Part 3
“Lower it,” I said.
Dean’s flashlight shook across Huck’s face, then dropped to the torn rope and my free hand. Luke stood behind him with his mouth open, staring at the bear as if the clearing had rearranged itself while they were gone.
“How did you—” Luke began.
Huck stepped forward. The rifle came up. I pulled against the rope hard enough to tear skin from my left wrist.
“Dean, don’t.” My voice cracked, but both men heard it. “You fire from there, you won’t stop him before he reaches you.”
That was not a promise. It was a fact Dean understood. The muzzle dipped a few inches.
Huck’s head remained low. His weight shifted off the injured hind leg, and a rumble moved through him, too deep to sound like anything made for human ears. He was not protecting me according to some clean moral rule.
Dean and Luke were armed strangers between him and open timber. I was the familiar scent behind him, fixed to a tree. That was enough to make the danger real.
Dean took one step sideways, searching for an angle. Luke caught his sleeve. “No.”
“Get off me.”
“You hit that bear, we’re done.”
“We’re already done if Warren walks out.”
The words hung in the light.
Luke looked at me then. His face had the gray, emptied look of someone who had spent an hour discovering that panic did not erase a decision. “Eli,” he said, “we didn’t mean—”
“Don’t.”
He stopped, and Dean recovered first. He always had.
“You came in alone,” he said. “You fell. We found you hurt. We tried to help, and the bear came in.”
Even tied to a tree, I could hear the report he was building. Men who break laws often believe the right sequence of ordinary words can make an extraordinary cruelty disappear.
“You took my radio,” I said.
“We found it on the ground.”
“My belt?”
His jaw tightened. “You don’t know where anything is.”
Huck made a sudden rush.
It lasted two strides. He drove forward with his shoulders high, jaws open, and stopped before the slope dropped toward the road. The force of it sent Dean backward into Luke.
The flashlight spun across the clearing. The rifle pointed at sky, then dirt.
Luke dragged Dean downhill.
“Move,” he said. “Now.”
Dean resisted until Huck struck the ground with one front paw. Then pride lost to survival. They backed toward the truck, stumbling through brush, Dean keeping the rifle between them and the bear without finding the nerve to raise it again.
As Luke passed my field pack, he looked over Dean’s shoulder. His boot caught the strap and kicked it uphill.
The pack slid across wet needles and stopped three feet from my right hand. Dean did not notice.
I did.
The truck doors slammed below. Tires threw gravel against the bank, and the engine revved until the sound tore away down the drainage. Huck watched the road long after the headlights vanished. Only when the forest settled did he turn back toward me.
The effort had cost him. Blood marked the inside of his hind leg, and his breath came too fast. He stood over the rope at my waist, swaying once before lowering his head.
“No more heroics,” I whispered. The word was for both of us.
I reached the pack with the tips of two fingers and dragged it closer by the strap. Dean had opened the main compartment and dumped part of its contents, but the zipper on the flat map pocket remained closed. I could not reach it while my left arm was pinned, and the knots around my waist held me several inches short.
Huck bit the rope again. This time I pulled against the loosened knot while he worked the outer strands.
My right hand had enough feeling to be useful and not enough to be graceful. Twice I lost my grip. On the third attempt, the rope around my waist slipped down over my hips.
My left shoulder came free first. The sudden release folded me forward, and Huck jumped back with a sharp exhale.
I caught myself against the trunk, then attacked the loops around my thighs with both hands. The rope had been damaged by his claws. I worried one broken strand through another until the knot collapsed.
When the final loop fell from my ankles, my legs did not hold me. I dropped onto my side and lay there while pain returned to every place the rope had denied blood. Huck stood close enough that his shadow covered my face. He sniffed my jacket, the rope burns, and the cut behind my ear, then lowered himself heavily onto his chest.
I crawled to the pack.
The emergency locator beacon was inside the map pocket.
For a moment, I only stared at it. Dean knew the equipment I carried. He had emptied my pack. The beacon should not have survived his search by accident.
Luke’s boot had not caught the strap by accident either. I opened the protective cover and held the button until the red light began to pulse.
No siren followed. No rescue lights appeared between the trees. A signal still had to reach a satellite, then a dispatch center, then people who had miles of bad road and dark timber between them and me.
But the chain had started.
Huck shifted beside the pine. The broken snare dragged across a root, and he snapped toward his leg with a sound that made me freeze. When he settled again, I saw the loop had tightened during the bluff charge. Blood darkened the fur below it.
I opened the main compartment of my pack. Inside were water, gauze, an emergency blanket, flagging tape, and my field notebook.
At the bottom lay the compact cable cutters I carried for illegal snares. I wrapped my hand around them and looked at the wounded grizzly three feet away. The easy part was knowing what needed to be done. The hard part was putting steel against the place where a wild bear hurt most…
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