Part 5
Nora stared at him through the smoke. “In here?”
“If she’s asleep in here, she burns.”
“If she’s awake in here, she…” Nora broke off, coughing. Her eyes were streaming. “She’s hypothermic, she’s septic, the reversal on top of that could…”
“Could kill her. I know.” The back wall was crackling now, a sound like heavy rain on a tin roof. “Asleep, she’s dead for sure. Awake, she’s got a chance at that door. So do we, maybe, if they’re looking at her instead of us.”
Nora looked at the bear and then at the door and then at him. Her face, in the orange light coming through the walls, was set in a way he hadn’t seen on her before. Then she dropped to her knees and tore open her case and found a vial by feel and filled a syringe, her hands shaking so badly the needle clicked against the glass.
“Hold her head,” she said. “No. Don’t. Don’t hold anything. Just get back.”
She went in at the shoulder, quick, and was out again and scrambling back on her hands before the bear had turned. Then she crawled behind the stove and pulled her pack against her and said, flatly, “Two minutes. Maybe less.”
Amos dragged the table away from the door. He set the rifle against the wall by the hinges, where he could reach it, and took his splitting axe off its pegs instead. He didn’t want to shoot anybody else if he could help it. He wasn’t sure he could help it.
The smoke was thick enough now that he had to crouch to see. The heat on the back wall had become something you could feel on your face from across the room. Nora had pulled her scarf over her nose. She had June’s bucket, he saw. She’d grabbed it off the floor without thinking and was holding it against her chest along with the pack, as if it were the most important thing in the cabin.
The bear came up.
She came up all at once, front end first, three legs braced and the splinted fourth held off the floor, and her head swung around the room with her lips peeled back and her ears pinned flat. She looked at the fire. She looked at the door. A sound came up out of her that was lower than the roar, a grinding rumble, and the hair on her shoulders lifted.
Amos threw the bolt and kicked the door open and flattened himself behind it against the wall.
Cold air rushed in and the fire on the back wall leaped up in answer. The doorway framed the clearing, lit orange and gold, the snow bright as noon, and in the middle of it two men standing in the open near the snowmachines, watching the cabin burn. Rusk had his rifle slung. The other man, the one who’d thrown the match, had his hands in his pockets.
The bear went out the door.
She went low and limping and fast, faster than anything that hurt should move, a dark heavy shape through the doorway and into the light, and when she cleared the step she stopped and rose up on her hind legs to see. Even three-legged, even starved down, standing she was taller than either man. Smoke poured off her fur. She opened her mouth and roared at them.
Neither of them moved. Rusk’s rifle hung off his shoulder by the sling, forgotten.
Amos slid out from behind the door and went along the front wall at a run, keeping to the edge of the light, axe in both hands. Rusk was turning toward the bear, finally fumbling for the rifle. He never saw Amos. Amos swung the axe flat and caught him across the back of the head with the side of the poll, not the edge, and Rusk folded into the snow like a dropped coat.
The other man broke and ran. The bear dropped to three feet and went after him six or seven bounding strides, and he screamed and fell, and she stood over him with her face a foot from his. He covered his head and lay still. She huffed at him once, hard, and swung away toward the dark tree line, and took four more steps, and stopped. Her bad leg buckled. She lay down in the snow.
Nora was in the doorway with her pack.
Amos turned to shout at her to get clear of the fire, and saw her face change. She was looking past him. He turned.
The man he’d shot through the legs had dragged himself away from the burning wall to the corner of the lean-to. He was propped on one elbow in the snow with a rifle across his knee, and he was bringing it up. Not at the bear. At Amos’s back. His face was white and set and twenty feet away.
Nora threw the pack.
It wasn’t a good throw, but it was heavy, and it hit the rifle barrel and the man’s arm together, and the rifle went off. The shot went wide and low into the clearing. Something metallic banged behind Amos, a hard flat crack like a dropped wrench. Then he was across the snow, and he had the rifle by the barrel and twisted it out of the man’s hands and threw it as far as he could into the deep snow beyond the woodpile.
The man lay back and moaned and held his thigh. Blood was black on the snow under him.
“Don’t,” Amos said, to nobody in particular. He was breathing so hard he could barely get the word out. “Nobody do anything.”
The match man was still lying where the bear had left him, arms over his head. When Amos walked over with Rusk’s rifle and told him to sit up, he sat up and put his hands on his head without being asked. He was young, Amos saw. Twenty-two, twenty-three. He was crying. When Amos asked his name, he said it was Cody.
“Get the rope off my sled,” Amos told Nora.
She brought it, and her roll of vet wrap, and a handful of zip ties from her kit that she said were for IV lines. They tied Rusk first, who was starting to stir and groan, then Cody, then the one with the shot leg, after Nora had packed the wound and wrapped it tight and checked that the bullet had gone through clean. She did it as carefully as she’d done the bear. Her hands had stopped shaking.
Behind them the cabin roof caught.
It went fast. The sod on top kept it from flaring, but the poles underneath burned through and the whole roof sagged, and then the back wall leaned in and the front wall leaned with it, and sparks went up into the sky in a column. The lean-to went with it. His snowmachine was in the lean-to. His gas was in the lean-to. When the lean-to roof came down there was a soft thump and a ball of light that made everyone flinch.
Amos stood and watched. He didn’t feel much of anything.
“Your house,” Nora said beside him.
“It’s done. Nothing to do about it.” He turned. “The bear.”
They went to her together. She lay on her side at the edge of the trees with her eyes half shut. Her fur was singed in long brown streaks down her flank, and the smell of burned hair came off her. Nora knelt and pressed two fingers inside the hind leg.
“She’s alive.” Her voice was thin. “Barely. Heart’s all over the place.”
Amos crouched beside her and put a hand on the bear’s shoulder. Two days ago he would have pulled the trigger on her without a second thought. Now he found that he didn’t want to take his hand away.
Nora was already pulling things out of her pack, which had come apart at one seam when she threw it. Vials. Syringes. A heat pack, which she cracked and stuffed in the bear’s armpit.
“I have to get fluids into her and something for the heart,” she said. “But it’s thirty below. The drugs’ll freeze in the line before they’re in her.”
Amos took a vial out of her hand and put it inside his shirt, against his skin, and held it there. Then another. She looked at him, and nodded, and kept working.
When she was done she sat back on her heels. In the firelight her face was black with soot except where she’d wiped her eyes. She still had June’s bucket in the crook of one arm. She saw him looking at it and held it out.
“I grabbed it,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
He took it. The enamel was blistered on one side now, and the speckles had gone brown. He held it a long moment. Then he set it carefully on the seat of Rusk’s snowmachine and went to look at the machines.
Rusk’s was nearly new, a big long-track with a heated seat and a cargo rack. The other one was older, and there was a hole punched through its cowling an inch above the engine, and the snow under it was going dark and wet with oil. That was the crack he’d heard when the wounded man’s shot went wild.
He crouched and looked at it for a long time. Then he stood and walked back to Nora. “We’ve got one machine,” he said…
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