Part 2
Huck pulled once, felt the rope crush into my ribs, and released it the instant my breath broke. He did not retreat. His ears came forward, and he pushed his nose against my sleeve as though the voice, the scent, and the old bite marks belonged to a puzzle he had nearly solved.
“Huck,” I said again.
He answered with another quiet huff, then set one claw against the pine and worried the knot from a different angle. The rope rasped over bark. Two strands parted, followed by a third, and my right arm dropped against my side so suddenly that my hand struck the ground. I could not close my fingers, but they were mine again.
As blood returned in painful sparks, Huck stepped back. The broken cable dragging from his hind leg caught on a root and pulled tight. He snapped at it, furious, and I saw how deep the loop had cut.
Five years earlier, another cable had nearly killed him.
I found the cub near Huckleberry Creek during the first wet week of April. His mother had been shot beside an illegal bait site, and he had twisted one foreleg into a snare while trying to stay near her. By the time I reached him, the cable had opened a wound along his side and he had exhausted himself fighting it.
A wildlife veterinarian was coming, but a washed-out culvert put her hours away. Mara Leland, who ran a licensed rehabilitation center two counties south, talked me through what I could safely do until help arrived. I covered the cub’s eyes, cut the cable, and wrapped him in my field coat because the temperature was falling and his body had stopped shivering.
He bit my wrist before I got him to the truck.
“That’s a good sign,” Mara said over the phone when I told her.
“It doesn’t feel like one.”
“It means he still plans to argue.”
For one night, my district office smelled like wet wool, formula, antiseptic, and bear. The cub slept in a transport crate, woke every hour, and objected to every useful thing we did for him. Mara warned me not to name him. A wild animal needed distance from people, she said, and people needed to remember that affection did not create ownership.
I agreed with every word and called him Huck before sunrise, after the creek where he had been found. The rehabilitation team kept him through summer.
By September, he had gained weight, learned to forage without approaching people, and become difficult in all the ways a healthy grizzly should be. I watched from a ridge when they opened the release crate in a remote drainage. He crossed the meadow without looking back.
I had been grateful for that.
Now he stood in front of me with a new cable cutting into his leg and my rope fibers hanging from his teeth.
“You remembered the wrong lesson,” I murmured. He lowered his head and returned to the rope.
With my right hand free, I could help. I slid numb fingers beneath the frayed section and pulled it away from my chest while he bit down. The pressure made my vision narrow, but the damaged strands began to separate. Huck paused whenever my body tensed, then tried again after I went still.
The rope gave with a sharp crack.
Air rushed into my lungs. I folded forward as far as the bands around my waist and legs allowed, coughing against the pine. Huck jerked back, startled, then leaned in and touched his nose to my shoulder.
The contact lasted less than a second. It was not comfort in any human sense, but it steadied me anyway.
My left arm was still trapped behind the tree. I worked my right hand downward, found the knot at my waist, and discovered Dean had doubled it.
Huck scraped at the rope with his claws, but the angle forced him too close to my body. Once, a claw split the front of my jacket. I felt the cold line of air before I understood he had missed my skin by less than an inch.
“Slow,” I said.
His mouth opened near my hip. Every useful instinct told me not to move. He caught only the rope and pulled.
The knot shifted.
At the same moment, Huck’s head came up.
His whole posture changed. The animal who had been focused on the rope became broad, still, and alert. His nose lifted toward the lower slope. A second later, I heard what he had heard: an engine climbing the abandoned road in low gear.
The sound stopped, then started again as tires found purchase on the wet ruts. I looked at the gray strip of sky above the trees.
My emergency beacon was in the hidden map pocket of my pack, if Dean had not found it. Rescue could not possibly have reached the drainage yet. Only two people knew exactly where I had been left.
Huck moved between me and the road.
Headlights swept across the lower timber, vanished behind a stand of fir, then returned brighter. The beams climbed the clearing and found the torn rope at my feet.
A truck door slammed.
Luke’s voice carried uphill. “Dean, the pack’s still here.”
Another door opened. Boots moved over rock, unhurried at first. Then the flashlight beam struck Huck’s shoulder, climbed to his face, and stopped on the white curve of his teeth. Behind the light, I heard the safety click off a rifle…
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