Part 7
The light belonged to the state.
It came over the bend low, a big orange-and-white contract helicopter, the kind they used in fire season, its searchlight cutting back and forth across the river until it found them and held. Rusk stopped laughing. The noise was enormous. Snow whirled up from the ice in a blizzard, and the machine settled onto the river a hundred yards off, rotor wash flattening the snow in a great circle around it.
People came out. Troopers in dark parkas, two men in orange with a stretcher, a woman with a medical bag, and behind them, last, moving slowly with his cane planted in the snow, Len Pike.
Len reached them, out of breath. He looked at the freight sled, at the three men in it, at the long scorched tarp behind. He looked at Amos’s soaked legs and his bare hands.
“Bev called me at midnight,” he said. “Said Dale and two of his boys gassed up and went upriver with their lights off. Just the two machines. She counted.” He jerked his chin at the helicopter. “Your vet already had this booked for first weather. I called a friend at the Fairbanks post, and he moved it up and put troopers on it.”
“Len,” Amos said. “You old fool.”
Then his legs went out from under him, and Len caught his arm, and the two old men stood propped against each other on the river ice while the rotor wash beat at them both.
After that everything sped up, and it seemed to Amos that it happened to someone else. A trooper put a blanket around him. The men in orange got the bear onto a cargo litter while Nora, wrapped in two blankets herself, stood over them and called out numbers in a voice that had gotten its edge back. They loaded the bear. They loaded the wounded man. Rusk and Cody went downriver on snowmachines with the two troopers who’d come up from the Landing behind the helicopter, their hands cuffed now instead of tied.
Nora came over to him before she climbed in. Her face was still black with soot, and her eyes looked huge in it.
“They’re taking her straight to the surgical center,” she said. “I’m going with her. You’re on the second trip. Len’s making them.”
“Good.”
“Thank you.” She hesitated. “For your hands. On the vials.”
“You didn’t flinch,” he said. “With the needle. In there.”
She laughed, a short, shaky sound. “I flinched the whole time. You just couldn’t see it in the dark.”
The blades started turning. She ran for the open door, bent low, and climbed in, and the door slid shut. Amos stood with Len and watched the helicopter lift off the ice and bank south and get smaller until it was just a light, and then not even that.
The next three days were troopers and a clinic. In a small, overheated room at the post in Fairbanks he told it once, in order, without decoration, while a heavy, patient sergeant named Ruiz nodded and wrote. The snare had ridden out the night in the outer pocket of Nora’s pack, and the lock with C.D. stamped on it was in an evidence bag on Ruiz’s desk; Cody had started talking in the helicopter and hadn’t stopped since. At the clinic down the street a doctor looked at Amos’s right foot and took two toes off it on the second day. He walked a little differently after that.
On the third afternoon Ruiz let him go. He walked out into the parking lot in clothes Len had bought him at the farm store, stiff new jeans and a canvas coat that didn’t fit across the shoulders, and stood there in the low winter sun with traffic going by, and realized he did not know where he was supposed to go next. Everything he owned was in a heap of ash on a bench above the river.
“Amos.”
Nora was crossing the lot toward him in jeans and a clean down jacket. She looked like someone else, someone who worked in a building and drove a car and slept in a bed.
“They told me you were finishing up,” she said. “I wanted to catch you before Len drove you back.”
“How is she?”
“Out of surgery last night. Two plates, like I said. It’s going to be a long time.” She shoved her hands in her pockets. “She lost a lot of muscle where the cable was. She might always limp. But the bone’s going to take, and the infection’s coming down. She ate this morning.”
He nodded and looked at his boots for a while.
“The state biologists are arguing about her,” Nora said. “If she heals, some of them want to try her back in the wild. A long way north, far from roads, with a collar so they can keep track of her. Some of them say a zoo. I’m on the first side, loudly.”
“Good,” he said.
She took a folded piece of paper out of her pocket. “My mom’s got a cabin outside North Pole she doesn’t use in winter. Furnace, running water. It’s not much, but it’s…”
“Len has a couch,” Amos said.
“Len’s seventy-four.”
“I’m not far behind him. We’ll keep each other honest.”
She saw he wasn’t going to take it, and decided not to make it a fight. She folded the paper and put it back. Then she held out her hand, and this time he took it.
“Take care of yourself, Amos.”
“You too.”
She walked away across the lot toward a small blue car and didn’t look back.
He slept on Len’s couch that night, and the next, and pretty soon nobody mentioned that he was supposed to be going anywhere else. He started going down to Halvorsen’s in the mornings for coffee, and the men by the stove, who used to go quiet when he came in, started asking him things instead: whether it was true the bear had stood up in the doorway, what Dale’s face had looked like. He found he didn’t mind telling it, a little at a time. In March, when the days got long, he went up the river with Len and three men from the Landing and a borrowed snowmachine and a chainsaw, and they started cutting logs.
The letter came in July.
He was on the new roof, nailing down the last of the poles for the sod, when Len came up the trail from the river with the mail sack and held up an envelope. “Fairbanks,” he called. “Got a stamp with a moose on it.”
Amos came down the ladder and sat on the step and opened it with his knife. Inside there was a single sheet of paper and a photograph.
The photograph showed a grizzly on a gravel bar beside a wide, braided river in sunshine, her coat thick and gold-tipped, a radio collar around her neck. She was looking back over her shoulder at whoever held the camera. There was a pale seam of scar on her left foreleg where the hair hadn’t grown back right. She was standing on all four feet.
The letter was short, in neat slanting handwriting.
Amos,
We won the argument. After a winter in the pens at the center, we let her go on June 3rd in the Brooks Range, about 300 miles from anywhere either of us has ever been. She walked off the gravel bar into the willows without looking back once, which the biologists say is exactly what you want.
Her collar pings twice a day. As of yesterday she’s eating soapberries on a hillside above the Alatna. I check the map every morning before work. I’m not supposed to tell you that.
I hope the new cabin has a bigger window.
Nora
He read it twice. Then he sat holding the photograph for a long time, with the sun warm on the back of his neck and the mosquitoes humming around his head. Len sat beside him on the step and didn’t say anything.
In August, when the fireweed had gone to cotton and the nights were starting to cool, Amos drove Len’s truck down the Chena road and parked at the pullout he hadn’t stopped at in eleven years. He sat in the cab a while. Then he got out and took June’s bucket off the seat, the speckled one with the dent and the blistered brown side, and walked up the trail, favoring his right foot a little.
The slope was the way he remembered it. Low bushes thick with fruit, the sky enormous, the river silver far below. He picked a spot partway up and knelt down.
The first berries hit the bottom of the bucket with a small hollow ping, and then another, and then a quieter sound as the bottom filled. He worked slowly, his old fingers stained blue. Every so often he lifted his head and looked uphill, along the ridge, the way June had taught him to. Then he went back to picking.