Part 4
“Nora.” He touched her shoulder. “Get up.”
She came awake fast, the way people do who’ve been on call. “Is it her?”
“Company.” He turned the lantern down to nothing. “Two machines on the river.”
“The helicopter people wouldn’t…”
“Not at one in the morning. Not by snowmachine.” He took the box of shells off the shelf and counted them by feel in the dark. Six. He’d meant to buy more in town and had forgotten, with everything. “Get behind the stove. Low.”
The headlights came up the river and swung off at the bank below the cabin and climbed the trail. They stopped about seventy yards out, just short of the clearing. The engines cut. In the silence Amos could hear the stovepipe ticking and Nora breathing behind him and, beyond the walls, boots in snow.
“Teague!” A man’s voice, loud and friendly. “Hey, Amos. It’s Dale.”
Amos said nothing.
“Saw your light. Thought we’d come up and give you a hand with that bear.” A pause. “You hear me in there?”
Nora’s hand found his sleeve in the dark. He shook his head at her, though she couldn’t see him.
“Come on, Amos. You going to make us stand in the yard?” The voice was moving now, circling to his left. There were other footsteps, two sets, spreading out. “Look. You told the whole store that bear was snared. Cody stamps his locks like a damn fool, so that piece of cable’s got his name on it, and I figure your vet’s got it now. We’d like it back.”
“And then what,” Amos said, loud enough to carry.
“And the bear. I got a man in Anchorage already paid half on her, and I already spent it.” Rusk laughed, not much humor in it. “She’s caused you nothing but trouble, old man. We’ll take her off your hands.”
“She’s going to Fairbanks.”
“No,” Rusk said. “She’s really not.”
Something heavy hit the door. The whole wall shuddered and frost sifted down from the ceiling poles.
“That’s the friendly part over,” Rusk called. “You got five minutes. You send the girl out with that snare and you drag the bear out after her, and we all go home. Or we come in. I’m not going to stand out here and argue about a bear.”
Nora’s breath was coming fast and shallow. “He’s not going to let me walk away,” she whispered. “Is he.”
“No.”
“Then why would he say…”
“Because he wants us out where he can see us.” He moved toward the back wall, feeling along the logs. At knee height there was a vent he’d cut years back to pull air for the stove in summer. In winter he stuffed it with an old down vest. He worked the vest free, and cold poured in around his hands, and through the gap he could see a narrow slice of the clearing in starlight: the stacked woodpile, the corner of the lean-to, a man’s legs.
“Is there a radio?” Nora whispered. “A phone, anything?”
“No.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We keep them out until morning. Len knows where I am.”
“Who’s Len?”
“Friend. Retired trooper. If I’m not in town by tomorrow evening, he calls it in.”
“Tomorrow evening.” She said it flatly. He didn’t answer.
The five minutes, if Rusk had been counting, ran out. A boot crunched near the door. Through the gap Amos saw a figure come out of the shadow by the woodpile carrying something long. An axe. The man moved toward the door at a crouch.
Amos slid the rifle barrel through the vent and laid his cheek along the stock. He waited until the man was ten feet from the step. Then he put a round into the doorframe log eighteen inches above the man’s head.
Inside the cabin the shot was so loud it seemed to have weight. Nora cried out. On the hides the bear jerked and made a low, wet groan. Outside, the man with the axe threw himself flat in the snow and scrambled backward on his elbows toward the trees.
“Next one won’t be the wall,” Amos called.
Rusk swore, high and furious. Then a rifle went off out in the trees and a bullet came through the plank door and smacked into the shelf on the far wall, and a can of peaches exploded.
After that they shot at the cabin for a while. They weren’t aiming at anything. They put rounds through the door and the window and into the log walls from three directions, and wood splinters spun through the dark, and the glass in the little window burst inward. Amos lay flat on the floor and didn’t fire back. Nora lay behind the stove with her arms over her head.
When the shooting stopped, the silence afterward was worse.
“How many shells do you have?” Nora asked, very quietly.
“Five now.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
His father used to say that the first man in a standoff to get bored is the first man to get hurt. Amos found himself thinking of it now, flat on the floor in the dark, with cold coming through the broken window. Rusk had come out here meaning to finish something quickly. Every hour he didn’t finish it, he got more dangerous and less patient.
He crawled to the woodbox and felt inside. Six splits, maybe seven. Two hours of fire, if he let the stove burn low. The temperature outside had been dropping since dark.
“They don’t have to come in,” Nora whispered. She’d worked it out too. “They can just wait.”
“Dale doesn’t want to wait. He wants this done before anybody in town starts asking where he went.”
On the hides the bear raised her head. It came up slowly, the sedative wearing thin, and her eyes caught the faint glow from the stove’s air vent. She looked toward the broken window, where the cold came in, and she drew a breath that seemed to go on and on, and then she made a sound that filled the whole cabin. It was deep and grating, half roar and half bellow, and it shook in Amos’s chest like a truck going by.
Outside, someone yelled in pure fright. Someone else crashed backward through brush.
“Shut up,” Rusk barked. “Shut up, it can’t get out, it’s dying.” But his own voice had gone up half a tone.
The bear lowered her head again, panting. Nora was staring at her.
They waited. Twenty minutes, half an hour. Amos fed the stove one split at a time. Then he smelled it.
It came in through the vent hole, sharp and sweet: gasoline. He put his eye to the gap. A figure was moving along the back wall, three feet from his face, bent low, swinging a red plastic can in a slow arc. The gas sloshed out against the logs with a sound like rain.
“No,” Nora breathed.
Amos pushed the barrel through the vent and fired at the man’s legs. The man screamed and went down, and the can tumbled away into the snow, gurgling. But a second shape had been right behind him. A match flared, a small yellow star, and arced toward the wall.
The logs went up with a sound like a sheet being shaken out. Light leaped across the clearing. Through the broken window the whole back of the cabin was suddenly bright orange, and heat pressed against the inside of the logs like a hand.
“Burn, you old bastard,” Rusk shouted, and laughed.
Smoke curled in through the chinking. In seconds it was in their eyes. Nora was coughing, crouched behind the stove with her pack clutched to her chest. On the hides the bear was struggling to get her legs under her, her head swinging from the smoke to the door and back.
Amos looked at her. Then he looked at Nora. “You put her to sleep with something,” he said. “Can you wake her up?”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇