Part 4
Tyler fired first.
The blast tore through the clearing and sent birds lifting from every tree at once. Cal felt the concussion in his teeth. The shot hit badly, high and scattered, enough to hurt the bear without stopping him.
The bear lunged.
Cal turned his face before the animal reached Tyler. He heard the impact, the broken shout, Snake cursing, the rifle cracking once and then again. The woods filled with the raw noise of terror and muscle and men discovering too late that money did not make them larger than the thing in front of them.
Cal moved.
He slid backward through the canes on his elbows and knees, biting down as thorns scored his hands. The bear’s roar covered the sound. Snake fired again, closer this time, and Cal smelled powder through the wet leaves.
He came out behind the blowdown and ran downhill.
The ground dropped hard. Cal half-slid, half-fell through leaves, crossed the ravine, and followed the watercourse until the shouting behind him broke apart. He did not know whether Tyler was alive. He did not know whether the bear had gone down. He did know Snake would not stay to save anyone if saving them cost him the tiger.
That thought had barely formed when a bullet snapped through a sapling to Cal’s left.
He threw himself flat.
Snake was still coming.
Cal crawled behind a mossy rock, pressed himself into the mud, and listened. The shot had been far enough to miss but close enough to make the message clear. Snake had survived the clearing, and now there was no Tyler to slow him down.
Cal waited until the next gust of wind moved through the trees. Then he rolled down the bank into a narrow drainage ditch choked with leaves and followed it on his stomach for twenty yards. The cold mud slid inside his sleeves. His breath came through clenched teeth.
When he dared to rise, the forest looked empty.
It was not.
Snake was out there, and Cal could feel the man’s patience rebuilding after the surprise of the bear. That was dangerous. A startled man made noise. A patient man became part of the woods.
Cal wanted the cabin. The cable and winch still lay in the yard. With them, the rescue remained possible. Without them, the tiger might as well have been buried in stone.
He started toward home by instinct, then stopped.
Blackwater Sink lay in the opposite direction. So did the tiger. So did whatever time remained before cold took what the bog had not.
Cal stood under the darkening trees with his shotgun in one hand, the ax in the other, and understood that the gear no longer mattered if he lost the animal while chasing it. The plan he had run from the cabin with had died somewhere between Snake’s rifle and the bear’s roar.
He turned toward the sink.
The last light was already bleeding out of the sky when Cal reached the bog from the north side. Wet snow had begun to fall, not enough to whiten the ground but enough to soften the edges of everything. The water in the sink looked darker than before. The mud had closed around the tiger up to his shoulders.
The animal was still alive.
Cal had to watch carefully to be sure. The tiger’s head lay low near a mat of grass, and every few seconds his side moved beneath the mud in a shallow, shaking breath. His eyes were half-open. He no longer cried. Silence meant he had begun saving what little life remained.
“I’m here,” Cal said, though he was too far away for the words to matter.
A low growl answered from the opposite edge of the bog.
Cal sank behind a tamarack and looked across the sink.
The bear had come back.
He moved badly now, limping, head swinging low, one side darker than the rest of him in the dusk. Snake’s shots had hurt him, maybe badly, but not enough. Hunger and pain had carried him to the smell he had followed from the beginning. He stopped at the peat’s edge, ten yards from the trapped tiger, and huffed steam into the snow.
The tiger found enough strength to lift his head.
His ears pinned flat. A weak, airless snarl moved through him. It was not enough to scare anything, but Cal respected it all the same. Even half-buried and freezing, the animal would not surrender quietly.
Cal raised the shotgun and knew it would not save either of them. At this distance, with buckshot and a hurt bear, he might buy three seconds and spend his life doing it. His fingers tightened on the stock anyway.
A twig snapped behind him.
Not ahead, where the bear stood.
Behind.
Cal did not turn. He did not breathe. The sound was too clean to be weather and too careful to be an animal. Then came the small metallic click of a rifle safety being pushed off. Snake had found him…
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