Part 2
He didn’t reach for it. Some part of him that was older than thinking understood that any fast movement would bring her the rest of the way, so he stayed down and kept his eyes lowered and talked in the same flat voice he’d use on a spooked dog.
“Easy. Easy now. Nobody’s going to do anything.”
She popped her jaws twice, a sound like someone snapping a wet towel. Her breath steamed. Then the trembling started in her shoulders, a long shudder that ran down through her whole frame, and her good front leg buckled, and she went down onto her chest in the snow and stayed there. Her eyes stayed open on him. The lip came down over the teeth.
Amos let out a breath he hadn’t noticed holding. His knee had gone numb.
Getting her on the sled took most of an hour. He couldn’t lift her; she had to weigh somewhere north of two hundred pounds, and she was dead weight now except for her head, which followed him. He tipped the sled on its side against her back, packed snow behind it, and used a come-along from the trap pack, anchored to the spruce, to roll her over the rail a few inches at a time. Twice she swung at him with her good paw. The second time she caught his sleeve and tore the outer shell of his parka from elbow to cuff.
He wrapped a lash rope twice around her chest and once around her muzzle, loose enough that she could breathe, tight enough that she couldn’t open her mouth more than an inch. Then he looked at what he’d done and felt, for the first time all morning, completely ridiculous.
Eleven miles back to the cabin. The machine labored the whole way, and he took the creek crossings at a crawl, looking back every few hundred yards to see if she was still breathing. She was. Each time he looked she was looking at him.
The cabin sat on a bench above the river, twelve by sixteen, with a sod roof and a lean-to on the east wall where he kept the snowmachine and the gas. He’d built it himself the year after June died, when the house in town had gotten too quiet to stand. It held a woodstove, a bunk, a table, two chairs, a shelf of canned goods, and a calendar from the feed store in Fairbanks that he hadn’t turned since August.
He dragged the sled through the door and into the warm. It barely fit. He put the bear on the caribou hides in front of the stove and then sat on the floor across the room with the rifle against his knee and watched steam lift off her fur as the frost melted.
By the light of the lantern, the leg was worse than he’d thought. Both bones above the wrist were broken, and one had come through the skin where the cable had sawed it open. The paw had swollen to almost twice its size. It was hot when he finally made himself put his hand near it.
He did what he knew how to do. He cut the rest of the cable away with tin snips, one strand at a time, with her eyes on the back of his neck. He washed the wound with water he’d boiled and let cool, and then with half a bottle of whiskey he kept for colds. She jerked and moaned at the whiskey, and he waited for her to settle. He straightened the leg as best he could by feel and splinted it with two lengths of spruce lath from the woodpile and strips torn off an old wool shirt.
When he was done his hands were shaking. He put snow in June’s old enamel bucket, the speckled blue one that had come back to him from the berry slope with a dent in the side, and set it on the stove to melt. When it was water he slid it across the floor toward her with a stick. She didn’t drink. She didn’t seem to notice it was there.
He sat up all night in the chair. Toward morning he dozed, and woke when the fire was down to coals and the wind was hammering the stovepipe.
The storm was back. Through the one small window he could see nothing but white moving sideways. He fed the stove and checked the bear. Her breathing had evened out, but the leg had gotten hotter overnight, and the smell coming off the wound had changed. He’d smelled that before on a trapped fox. He knew what it meant.
Tamarack Landing was twenty-two miles downriver. In this weather it was a fool’s trip. He loaded the stove as full as it would go, closed the damper down, set the bucket of water within her reach, and went out to the lean-to.
The run took him four hours. Twice he lost the trail entirely and had to sit with the engine idling until the wind dropped enough to show him the cut bank on the far side. His goggles iced over and he pushed them up and rode with his eyes slitted against the snow until his eyelashes froze together. By the time he saw the fuel tanks at the edge of the Landing, the light was already going out of the day.
Halvorsen’s store had the only landline in forty miles, a beige phone on the wall beside the coffee machine. Five or six men sat around the barrel stove with their boots steaming. Talk stopped when he came through the door. Amos knew what he looked like. He had ice in his beard down to his chest.
“Bev,” he said to the woman behind the counter. “I need the phone. And I need the number for the wildlife people in Fairbanks.”
Bev Halvorsen had known him thirty years. She didn’t ask questions. She found the number in a binder under the register and dialed it for him because his fingers wouldn’t work the buttons.
The young man who answered at Interior Wildlife Rescue thought at first that Amos was drunk, then that he was confused about the species, then that he was joking. Amos said the same three sentences four times, louder each time. Grizzly sow. Snared. Leg broken, she’s in my cabin. Somewhere in the store behind him, someone laughed.
The young man put him on hold. When the line clicked back, it was a woman’s voice, low and clipped.
“This is Dr. Lindqvist. You’re telling me you have a live grizzly inside a building.”
“Subadult. Three years, maybe.”
“Inside a building.”
“She’s on my floor in front of the stove.”
A silence. “Is she sedated?”
“No, ma’am. She’s just about dead.”
Another silence, longer. “Where are you?”
He told her. She asked how far, and what the weather was, and whether there was a strip. There was, a gravel runway on the river terrace that the mail plane used twice a week when it could. She said a name, a pilot, and said she’d call him. She said if the ceiling lifted at all she’d be there tomorrow. She said, “Don’t go near her mouth,” and hung up.
When he turned around, the men by the stove were all looking at him.
“Teague,” one of them said. “You haul a griz into your cabin?”
He didn’t answer. He took a cup of coffee from Bev and went to the corner bench and sat.
They talked about him anyway. Somebody said he’d finally gone around the bend, living alone out there. Somebody else said it was the June thing, you never knew what a thing like that did to a man. Amos drank his coffee and let it go past him.
At the table nearest the window, a big man in a clean canvas jacket had been working on a plate of chili the whole time without looking up. Dale Rusk owned the fuel depot and the freight barge and the gravel pit, and most of the men in the room owed him money or work or both. He finished his chili, wiped his mouth, and came over to the bench with his coffee.
“Rough trip,” he said.
Amos nodded.
“That’s something, about the bear.” Rusk sipped. “Where’d you find her?”
“Up the line.”
“Which drainage?”
Amos looked at him then. Rusk’s face was friendly and interested, the face of a man making conversation. But his eyes had gone still, and he’d asked the second question too fast.
“Up the line,” Amos said again.
Rusk smiled and nodded and went back to his table. A minute later he paid Bev and went out. Through the frosted window Amos watched him cross to the fuel shed and stand in its lit doorway, talking to two younger men who kept glancing back at the store. Then one of them dragged a freight sled up to the pumps and began filling red gas cans, one after another, and setting them in the sled. Behind the counter, Bev had stopped wiping the coffee machine. She was watching too…
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