The Cutthroat Cannibals (5 page)

“Now, come on,” Stone screamed as he fumblingly erected the makeshift ladder he had made for himself earlier. He scrambled
up the branch commanding himself to stay calm. But his heart didn’t seem to want to listen as it pounded away inside.

Somehow, grunting with bursts of pain as he put any weight on the broken leg, Stone scrambled up the ladder and set himself
on the ledge created by the conjoining branches of the tree. It wasn’t going to be high enough—he could see that even as he
looked back down. The fucking bear could stand this high. But it would just have to do because Stone wasn’t going any higher.

“Come on, dog, dammit, jump, get up this thing,” Stone screamed, looking down to where the dog had gone into hunting posture,
lining up the approaching grizzly with its three-pointed stance—tail, shoulders, and nose all lined up straight at the creature’s
throat. The bear stopped for a minute as it came rumbling through the shrubbery about forty feet off. It stood up again to
its full height. It was a monster. The ears of the beast were almost level with Stone, and suddenly his little tree house
seemed like a joke.

As Excaliber saw the thing stand up, whatever vague thoughts the dog had been harboring about taking on the beast in a one-on-one
quickly vanished like so many bloody bubbles in the wind. It turned and tore up the branch, scrambling along it like a monkey.
Stone helped the dog get aboard on the juncture and kicked the ladder away—not that the bear needed it. He reached around
behind him and found the stick he had left before, a good stout green thing about three inches thick and five feet or so long.
It looked like a toothpick in his hands as his eyes caught the carnivore coming through the rye. The bear at first seemed
more interested in the fish that had been left behind, perhaps knowing that its two treed friends weren’t booking any flights
to Hong Kong. It hardly bothered to look up at them, but nosed around in the dirt, snorting up pieces of trout and gulping
them down in big bites without even chewing. Stone gulped as well, and heard Excaliber making a funny sound deep in his throat.

But as soon as the great beast had finished with its garbage collection, which took about five seconds, it focused its attention
completely on the tree. It walked over on all fours, the great body rolling from side to side, so Stone could see the tremendous
muscularity of the beast. Whoever said the animals were fat must have been insane. For the tree-sized predator looked like
it had been taking body building courses, as sheets of muscle rippled through its legs and chest. And when it stopped, looked
straight up, and opened its mouth with its rows of huge jagged teeth, Stone got a chance to see those too.

The bear suddenly heaved itself up on its back legs with a big grunt of energy, and the musky stench of the animal suddenly
filled Stone’s nostrils.

“Back, back,” he screamed at the dog, which pulled itself up another six feet or so, scampering along a thick branch and into
the higher needled foliage. Stone pulled himself up too, pushing off from the tree ledge with the stick. He found another
little meeting point of two branches across from the pit bull, about seven feet above where he had been sitting. The bear
seemed to take it all in stride. It set itself on its lower legs, shifted things around a little and then let out an ear-shattering
roar.

It fixed its bottomless eyes right on Stone’s as if to tell him, you can play all the tricks you want mister, but I’m going
to eat you before the sun’s up.

The massive right paw rose up through the branches pushing the smaller ones aside. Claws that looked a good eight inches long
and sharp as icepicks at the tips, swept back and forth in the air just beneath Stone, catching the very bottom of the material
of his pants. He was up a good fifteen feet and the bear was nearly able to reach him, as it soon would once it got hopping
mad. Stone pulled his feet up as high as they would go, and catching one arm securely around a branch he slammed down with
the green stick in his right hand. The shot was a good one and caught the grizzly square in the snout. And at that moment
Martin Stone learned the one thing you can learn about fighting grizzly bears: go for their noses, the only vaguely vulnerable
spot on the fur-coated beast, most of whose hide a spear couldn’t penetrate.

Stone could see the shock in the great carnivore’s eyes the moment the end of the stick slammed into the nostrils. The bear’s
eyes shot open as it let out a blood-curdling scream that promised pain and blood. Rivers of it. Then it really came after
him. It was mad now. That much Stone had managed to accomplish. The huge head came snapping up out of the darkness. A fog
of moonlight wafting down from the narrow sky that showed between the two towering mountain walls on each side of them suddenly
lit up the grizzly, and Stone saw its gnashing jaws, saliva dripping out in torrents, the maddened demonic face growling in
the middle of all that black fur.

He slammed the stick down again with every bit of strength he had, and the beast reeled but stayed on its feet. Yet again
Stone cracked down, trying to force the creature back, to force it to submit to his will. At last after six, seven, eight
strikes, the brute dropped down to the dirt with a roar that shook the mountain stillness as it echoed for miles. Birds normally
asleep flew up from nearby trees at the sound. Excaliber let out a high-pitched counter scream, letting the bastard know that
his side had only just begun to fight.

The bear walked around in a circle, shaking its head from side to side as if trying to clear its senses, like an old but formidable
boxer a little punch-drunk from too many rounds. At last it seemed to get it together again and retreated about forty feet.
Then all two thousand pounds of the animal came charging in like a cavalry of murder. Stone steadied himself with every bit
of strength remaining in his taut body. His teeth gritted like a wild man’s as he timed the charging bear, holding his stick
raised until the last possible second. The bear suddenly leaped up with all the strength of its thick hind legs. If a ball
of fur as big as a small elephant can fly, then this black-pelted monstrosity was positively heading into orbit.

And Stone was waiting there to meet him. As if the black snout of the grizzly was the pitch that would save the Series, Stone
swung down with every ounce of will and remaining power in his torn and fractured flesh. The combined forces of the bear’s
nearly unstoppable mass and the sharp focused stroke of the branch met with a bloody and noisy explosion. Stone felt the stick
slammed out of his hand and he fell backward, barely catching himself on a thin branch before he went over and down onto the
ground. He tensed himself waiting for the end, waiting for the crunch of those monster jaws. But nothing happened. And suddenly
he heard the thing wailing up a storm as if it was having some kind of primal therapy session down below.

Stone swiveled his body around and stared down. The bear’s whole face was mashed in, just a bloody porridge with more red
pouring out every second. It didn’t seem too bent on dinner anymore. It didn’t seem bent on anything for that matter as it
raced rapidly around about ten times in a tight little circle like a whirling dervish, and then shot forward in an absolutely
straight line right toward the river, where it disappeared into the shadows of the trees. Stone heard splashing and then nothing.

S
TONE and the dog spent the entire night up in the tree, not being one hundred per cent sure that the bear wasn’t about to
make a reentry and a dramatic finale with their heads as trophies. Stone couldn’t sleep a wink as every chirp, every rustling
in the branches or on the ground sent surges of adrenaline into his system in quantities that could be bottled. Stone was
annoyed to see that after about half an hour of growling and making general bestial noises from the far side of the tree the
dog fell sound asleep. With his four legs draped over the branch, a good sixteen feet off the ground, the pit bull looked
to Stone’s fatigued eyes like nothing less than some mutant sloth, a genetic experiment that had gone terribly awry.

With the taste of rotting fish on his lips, his ass freezing from the cold night, his leg burning with an electric fire, and
assorted other complaints too numerous to list, Stone had just about had it. His brain felt as if it was ready to erupt into
spouting pink tissue from the events of the last twelve hours. He felt that he was in the front car on the Cyclone roller
coaster at Coney Island, only he just kept going down.

At last as the sun began painting the ribbon of sky above the towering ridges of rock a dim blue, Stone allowed himself to
feel just a trace of hope. With the dawn of a new day the eternal optimist in man bursts forth in absurd and ridiculous zeal
as the first rays of light hit his retina and set his pineal and half a dozen other glands all working like mad. For if man
wasn’t a shit-eyed optimist and wishful buffoon from the start he would have just turned around and walked back into his cave
and sealed himself off forever the first time he ever saw what was awaiting him outside.

So Martin Stone raised his head toward the crazy dawn speckled a hundred colors and vowed that he would make it.
Fuck ’em all
, he thought.

“Come on, dog,” Stone yelled across the opposite branch. Not an eyelid stirred. “Dog, we’re on the road, we’re outa here,
let’s go.” Not a quiver. Stone didn’t want to start out the day in a bad mood. He had already resolved to ignore his leg,
ignore everything bad, and concentrate on the positive. But already he could feel his blood pressure rising, the adrenaline
flowing, teeth starting to grind. And he hadn’t been up five minutes yet.

“DOG!” Stone screamed, slamming out with the long green stick that had done so well with the grizzly the night before. The
edge of the stick grazed the pit bull’s shoulder and that seemed to catch its attention. Enough to make it raise its head
lazily to see what fool was messing with it. Once it saw that Stone had caught it looking up, it tried to pull its head back
down again fast, pretending that it was actually asleep and that what had just happened, hadn’t.

“Come on dog, don’t be an idiot. I’m a human, I’m smarter than you—I know you’re awake. Now move it. We gotta get going fast
’cause I don’t want to spend the day fending off that bear cub’s mother, brother, sister, or uncle. And if you weren’t so
damned lazy you’d think about it and know that if we don’t split its dog jerky time.” Stone raised the stick again, being
in no mood for canine bullshit this cold morning, the dew of the firs all around him dripping down onto his face and hands
as if he was in a mini rain shower.

The dog jumped up, or tried to, sliding around on its branch as it forgot for a moment that it was high up in a tree. It yelped,
not wanting to get struck again, though Stone hadn’t made a scratch on its thick and nearly impervious hide. But in trying
to avoid Stone’s “motivator,” the fighting canine lost its grip, and with its paws flailing like mad it slowly slid straight
down the branch toward the lower junction. Letting out a shrill howl of hysteria, the animal built up speed as it shot down
the six or so feet to the lower level. Its paws moved like pistons but not being quite equipped by nature for tree climbing,
it just shot down the limb as if it was greased with oil. The dog slammed into the branch ledge and right across it, bolting
out into the air. The pit bull kept swimming away on the insubstantial morning breeze as it shot out about eight feet. Then
it looked down and saw that it was no longer traveling on tree.

The animal let out just about the most plaintive sound Stone had ever heard, then it dropped straight down. The distance,
fortunately for the dog, was only about nine feet and it too, as Stone had done, landed in some low bushes, which cushioned
its fall. Once Stone saw that aside from a wounded pride Excaliber was okay, he couldn’t help but let out a smug laugh. The
pit bull dragged itself from the greenery and looked up, giving Stone a mean scowl. It licked around at its legs and chest,
making sure that everything was in working order. Seeing that it was, the pit bull sat down on its hindquarters and stared
up at Stone as if asking what’s taking you so long, asshole?

But having already taken the emergency exit once, Stone wasn’t in any hurry to do it again. With his right leg all swollen
up now and hurting even more than it did the day before, he took it slow as he maneuvered himself down the branch, onto the
ledge and then down the tree. Without the ladder, which he had kicked away when the bear came visiting, Stone had to hang
out from the branch and let himself drop, falling about five feet to the ground. Ordinarily the drop would have been no problem,
but due to his fractured leg an explosion of pain ripped through his thigh when he hit dirt. He collapsed straight onto the
ground and lay there groaning for nearly a minute.

When he finally managed to pull his mind back from the vat of pain it was flopping around in. Stone saw the pit bull staring
at him. He swore the edges of its overtoothed mouth were curved back in something approximating a smirk. This whole avalanche
experience had put the two of them in a fine fettle with each other.

But Stone quickly saw that he had worse things to worry about than interpersonal relations between the human and animal species.
The ground was getting wet, very wet, like a fucking swamp. As soon as he came out of his daze he realized that his legs and
chest and face for that matter were wet. He looked down. The ground was oozing with water, like a sponge. He pushed himself
up and glanced quickly around. The earth all around him was like that. The river was continuing to rise. It hadn’t abated
at all. “Jesus Christ—the whole shoreline could be overrun,” Stone muttered to himself, starting to get depressed again. He
again looked up at the towering wall of granite and shook his head from side to side. There was no way in hell he’d even get
ten feet up the side of that thing.