Part 2
The change was no more than an inch, but Eli felt it in both hands.
Cedar pulled again. The hauling rope slid over wet bark, tightening first, then shifting sideways into one of the hemlock’s deep grooves. Eli turned his right wrist as far as the joint would allow.
Skin peeled from the heel of his hand. He kept turning.
The loop crossed his knuckles, caught at the thumb, and stopped. Eli flattened his palm behind the trunk and pulled until pain flashed to his elbow. For one sickening second, he thought the thumb would break before the rope gave.
Then his right hand came free.
He dragged it around the trunk and cradled it against his chest. The fingers were swollen, purple at the joints, and slow to obey. Behind him, Cedar released the rope and moved away as the cub cried again.
Eli did not call after her. He hooked two stiff fingers beneath the loosened line across his ribs. Cedar’s earlier pull had shifted a half hitch toward the rough side of the trunk. He pressed the knot against a ridge of bark and worked it up and down, using the tree as a rasp.
The first passes did nothing except grind grit into his knuckles. He changed the angle, braced one boot against a root, and threw his weight sideways. Bark tore through his coat. The hitch moved a fraction.
“Come on,” he breathed.
He repeated the motion until the rope burned through the skin above his hip. At last the hitch rolled over itself and opened enough for him to force his right hand under the chest loop. He pulled slack toward his shoulder one painful inch at a time.
When the line slipped below his ribs, air entered him so quickly that he coughed. The sound brought Cedar’s face into view between the rhododendron leaves. Her ears were forward; her body remained angled toward the cub. She did not approach.
Eli reached behind the hemlock with his free hand and found the wrist knot by touch. His left hand had almost no feeling, which made it difficult to tell rope from his own fingers. He picked at the wet braid until a loop rose beneath one nail.
The knot had been tied by someone who knew hauling line but had been in a hurry. That knowledge hurt more than it helped.
Eli pulled the loop, lost it, found it again. The hemlock bark gave him resistance where his numb fingers could not. After several minutes, the knot softened, and his left wrist slid out with a strip of skin left on the rope.
The remaining turns around his waist and thighs were joined to the same line. Freeing them was not quick. He had to rotate around the trunk, drag each binding across the bark, and feed slack downward while his ribs protested every breath.
By the time the last loop dropped around his ankles, his legs would not hold him. Eli fell onto his right shoulder and lay among wet needles until the clearing stopped tilting.
The cub whimpered. He rolled onto his knees.
Cedar stood at the thicket entrance, watching him with her head low. There was no gratitude in her posture, no invitation. She was a wild mother divided between a trapped cub and an injured man who had become unpredictable by standing up.
Eli kept his gaze down and crawled toward the sound. The rhododendron formed a wall six feet deep. Inside it, a young black bear lay against an uprooted stump, one foreleg folded beneath its chest. A steel cable loop had cinched around its body just behind the front legs, trapping one leg inside the noose.
A second cub clung silently to the low fork of a sourwood several yards behind Cedar. Its claws scraped the wet bark whenever the trapped cub struggled, but it stayed high and close to the trunk.
Each struggle drew the loop tighter and dragged the swivel against a rock. The cub was still breathing well, but its gums showed pale when it cried.
Eli stopped beyond the mother’s reach. He could see the set clearly now: cable anchored around a locust root, swivel packed with mud, no breakaway device, bait scattered in a line that led directly to the loop. Whoever placed it had wanted any bear that came through, regardless of age.
Cedar shifted between him and the trapped cub while keeping the sourwood within sight. Eli backed away on his hands and knees.
“I need cutters.”
His canvas field pack lay near a fallen log where the men had thrown it. He crawled to it, expecting every second to hear Cedar rush behind him. Instead, he heard her moving at the thicket edge and the cub’s short, weakening cries.
The pack’s zipper had been left open.
Inside were a water bottle, flagging tape, evidence bags, and a first-aid roll.
The compact cable cutters belonged in the sheath on his missing duty belt. Eli emptied the pack anyway.
The pack held no multitool, side cutters, or anything else strong enough to bite braided steel. He picked up a flat stone, tested it against the cable near the anchor, and knew from the first strike that he was wasting time.
An engine sounded below them. Eli froze with the stone raised.
The noise climbed the abandoned trace at low speed, tires slipping in mud, stopping, then catching again. Not an agency truck. An old side-by-side labored up the grade.
Cedar heard it too. She moved backward into the rhododendron until only the pale crescent on her shoulder showed through the leaves.
The engine shut off.
For several seconds, water and the cub’s breathing were the only sounds in the hollow. Then the side-by-side’s half-door creaked open below. One man started uphill.
Eli searched the spilled contents of his pack again as if metal cutters might appear through need. His sidearm was gone. His legs shook when he tried to stand, forcing him against the hemlock that had held him.
Footsteps entered the clearing. The man wore a rain-dark canvas jacket and carried a flashlight in one hand. Mud streaked his jeans to the knee. When he lifted his face, Eli recognized the gray beginning at his temples, the narrow scar across his chin, and the fear he had heard in the second voice before the blow.
Luke Carver stopped beside the severed loops of hauling rope. He was the man who had held Eli’s shoulders while someone else tied the knots…
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