Part 2
Owen showed up the next afternoon. They heard the snowmachine well before it appeared between the trees.
Owen Yates was more than thirty years younger than his uncle, broad-shouldered, always in a hurry, winter and summer. Even sitting, he looked about to get up and go somewhere. He pulled off a mitten, rubbed his palms together, then tugged at his left sleeve. He always tugged that sleeve when he was nervous, as if the cuff had gotten short on him.
“So, show me your buddy.”
Elias looked at him. “What buddy?”
“Hump.”
“Call him your buddy when he’s standing next to you.”
Owen grinned, but not for long.
The tracks by the larch had held up well. He followed them about fifty yards. “Big.”
“I know.”
“Where was the wound?”
Elias touched his own shoulder.
Owen crouched by a print. “Maybe he tangled with another bear?”
“In winter?”
“So what if it’s winter? Bears don’t read calendars.”
Elias grunted. That was Owen since childhood. If he saw a hole, he plugged it with the first explanation that came along. A noise is a tree. A track is an animal. A broken branch is the wind. His world had to work simply.
Elias had liked simple explanations once, too. Then he lived long enough to notice that a simple explanation holds only until the second strange thing turns up. They already had three. The bear came to a man, shrugged off a gunshot, and was hurt.
“Want to go up and look?” Owen asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because no. That’s reason enough.” Elias looked at the woods above. “We’ve got no business up there.”
Owen opened his mouth but didn’t argue.
Two hours later, Elias was the one who broke his own rule.
They were splitting wood by the shed when Red dropped his half-eaten fish and turned toward the slope. Minnow got up next. Elias straightened. Owen was mid-swing with the ax.
“Hold it.”
The ax stopped.
For about ten seconds nothing happened. Then the ground shivered, barely, a faint jolt under their boot soles. Almost at the same moment a boom came from up above.
Owen lowered the ax. “What was that?”
Up in the draw, snow spilled off the branches. Birds lifted all at once, though the woods had seemed empty a moment before.
“Rock fell,” Owen offered.
Elias kept looking up. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I wasn’t standing there. How would I know?”
Owen laughed. It wasn’t funny; he just wasn’t used to hearing his uncle say he didn’t know. “Okay, now I’m really curious.”
“I’m not.”
But that evening Elias got out the old map and sat over it by the lamp for a good while. Owen glanced over a few times and kept quiet.
On the map the upper draw was nearly empty. A creek, two old cutlines, an elevation mark, and a thin line in pencil. Elias couldn’t remember drawing it. Probably back in the nineties. The line ran toward the north slope and stopped.
“What’s that?” Owen asked.
Elias ran a fingernail along the pencil line. “An old trail.”
“Going where?”
The old man folded the map in half. “Nowhere now.” He put it away. “Tomorrow we’ll check the road. If it’s clear, you head down.”
“And you?”
“I’m staying.”
His nephew looked at the window, already dark. “After two visits from a bear?”
“He hasn’t eaten me yet.”
Owen snorted. “Great safety standard.”
Elias smiled a little. “Live to my age, you’ll have standards of your own.”
That night they both woke. Minnow was whining.
Owen sat up on his bunk. “Again?”
Elias was already pulling on his boots.
Hump stood by the shed, very close now. He wasn’t looking at the house. He was looking uphill.
Elias stepped onto the porch. Owen stayed in the doorway, holding the flashlight.
“Uncle Eli,” he whispered.
Hump raised his head, and the blow came again, much stronger. Boom.
Something cracked high on the slope. The bear jerked his whole body and turned. Owen stepped back inside on instinct, sure the animal was about to charge.
Hump didn’t come at them. He took two steps back, then one more. He was backing up without taking his eyes off the dark draw, and he ended up almost at the porch.
Owen stopped breathing. “Uncle Eli…”
Elias kept watching.
“He’s scared of us.”
Elias looked at the pinned ears, at the way the bear kept drawing in air from the direction of the upper slope. “No.”
“No what?”
Elias slowly raised his eyes to where the draw began beyond the black spruce. “Not us…”
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