance.
Grizzlies stayed in the high
altitudes in the remotest areas of the park, and if any place was
more remote than this little trough between two mountains, then it
couldn’t be reached by a human being. There wasn’t even
enough animal traffic to make a path in the weeds. She could see the
thicket was full of berry bushes. The bear seemed to be finishing off
a low branch, and now it raised a paw and swatted the next one to
shake the berries loose. That reminded her of another problem. This
was the time of year when they were voracious, trying desperately to
fatten themselves for the winter. Never hike at dusk. That was the
part that had been printed in bold letters.
In her peripheral vision she
could see Pete slowly reaching into his pack for the pistol. She
touched him and shook her head. Then they began to walk toward the
far end of the narrow valley. It seemed hopeless. A bear could outrun
a man. This bear was hungry. The gun Pete was still searching for
would be about as much protection as a fly swatter if a bear like
this one decided to come for them. Nobody even knew what made a bear
decide to amble away one time and attack another time, but there were
theories. Suddenly she remembered the rest of the warning. This was
the reason no dogs were allowed in the park.
She whispered, “Keep
going. Don’t run, don’t stop.”
He looked alarmed. “What
are – ”
She pushed him forward, and he
kept walking. She was aware of each pace he took as he moved farther
away from her. Jane slowly turned her head to look back at the way
she had come, then across the field to the far end. She carefully
chose the spot where she would make her stand.
The bear stopped eating the
berries, shook its wide, shaggy body, and raised its head to stare
directly into her eyes. She did not know if she was held in the huge
animal’s gaze for a few seconds or a minute. The bear’s
undistracted intensity brought back to her phrases from stories her
grandfather had told. Bears could read minds. Probably in the Old
Time, the listeners would all have known what it was like to stumble
on a bear in the forest. They would have nodded their heads, maybe
chuckled nervously at the memory of this stare. It was said that if
he knew your real name, you couldn’t escape him, and to her it
felt as though he were probing her mind for it now. The stories were
proof that what was happening was unchanged since the beginning of
time. There was only one bear, and one small woman walking through
the wild country.