Part 2
Walt set the coffeepot back on the burner before he answered, because his hand wanted to do something else with it.
“Then you’d better call them back,” he said. “Tell them the barn comes with a grizzly.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s true.”
“I know it’s true. That’s the point.” Dana pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. “Last February you lay on the ice by that woodpile for fifty minutes with your hip out. Fifty. I heard your address come over the dispatch radio in the middle of a shift, and I had to finish splinting a kid’s arm before I could even get to my car.”
He’d heard this before, but never with the minutes in it.
“I’m not asking you to move to Arizona,” she went on. “I’ve got a room. It’s eight minutes from the clinic. You’d have a grocery store you don’t need chains to reach.”
“The Hallorans,” Walt said. “Bozeman people.”
“They’re nice people. They want to keep horses.”
“They want a view.”
“So what if they do? It’s a good view.” She opened the folder and turned it toward him: a purchase agreement, his name typed in, a yellow sticky tab where his signature would go. “I didn’t sign anything for you. I couldn’t. I just told them we’d take it.”
“We.”
She closed the folder again. “Somebody has to say we about this place. You won’t.”
He looked out the window at the knoll above the house, where a short iron fence stood around four stones: his mother’s, his father’s, a baby brother he’d never met, and Ruth’s. From the kitchen he could see the top of the fence and nothing more.
“Your mother is up there,” he said.
“I know where my mother is.” Dana’s voice went flat in a way it never did with patients. “I walk up there every time I come. Every single time. When was the last time you did?”
He didn’t answer. He hadn’t been up the knoll since the funeral, and they both knew it.
She went out to see the bear. He told her not to, and she went anyway, the way her mother would have, and he took the shotgun off the rack and followed her across the yard. He kept bear slugs in it and had never fired one at anything but a target.
Agnes was awake now. She stood in the barn doorway with her front feet in the snow, enormous and still, but she wasn’t looking at them. Her nose was lifted toward the head of the gulch, toward the Queen, and her nostrils worked slowly.
Dana stopped forty yards off. Walt stopped beside her.
“That’s really her,” Dana said quietly. “The shawl.”
“That’s her.”
“Mom used to talk to her. Did you know that? She’d stand on the porch with her coffee and say, ‘Morning, Agnes,’ across the creek like she was talking to the lady at the post office.”
He knew. He’d stood behind her in the doorway and said nothing, because it seemed like something between the two of them.
The bear swung her heavy head their way once, then back toward the gulch. She didn’t charge or huff or clack her teeth. She went back to smelling the mountain, as if they weren’t the most important thing in front of her.
“I’m staying tonight,” Dana said. “Don’t argue. I’m not driving fourteen miles home and leaving you here with a grizzly in your barn.”
They walked back. The steps had gone to glare ice in the shade, and she held out her arm at the bottom. He went up holding the railing instead.
Before supper she climbed the knoll in the last light to call the clinic about her Monday shift, because it was the only place on the ranch where her phone would work. He made her take the shotgun. From the kitchen window he watched her stand at the iron fence, a small dark shape with one arm raised to hold the phone up and the other hand resting on top of Ruth’s stone. He looked away before she turned around.
She made chili from the groceries and talked about the clinic, about the Ruiz baby she’d treated for croup two weeks ago, about how Tess Ruiz had driven in at three in the morning with the baby wrapped in a towel because her car heater was broken. Walt listened and ate and didn’t bring up the folder. Neither did she. It sat on the end of the table like a third person.
When he went to bed, he lay awake listening for the creek.
Sauer Creek ran under the ice all winter, even at thirty below. The water came out of the old drain tunnel at the Queen warmer than the air, and it kept a channel open the whole length of the gulch. On the coldest nights you could hear it from the bedroom, a steady muttering under the floor of the world. Ruth used to say the creek talked all winter and Walt talked all summer, and between the two of them she never got any quiet.
Tonight he couldn’t hear it. He told himself it was the cold, the snow piled against the north wall. He’d been telling himself something like that since Thanksgiving.
Around two, Juniper screamed.
He was at the window before he was awake. Dana came into the hall in his old flannel robe, the one she’d borrowed years ago and never returned. Under a half moon, the yard was blue and bright. Agnes was walking up the slope behind the house, slowly but steadily, her pale shoulders rolling. She didn’t go toward the woods. She went straight up the hill to the knoll and lay down in the snow along the iron fence.
Down in the round pen, Juniper had gone quiet. She stood facing the knoll with her ears pricked.
“What’s she doing?” Dana whispered.
“Getting up high,” Walt said, and didn’t know why he’d said it.
In the morning he took the ax down to the creek, the way he did every morning, to open the water hole for the mare. He kept it chopped open on a bend below the barn, where the current ran fast and the ice never got more than a few inches thick.
He swung once, and the blade went through the ice and kept going, into air. He knelt and broke the edges away with his hands. Under the shelf of ice, where there should have been black water moving, there was only bare gravel furred with frost. The creek bed was dry…
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