Part 3
Len Pike gave him a cot that night in the back room of the house Len had lived in since he retired from the Wildlife Troopers. Len was seventy-four and walked with a cane he mostly used for pointing. He listened to the whole story without interrupting, then sat a while with his hands folded on top of the cane.
“Rusk,” he said finally.
“Didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Three winters ago I found a bear carcass up the Kanuti with nothing taken but the paws and the gallbladder. Wrote it up. Never went anywhere. Dale’s boys run that country every fall, supposedly cutting firewood.”
“Didn’t see any firewood.”
“No.” Len looked at him. “You taking that vet out there tomorrow?”
“If she comes.”
“Then you write me a note before you go. Where you’ll be, when you’ll be back. If I don’t see you by dark day after, I call it in.”
Amos thought that was an old man’s fuss, but he wrote the note.
The ceiling lifted around ten the next morning, enough for a gray light with a horizon in it. At eleven-thirty a single-engine plane on skis came in low over the river, bounced once, and slid to a stop at the end of the strip. The woman who climbed out was younger than he’d pictured from her voice, maybe thirty, tall and pale, in a red parka too bright for the country. She had two hard cases and an enormous pack. She looked at the fuel tanks and the half-buried houses and the men who had drifted out to watch the plane, and then she found Amos by process of elimination.
“Mr. Teague.”
“Amos.”
“Nora Lindqvist.” She didn’t offer her hand. “I need ten minutes on your store’s phone to set up the helicopter. Then how long to your place?”
“Two hours, if the trail holds.”
She made her call. Then she rode behind him on the seat with her arms around the pack instead of around him, and she said nothing for the whole two hours. He could feel her stiff against every bump. When they reached the cabin she was off the machine before it had fully stopped, and she pushed through the door ahead of him and stopped dead.
The bear lifted her head. The cabin stank of infection and wet fur and woodsmoke. The bucket of water he’d left was half gone; she had drunk after all.
Nora knelt, slowly, at the edge of the hides, a careful distance from the head, and began unlatching one of her cases. She loaded a pole syringe and caught the bear in the thick muscle of the hip before the bear seemed to understand what had happened. Then she sat back on her heels and checked her watch and waited. Amos watched the bear’s eyes go soft, and her head settle down onto her paw.
Only then did Nora look at the splint.
She cut it off. She looked at the wound for a long time with a headlamp. She looked at the cable marks on the foreleg, where the hide had been chewed away down to raw tissue, and she looked at the coil of cut snare that Amos had dropped by the woodbox, and her jaw got tight.
“Did you set this?”
He’d known it was coming. It still landed. “No.”
“You run a trapline.”
“Marten. Lynx. I don’t set snares that size, and I don’t set them for bear.”
“Somebody did.” She turned the coil over with her gloved fingers. At the loop end was a homemade lock, a small rectangle of flat steel with the cable threaded through two drilled holes, and a pair of initials stamped into it with a punch set. C.D. “Somebody who signs his work.”
Amos crouched to look. He hadn’t noticed the stamp in lantern light. He knew a Cody Dahl, who worked for Rusk at the fuel depot and who had stood in the doorway of the shed last evening, filling gas cans.
He said nothing. It wasn’t his to say yet. Nora took three photographs of the lock with her phone, then bagged the whole snare and put it in the outer pocket of her pack and zipped it shut.
“That goes to the troopers,” she said.
They worked for three hours. Amos held the light and boiled water and handed her what she pointed to. She flushed the wound, trimmed dead tissue, packed it, closed what could be closed. She ran fluids into a vein on the bear’s hind leg, the bag hanging from a nail in the ceiling beam. She talked to herself under her breath, numbers and drug names. When she rebuilt the splint, with a proper rigid brace from her kit, she looked at his old one lying on the floor and said, without looking up, “This was a decent field splint.”
It was the first thing she’d said to him in three hours that wasn’t an instruction.
Afterward she sat on the floor with her back against the bunk and drank the coffee he made her and stared at the bear. The light was gone outside. This time of year it went early; by four it was full dark.
“Both bones,” she said. “Compound. The wound’s badly infected. I’ve got her on antibiotics, but she needs real surgery, with plates. Without it she loses the leg or she dies.”
“So she goes to Fairbanks.”
“The center’s sending a helicopter as soon as there’s flying weather. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, depending on the front.” She rubbed her eyes. “She’s not going in a bush plane, and she’s not going two hours on a sled to the strip. I’m not moving her more than once.”
“So we wait.”
“So we wait.”
The stove ticked. The bear’s breath came slow and even. Nora reached out with one finger and touched the speckled bucket by the hides, which had a crescent dent in its side.
“This was in the way all afternoon,” she said. “I kept almost kicking it.”
“It was my wife’s.”
She looked at him. He hadn’t meant to say anything else. But it was dark and warm, and he was more tired than he could remember being, and there was a grizzly on his floor, and he found that he wanted to say it, once, to somebody who hadn’t been in Fairbanks eleven years ago.
“She picked berries,” he said. “Every August. There’s a slope above the Chena road, about a mile in. Best blueberries in the valley. She’d fill that bucket three times a day and make jam until the whole house stank of sugar.” He turned his cup. “I was down at the truck. I heard her yell my name once. When I got up there the sow was already running off with two cubs, and June was in the bushes, and that bucket was lying a hundred feet down the hill.”
Nora didn’t say anything. He was grateful for that.
“I’ve hated every one of them since,” he said. “Every bear in this country. I’d lie awake thinking about it.” He nodded at the shape on the hides. “Had the rifle on her yesterday. Had my finger on the trigger.”
“What stopped you?”
He thought about it honestly. “She didn’t look like the one that did it,” he said. “She looked like somebody else had done it to her.”
After a while Nora got up and checked the IV and came back and sat closer to the stove. He banked the fire. She fell asleep against the bunk with her head tipped sideways and her mouth open, still in her red parka, and he sat in the chair with the rifle across his knees and listened.
He’d lived alone too long to sleep deeply in company. Around one in the morning he heard it, under the wind: a high, thin drone, rising and falling. He went to the window and cupped his hands against the glass. Out on the river, a mile down, two headlights were coming up the ice…
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