Part 4
He put his hand on Megan’s shoulder and she came awake all at once, the way people do in strange places.
“Somebody’s coming,” he said. “Put your boots on. Then sit on the floor behind the stove and stay there.”
“Who?”
“The people who own that cable.” He turned down the lamp until the flame died, and the cabin went black except for the red seams around the stove door.
The engines stopped a hundred yards out, near the bend in the river. The silence that came after was worse than the noise. Hollis stood beside the window frame with his back to the logs and counted shapes against the snow: three of them, spreading out.
“Hollis!” Wade Kessler’s voice carried easily in the cold, warm and a little loose. He’d been drinking, but not too much. “It’s Wade. Came up to see about your patient. Heard the lady doctor’s with you. Figured you could use help getting that animal down the hill.”
Hollis said nothing.
“Don’t be like that. Come on out. It’s cold, and I’m too old to be standing in the snow yelling at a house.”
“The cable’s not here, Wade.” Hollis kept his voice level. “It’s with Dutch, and Dutch is calling the warden in Libby.”
There was a pause, and then Kessler laughed. It sounded honestly amused.
“Dutch Amundsen’s grandson has a wife and two babies and a payment on a truck that I pay for. Dutch isn’t calling anybody.” The warmth went out of his voice in one step. “Here’s how it is. I’ve got a man in Spokane who paid for that sow in September. Claws, hide, gall, all of it. That money’s spent. So you push her out that door, and you send the doctor out with her, and the doctor and I are going to talk about what she saw and didn’t see. Then we all go home.”
Behind the stove, Megan made a small sound.
“Five minutes,” Kessler said. “I’m being generous because I’ve known you since I was a kid.”
A rifle cracked, and a round tore through the roof boards over the door. Bark and frost came down in a shower. On the hides, the sow jerked and moaned through the haze of the drugs.
Hollis took stock in the dark. His rifle held six. He had two more in his coat. He’d always meant to buy another box in town and always found a reason not to, and now that reason felt like the stupidest thing he had ever done. Eight rounds against three men who could drive away for more.
“Megan,” he said. “That orange thing of yours. Does it call for help?”
He heard her scrabbling in her parka. A tiny screen lit her face from below. “It has an SOS.”
“Push it.”
She pushed it. The screen pulsed. They waited, and the five minutes ran out while they waited.
A shape came at the porch from the left with something long in its hands. Axe, Hollis thought, or a pry bar. They meant to take the door. He let the man get almost to the step, then put a round into the porch post a foot from his head. In the closed cabin the shot was a physical blow. Megan cried out. The man on the porch dropped whatever he held and threw himself flat in the snow, then scrambled backward on his elbows into the dark.
“That’s one,” Kessler called. “You don’t want to start counting with me, Hollis.”
Then all three of them opened up.
They weren’t aiming. They didn’t have to. Rounds punched through the door and the front wall and slapped into the logs behind the stove. A jar of rice exploded off a shelf. The lamp chimney burst. Hollis went down flat beside Megan and covered the back of her head with his arm, and they lay there with splinters raining on them while the bear on the hides tried to drag herself toward the far wall.
It stopped as abruptly as it started. In the ringing quiet, the messenger in Megan’s hand buzzed.
She read it twice before she could say it. “SOS received. County sheriff notified. Air unavailable due to weather.”
“That’s a truck from Libby to Larch Creek,” Hollis said, “and then sleds up the river in the dark. Four hours. More.”
“Can we hold four hours?”
He didn’t answer, because the answer was in the stove. He’d brought in one armload of wood that afternoon. The rest of the woodpile was stacked against the outside of the north wall, where it had been for thirty years. He could feel the cold already working in through the bullet holes, thin needles of it across his face. At twenty-six below, a cabin with no fire stopped being shelter in a couple of hours.
Kessler knew it too. “We can wait,” he called. “Can you?”
Then the bear woke.
The drugs had been wearing off in the noise, and something in the last volley had pulled her all the way up. She got her head and shoulders off the hides and opened her mouth. The moan of the night before was gone. What came out of her now was the voice every child in that valley had been raised to fear, and it went out through the holes in the walls and across the river ice.
Outside, a man swore in a high, cracked voice. Another said, “Wade. Wade, what the hell…”
“She’s dying,” Kessler snapped. “That’s what dying sounds like.”
But nobody fired.
In the dark, Hollis felt Megan turn toward him. He could almost hear her thinking, because he was thinking the same thing.
“What did you give her?” he said. “To put her under.”
“A sedative. There’s a reversal for it.” Her voice was very quiet. “If I give it, she comes all the way up. She’ll feel the leg, everything. Her heart’s already working too hard. It could kill her. Or she could come through the room at us instead of them.”
“I won’t ask you to.”
“I know you won’t.” He heard the box open. He heard her breathing slow down, the way he’d heard it slow when she bent over the leg that afternoon. “I spend most of my life putting bears down because people got careless around them. If this is the last thing she does, I’d like it to be her own.” A pause. “Hold her head.”
He held the bear’s head against the hides with both arms while Megan found the vein by feel, and he felt the sow’s skull swing against his chest as the drug went in.
Outside, someone was shouting about a gas can, and both sleds growled up off the river and stopped at the edge of the yard, their headlights swinging across the cabin wall.
Hollis went to the small vent window low in the back wall, the one he stuffed with an old wool jacket every winter. He pulled the jacket out. Cold air poured across the floor. Through the opening he could see the corner of the cabin and a figure crouched against it, sloshing something from a red can along the bottom logs. The smell came in a moment later, sharp and sickening.
He fired once. The man screamed and went down holding his thigh, and the can rolled away gurgling into the snow.
But there was a second figure behind him, skinny, bareheaded. A match flared, small and yellow, and arced onto the soaked logs.
The north wall went up with a sound like a sheet being shaken out. In a breath the window glowed orange. Smoke came through the chinking in thin gray threads, and the heat reached them before the light had finished filling the room.
On the hides, the grizzly rose onto three legs, swung her great head toward the door, and began to growl…
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