Part 2
That place was Gilchrist’s dam.
A mining outfit had pushed it up across Tenderfoot Creek in the nineteen-thirties, three miles above the station. The company went broke before the war and left behind the earth dam, a rotting timber spillway, and a pond that froze solid every winter. Lyle knew the clay because he’d once slid down the face of that dam on the seat of his pants, Ruth laughing at him from the berry bushes, and he’d spent the evening scraping it off his jeans with a knife.
A south-facing earth bank, with soft fill and good drainage, would make an easy place for an old bear to dig in.
If Bishop had been sleeping inside Gilchrist’s dam, and the inside of the dam was wet in January, then something up there had gone wrong.
He didn’t let himself finish the thought. He went inside and found the satellite messenger in the drawer, under the spare batteries. Dana had given it to him the spring after the funeral and made him promise to send one word every night, OK, so she would know he hadn’t fallen through the creek ice or off the roof. He had kept the promise and resented every one of those nights.
The keypad was too small for his fingers. Bishop in yard all night, he typed. Wouldnt leave. Big boom upvalley 3am. Im fine. Just so you know.
Her answer came eighteen minutes later. Bishop the BEAR?? In JANUARY? Are you inside
Yes.
Leaving camp after shift. Keep Sadie in. Dont argue, its one sentence.
Thats two sentences, he typed. Then he deleted it and sent OK instead.
At twenty to two, while he was splitting stove wood, a second boom came down the valley. He felt it through the soles of his boots before he heard it, and a puff of snow came off the cabin roof. He set the maul down, went inside, and wrote the time in the remarks column.
Dana’s headlight came up the creek road at twenty past five. She drove the state’s snowmachine, with a freight sled behind it and her duffel lashed on top. She climbed off and kicked each ski the way she kicked the tires of every truck on her crew. She was forty-one, with her mother’s sharp chin and shoulders built by twelve winters of plowing, and for two years she had run the Kettle River maintenance camp at the highway bridge, six miles down.
“Where is he?” she said, instead of hello.
“Gone since morning. He’ll be back.”
“You sound pleased about that.”
“I sound like a man reporting the facts.”
She brought in a coffee can of frozen moose chili and set it on the stove. When she went back out for her sleeping bag, Lyle stood in the doorway and watched her unbuckle the sled bag. A manila folder rode on top of her gear. Its corner was bent back, and a brochure stuck out of it. He could see half a photograph of an old couple smiling over a raised garden bed, and the words Birch Hill Senior Apartments.
She tucked the folder deeper into the bag, and Lyle went back inside before she could see that he’d seen it.
Over the chili she gave him the speech he expected. A grizzly that came into a yard in winter was a problem bear, and Fish and Game would tell him so. Problem bears ended one way, and an old man alone at the end of a dead-end creek had no business keeping one for a neighbor.
“Fish and Game never met him,” Lyle said.
“Uncle Lyle.”
“He lay down by the shelter like he was waiting for a bus. He didn’t look at the cache once.”
Dana didn’t answer that. She tore a heel off the bread and dragged it through her bowl.
“Who’s covering for you tomorrow?” he asked.
“Hollis.” She made a face. “He’ll cover. Then he’ll bring it up for a year, like March.”
Lyle remembered March. She had closed the highway for an avalanche that never came down, and two of her crew had sat all night in a loader cab on the gravel pit bench at forty below. The youngest, Marcus, had lost the feeling in three fingers for a month. Hollis had worked that road for twenty-six winters, and he had mentioned the night at every safety meeting since.
“He’s not wrong to,” Dana said. “That’s the trouble with Hollis. He’s usually not wrong.”
She studied him over her spoon. She had always been able to tell when he was holding back, and he had always been able to wait her out. Tonight neither of them won.
Bishop came back at half past eleven. Dana saw him first, through the window over the washbasin, and she went very still. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. That’s a big bear.”
“Watch his head,” Lyle said.
“What?”
“Watch his head. Don’t watch the rest of him.”
They stood side by side at the dark glass for twenty minutes. At ten to midnight the bear’s head came up off his paws, and Dana drew in a breath. Then the boom rolled down the valley, and the lamp chimney rattled in its collar.
“Frost quake,” she said at once, as if she’d had the word ready. “We get them on the highway. The ground freezes too fast, the water in it expands, and it cracks. The pavement splits right across both lanes.”
“When the cold drops fast.”
“Right.”
“It’s been thirty below for twelve days. Hasn’t moved two degrees.”
She had no answer to that. He opened the ledger and turned it toward her so she could see the times: 3:10. 1:40. 11:50. She read them, and then her eyes went to the right-hand column, where his handwriting sat inside her aunt’s ruled lines. She let it go, and Lyle was grateful.
“You’d tell me,” she said finally, “if you were scared up here.”
“I’d tell you if it were any of your business.”
He regretted it before he finished saying it. Dana put her mug down carefully, as if it might break, said goodnight, and climbed the ladder to the loft.
A fourth boom came at twenty past five in the morning. Lyle wrote it down in the dark.
At first light he took the ice bar and the bucket down to the creek. Thirty-one winters ago he had built a plywood lid over a deep pool below the cabin. Every morning he lifted the lid, chopped through the skin of ice that had formed overnight, and dipped water from the spring-fed current that had never once stopped running underneath.
He chopped through the skin. The bar went straight on through and rang against something hard.
There was no slosh and no black water welling up. He knelt, then lay flat on the snow, and shone the headlamp down the hole. Under the ice shelf, where Tenderfoot Creek had run every winter he had lived beside it, there was nothing but bare frosted stones and the dry smell of cold rock…
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