Part 4
The wound was high and forward of Alder’s hip. Blood welled through the fur, but not in the bright, pulsing way that would have told me there was nothing useful I could do. The bullet appeared to have passed through soft tissue. That was good news only by the narrow standards of a man kneeling beside a wounded grizzly in the dark.
My field pack lay beyond his front paws. I crawled around him rather than over him, moving slowly enough that he could follow every motion. The pack’s canvas was wet with frost. My fingers slipped twice on the zipper before I got it open.
Cal had searched the outer pocket and missed the inner seam. Sewn beneath the flap was a compact emergency locator, something I carried after spending one too many nights looking for people who believed a phone signal followed them everywhere. I pulled the cover back and pressed the distress button.
A red light began to blink. Nothing else changed. No siren sounded. No aircraft appeared over the trees. The signal had to find a satellite, reach a monitoring center, move through dispatch, and bring people up a road that barely deserved the name. Rescue in real country is usually a chain of ordinary steps performed correctly by strangers who cannot see you.
Still, the chain had started. Alder watched the blinking light without interest. His head rested on his paws, but his eyes remained open. Each breath lifted the fur along his ribs. The old crescent scar showed pale beneath the new blood.
“Stay with me,” I said, and hated how much the words asked.
He raised his head just enough to huff at me. The first-aid roll held gauze, antiseptic, a pressure bandage, and two lengths of self-adhering wrap. None of it had been packed for a six-hundred-pound patient. I cleaned my hands with the last of the water, then let Alder smell each item before I brought it near his leg.
His lips lifted when the wet gauze touched the wound. I froze. At that distance, I could see a chipped tooth along one side of his mouth and the dark skin beneath his gums. The warning was neither cruel nor misunderstood. He was hurt, and I was causing more pain.
“I know,” I murmured. “One minute.”
The lips lowered. His head settled back onto his paws.
I pressed clean gauze against the wound and held it there while my arms shook. Alder rumbled once, deep in his chest, but he did not turn on me. After the bleeding slowed, I packed the outer injury as well as I could and wrapped the upper leg loosely enough not to restrict him. The pale bandage looked ridiculous against the mass of dark fur, a small human answer to a problem larger than my hands.
When I finished, he sniffed the wrap, then the rope burns at my wrist. His nose moved to the cut behind my ear. I leaned away before he could touch it.
“I’m next,” I promised.
I cleaned my wrists, pressed gauze to my scalp, and drank what remained in the bottle. My ribs protested every movement. One might have been cracked, but my breathing stayed even enough that I stopped counting worst possibilities.
The cold became its own injury after that. I sat against the larch and pulled an emergency blanket around my shoulders. Alder lay several feet away, close enough that I could feel the heat of him whenever the wind shifted. He did not become gentle or tame. His ears tracked the woods, his nose lifted at every change in air, and twice he rose halfway at sounds I never heard.
We waited in the dark like two creatures neither of whom had chosen the other’s company. Once, Alder shifted closer to the larch and rested his shoulder against the roots. I could have reached him, but I kept my hands inside the emergency blanket. The trust of a wild animal, if that was what I had been given, did not become permission simply because I was cold.
The red locator flashed between us. Each pulse lit the torn rope, then left it dark again. I thought about Cal tightening those knots with hands that had once steadied the back of my bicycle, and about Jesse hiding a pack he could not know I would reach. The mountain had not sorted any of us into the clean roles people prefer. It had only kept the evidence.
At some point, headlights moved far below the ridge. They stopped, disappeared, and returned higher on the old road. A radio crackled faintly through the trees, and Alder pushed himself upright.
“Those are mine,” I said. “They’re here for me.”
He looked downhill, weight held off the bandaged leg. The fact that help had arrived did not make him safe. A deputy coming into a night clearing would see a missing officer on the ground and a wounded grizzly standing over him. Training, fear, and bad light could turn the story into gunfire before I managed three words.
“You have to go.” I slapped my palm softly against the ground, then pointed uphill. “Go on.”
Alder took one step toward me instead. Voices carried through the timber. Someone called my name. Another person warned that there was blood on the trail.
I forced myself onto one knee. Pain folded through my side, and the clearing tilted, but I stayed up. Alder moved between me and the approaching lights, his shoulders rising dark against them.
A flashlight beam struck his face. “Bear!” a deputy shouted. Alder swung his head toward the sound. Metal clicked in the dark, and the muzzle of a rifle came up beneath the light…
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