Part 3
“It’s on her leg,” Hollis said.
That was true as far as it went. The loop was on her leg. The six feet of free end, with Kessler’s paint on it, was coiled in the inside pocket of his coat, pressing against his ribs.
Kessler studied him through the snow. “Well. When you get it off her, whoever owns it will want it back. Cable’s not cheap anymore.” He smiled and went back inside. Hollis finished with the wheels and noticed that his hands were steadier than he expected.
He didn’t head back up the river. He went three houses down to Dutch’s.
Lyle Amundsen had been the game warden for this end of the county for thirty-one years. Everyone had called him Dutch for so long that his own grandchildren thought it was his name. He was seventy-four now, with a bad hip and a kitchen that smelled permanently of coffee and gun oil. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was the closest Hollis had to a friend’s virtue. Then he looked at the cable lying on his oilcloth for a long time.
“You know what you’re holding,” Dutch said.
“Paint.”
“It’s a federal case, is what it is. Snaring a grizzly. They’ll want this, and they’ll want that loop off her leg, and they’ll want to see how that ferrule was crimped.” He rubbed his face. “Cody drives log truck for Kessler. Has for six years. You know that.”
“I know it.”
“I’m just saying it out loud so I’ve said it.” Dutch slid the cable into a bread bag and put it in the drawer under the phone, next to the batteries and the church directory. “I’ll call the warden in Libby in the morning. You stay here tonight. You’re not driving that river again in the dark.”
Hollis didn’t argue. He slept four hours on Dutch’s couch under an afghan someone had crocheted in the colors of a high school that no longer existed, and he dreamed of nothing.
Megan Ruiz came in at ten past eleven, in a state pickup with chains on all four wheels. She was younger than her voice, early thirties, compact, in a parka with the agency patch half torn off one shoulder. She took one look at him and he watched her decide. He was either telling the truth or he was the most committed liar she’d ever met, and she’d find out which at the other end of the river.
She rode behind him on the machine with her gear box strapped to the rack, gripping the seat handles and saying nothing for eighteen miles. Twice, when they hit drifts, he felt her nearly come off. She didn’t complain. When they pulled up at the cabin, she stood in the yard pulling on a second pair of gloves, and he saw her hands weren’t quite steady.
“Stay in the door,” she said. “Whatever happens, you stay in the door.”
Then she went in, and stopped, and he heard her let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost something else.
The sow lifted her head off the hides. Her lips peeled back. Megan crouched slowly just inside the threshold, and for a minute neither the woman nor the bear moved. Then she said, very quietly, “Well, hello. Hello, you,” and began opening her box without looking away.
She put the sow under with a pole syringe, waited, checked the eyes and the breathing, and only then went close. Hollis watched her face darken as she worked down the leg. When she reached his lath splint she stopped and looked at the knots.
“You did this?”
“Wasn’t anybody else.”
“It isn’t bad.” She said it like an admission. Then her eyes went past him to the wall by the door, to the marten boxes and the bundle of body-grip traps hanging from their chains. Her voice changed.
“You trap.”
“Marten. Bobcat when there’s snow.”
“Then you’ll understand why I have to ask whether this was yours.”
He didn’t take offense; he’d have asked the same. He held up a thumb and finger an inch apart. “My cable’s about that big around. Anybody setting three-eighths is after something that outweighs me.” He considered telling her about the paint and decided she would hear it better from a warden than from an old man with a stove full of bear. “I didn’t set it. I found it.”
She held his eyes a moment longer, then turned back to the leg. “Lamp,” she said. “Closer. And I need water hot enough to hurt.”
They worked through the short afternoon. She cut the loop free, sealed it in a plastic bag, and zipped the bag into the inside pocket of her parka without being asked, and that, more than anything she’d said, made him start to trust her. She flushed the wound, gave antibiotics and something for the pain, and rebuilt his splint with molded padding and tape the color of a traffic cone. He held the lamp, fed the stove, and pressed down on the bear’s shoulder when the sleeping body twitched. Once he caught her talking under her breath to the animal, the same low steady murmur he’d used on the hill, and he looked away so she wouldn’t know he’d noticed.
When she straightened, the window had gone dark blue.
“The bone’s in pieces,” she said. “I can’t fix that here. If she gets to the clinic in Kalispell in the next day or so, there’s a chance they save the leg. If they have to take it, she doesn’t go back out. A three-legged grizzly in the wild is a dead grizzly. Best case then is a facility somewhere.” She didn’t say what the worst case was. He could see she’d been the one to carry out the worst case before, more than once.
She took a small orange satellite messenger from her parka and thumbed out a request for the agency helicopter. They waited twenty minutes by the stove for the answer. Ceiling too low, it said. Reassess at first light.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said.
“Tomorrow.”
Before she slept, Megan stood a while at the shelf by the bed, where a woman in a red wool cap squinted out of a dime-store frame. “Your wife?” she asked. Hollis said, “Ruth,” and then, because the bear was breathing on the floor between them and lying would have been stupid, “A sow got her. Nineteen years ago, down at the bend.” Megan looked from the photograph to the bear and back. She didn’t say she was sorry, and he was grateful for that.
She fell asleep in his one good chair around nine, still in her parka, her boots stuck toward the stove. Hollis didn’t sleep. He sat on the stool with the rifle and listened to the bear breathe, and to the stove tick, and to the storm, which had finally blown itself out. The quiet afterward was enormous, the kind of cold-night quiet in which a man could hear a branch let go a mile off.
So he heard the engines a long time before he saw them. First a vibration he felt through the floor more than heard, then a thin, steady whine downriver. He went to the window and wiped the frost from one pane with his sleeve.
Two headlights were coming up the river ice, side by side, fast…
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