Part 2
He took the lamp outside to look at that trail, and the snow was already coming down to meet him.
This snow came sideways out of the north on a rising wind, nothing like the dry sift of the last three days, heavy enough that the lamplight died ten feet past the porch. He stood in it until his face hurt, watching the toboggan track fill and soften. By the time he went back in, he knew there would be nothing on the hill by morning to show anyone where he’d gone.
The weather could hide her. It couldn’t fix the leg.
At first light the paw had a smell to it, sweet and wrong, and the heat had climbed past the elbow. Her eyes were open now and following him. When he came near with the water, she pulled her lips back from her teeth without making a sound. A bear that had given up wouldn’t bother.
He knew what came next with a wound like that. He also knew what it meant to drive eighteen miles down to Larch Creek and pick up a phone in front of people. In a town of two hundred and forty, saying a thing out loud in the Mercantile was the same as painting it on the water tower.
He stoked the stove full and went.
The run that took forty minutes in July took three hours. The wind had packed the river road into hard ridges the machine slammed over, and twice he lost the road entirely and had to wait for a gap in the snow to show him the line of cottonwoods. When he came in past the grain bins at the edge of town, his beard was a block of ice and he couldn’t feel the hand on the throttle.
The Mercantile was the only lit building on the street. It sold groceries in front and beer in back, and it had the one landline in town that worked when the lines went down on the ridge, which was most of the winter. Half a dozen men sat at the back bar with the noon news on. They looked up when he came in stamping, and they kept looking.
“Phone,” Hollis said to Bev behind the register. “I need the state wildlife office in Kalispell.”
“Hollis, you look like something that crawled out of a culvert.”
“Phone, Bev.”
He got a recording, then a dispatcher, then a long hold while the room went quiet behind him. Nobody pretended not to listen. At last a woman came on, brisk, as if he’d caught her mid-bite.
“This is Dr. Ruiz. They tell me you’ve got a bear situation.”
“Grizzly sow,” Hollis said. “Caught in a snare up the Tamarack. Leg’s broken above the paw. I brought her down to my place.”
The pause went on long enough that he checked the line.
“To your place,” she said.
“My cabin.”
“You have a live adult grizzly inside your cabin.”
“By the stove.” Somebody at the bar laughed and cut it off. “She was in the snare four, five days. I set the leg best I could, but it’s going bad. It’s past me.”
Another pause. He could hear her deciding he was drunk, or senile, or one of the men who phoned in every fall swearing a bear took his calf when the calf had wandered into the neighbor’s pasture. He’d been on the other end of that silence before.
“Mr….?”
“Brandt.”
“Mr. Brandt, if this is real, you need to get out of that cabin and stay out until somebody qualified…”
“I’m what’s keeping her alive,” he said. “I stay out, she’s dead tomorrow. I’m asking you to come look. You look and tell me I’m crazy, I’ll pay your gas.”
Something in that reached her, or maybe it was only that he hadn’t once raised his voice. “They’re plowing the highway to Libby tonight,” she said. “If it holds, I can be in Larch Creek by eleven tomorrow. Where do I find you?”
“Right here. The store.”
“Megan Ruiz. If this is a joke, Mr. Brandt, I’ll know in about one minute.”
When he hung up, the room had made up its mind. A couple of the old men shook their heads at the bar top. Glen Pickett, who had buried a dog the year before after a grizzly got into his sheds, said loud enough to carry that some men lost their sense when they lost their wives. Nobody told him to shut up. Bev set a coffee in front of Hollis and waved off his money, which in Bev’s language was a whole speech. Down the canned-goods aisle, Troy Mabry’s nephew Danny, who stocked shelves afternoons, stood holding a case of peaches and staring at Hollis as if he’d walked in carrying the bear.
Only Wade Kessler said nothing. He sat at the far end where he always sat, in a canvas coat worth more than everything Hollis owned, his stool turned halfway around to listen. Kessler had kept the mill running through two bad decades while every other mill up the valley went dark. Half the men in the room drew his paychecks and the other half had kin who did. He was a big man going soft, with a pleasant red face, and he lifted his beer an inch when their eyes met.
“Hard way to spend a winter, Hollis,” he said. “Snared, you said?”
“I said.”
“Hell of a thing. Somebody setting for wolves, I’d guess.”
Hollis drank the coffee, because Bev would take it personally if he didn’t, and went out to dig the machine from the drift building against its windward side. He was crouched by the track, knocking ice off the wheels with the heel of his hand, when the door opened and boots came down the steps.
Kessler stopped beside the machine with his collar up and his hands in his pockets. Up close he smelled of beer and cedar dust. He watched Hollis work for a while, friendly as a neighbor. “Tell me something,” he said. “That cable. You bring it down with her?”…
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