Part 5
I tied a strip of orange flagging to the tree below the camera. It was the only useful thing I could do. The unit sat too high to reach without climbing, and I could barely stand. I wrote its position in my notebook, placed the cut snare cable inside an evidence bag, and settled back beneath the emergency blanket.
Huck paced the edge of the clearing once, then lay down again. The first human sound came sometime near midnight: a faint electronic chirp from a radio below the ridge. A voice followed, distorted by trees.
“Eli Warren! Call out if you can hear us!”
Relief struck so hard it left me dizzy. I recognized Leah Grant, the senior officer who had been coming to back me up when my check-in stopped. I filled my lungs as far as my ribs allowed.
“Bear in the clearing!” I shouted. “Hold where you are!”
The movement below stopped.
Leah answered immediately.
“Copy. Are you conscious? Are you injured?”
“Yes. Adult male grizzly, about thirty yards above you. Nobody comes up with a weapon raised.”
A pause followed. The county deputies with her had every reason to be careful. They had followed a distress signal into dark timber and found blood, torn rope, and a grizzly standing near an injured officer. Fear could make a fatal decision before explanation caught up.
Huck rose.
Light from below moved between the trunks, not advancing, just enough to show where the rescue team waited. He turned toward it and tested the air. The cut cable was gone from his leg, but his limp remained. His body widened as he shifted to face the slope.
“Huck,” I said. His ear moved.
I pointed uphill, toward the deepest timber. The gesture meant nothing by itself. Perhaps my tone did.
Perhaps the arriving people made the choice for him. He looked back at me, then toward the dark beyond the clearing.
“Go on.”
He took three slow steps and stopped beside the pine that had held me. His nose passed over the rope hanging from the bark. For a second, he stood inside the beam of my beacon, the old scar pale along his side and the fresh wound dark above his paw.
Then he moved uphill.
He did not disappear gracefully. One branch snapped under his weight, and loose stones shifted beneath the injured leg. Yet within seconds, his shape broke apart among the firs. The last thing I heard was a short huff from somewhere beyond the light.
I waited until the forest swallowed every trace of him.
“Come up,” I called.
Leah reached me first. She took one look at my wrists and the rope, then knelt without asking questions she already knew could wait. A paramedic followed, along with two deputies whose attention kept returning to the timber.
“Bear?” one asked.
“Gone,” I said. “Keep it that way.”
They wrapped me in a heavier blanket, checked my pupils, stabilized my neck, and started working through injuries in the calm order that keeps panic from becoming contagious. Leah photographed the clearing before anyone disturbed it. I pointed out the cable, the pack, the tire tracks, and the flag beneath the camera.
When a deputy climbed for the memory card, I watched his light rise through the branches until nausea forced me to close my eyes. The trip out came in pieces: a litter bumping over roots, the metallic smell inside an ambulance, Leah’s hand on the door as she told me Dean’s truck had been found sideways against a washed-out shoulder four miles below the closure. Dean had tried to leave on foot. Luke had stayed beside the vehicle and put his hands where the first deputy could see them.
At the regional hospital, a doctor counted two cracked ribs, a concussion, severe rope burns, and nerve compression in my right hand that she expected to improve. None of it sounded small, but all of it came with the same word: recoverable.
By late morning, Leah returned carrying my field notebook in an evidence sleeve and a tablet under her arm.
“The camera worked,” she said.
It had been set to record twenty-second clips whenever movement crossed the snare line. The first files showed Dean and Luke installing cable three nights earlier. Another showed Huck caught by the hind leg before dawn, fighting until the anchor tore loose. He passed the camera again hours later, dragging the broken line.
Then my truck appeared through the trees. I watched myself enter the clearing, kneel beside the blood trail, and reach for my radio. Dean came from behind me. The camera had no clear view of the first strike, but it recorded the rest: Luke taking my sidearm, Dean binding my wrists, both men arguing while I drifted in and out beneath the pine.
There was no clean audio, only wind, cloth, and occasional pieces of speech. None was needed.
Leah advanced to the final clip before they drove away. Dean carried my duty belt and radio downhill. Luke remained in the clearing for six seconds. He looked toward the road, then picked something small from the dirt beside my pack.
My beacon.
Dean had found it after all. On the screen, Luke opened the map pocket, pushed the beacon inside, and zipped it shut. He moved the pack beneath the fern, closer to the tree, then followed Dean out.
I watched the clip twice.
“He gave a full statement before sunrise,” Leah said. “He also asked me to give you this. You don’t have to read it.”
She placed a folded sheet on the bedside table. I waited until she left before opening it.
Luke’s handwriting had not changed since high school. It still leaned forward as though every word was hurrying to become the next one.
Dean found your beacon. I put it back when he went for the truck. I could have cut you loose, but I was afraid he would come back and see.
Then I told myself the beacon was enough. It wasn’t. I know that. The next line had been pressed so hard the pen nearly tore the paper. I did one small thing so I could pretend I wasn’t leaving my friend to die…
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