Part 5
“Behind me,” Hollis said. “Stay right behind me, and when I move, you move.”
Megan was coughing. Her eyes streamed in the firelight, and she had the steel drug case clutched to her chest with both arms, as if it were the one thing she meant to save from a fire. “Hollis, we can’t…”
“We can’t stay.”
He shoved the table away from the door and pulled the bolt. He didn’t open it yet. He stood to the hinge side with his back against the wall, and he looked at the bear.
She was looking at the door too. Firelight crawled along the guard hairs on her shoulders. Behind her the north wall roared, and in front of her was the only cold place left in the world.
Hollis threw the door wide and flattened himself against the logs.
She went out through it low and fast, all shoulder, the porch boards booming under her. Her bad leg folded on the step and she caught herself on the other three and kept going, and the noise she made coming off that porch was something Hollis would hear for the rest of his life. Out in the yard, lit gold by the burning cabin, Wade Kessler and a skinny kid stood with their rifles half raised. They’d come out from the trees to watch the fire. Neither one moved. A snare was a quiet thing you set and walked away from, and no man who set one ever pictured the bear coming at him out of a burning house, close enough that he could smell her breath.
Hollis went out the door behind her and left along the wall, low and fast, with the splitting axe he’d taken off its pegs.
Kessler saw him at the last second and started to turn the rifle. Hollis swung the flat of the axe across his forearm. The rifle went one way and Kessler went the other, onto his back in the snow, his breath leaving him in a grunt. Hollis put a boot on his chest and kicked the rifle farther off.
The sow had stopped ten feet short of the kid, swaying, head low, blowing clouds into the cold. She wasn’t attacking and she wasn’t backing off. The kid stood rooted in front of her with his rifle pointed at the ground, and Hollis could see his whole body shaking.
Hollis didn’t see the other one. He heard Megan’s breath catch behind him, and he turned in time to see the steel case leave her hands.
Troy Mabry lay against the burning corner of the cabin, where he’d dragged himself. He had found his rifle in the snow and got it up across his good knee, the barrel swinging toward the spot where Hollis’s back had been. The case hit him in the shoulder. The rifle bucked, and the round went wide into the hood of the nearer snowmobile with a flat bang. Hollis crossed the space in four strides and tore the rifle out of Troy’s hands.
The kid finally ran. He broke for the sleds at the edge of the yard, flat out, coat flapping.
“Danny.” Hollis didn’t shout it. He said the name flat and quiet. He’d known the boy since he was born. “Danny Mabry. Stop.”
The kid stopped. He turned around with his hands already going up, and in the firelight his face was nineteen years old and terrified.
The sow went down then, as if she’d been holding herself up only until it was over. She folded into the snow on her side, and her breath came in short, shallow puffs.
They tied the three men with Hollis’s lash ropes and the rolls of vet wrap from Megan’s case. Troy swore steadily the whole time. Megan packed his thigh with gauze and taped it hard before she would let Hollis tie him; she did it with her jaw set and her eyes on the bear. Kessler came around with his arm swelling and said nothing at all. He watched Hollis with a flat, patient look, and Hollis understood that being tied up hadn’t changed anything Kessler believed about the world.
The cabin was gone. Hollis’s own snowmobile had been parked in the lean-to against the north wall, and the lean-to was a box of fire. He stood and watched his roof sag in the middle. For a moment he thought about the shelf by the bed, and what was on it, and then he made himself stop. There’d be time for that or there wouldn’t. He took off his coat and put it around Megan, who was shaking so hard her teeth clicked, and she didn’t argue. Then he dug Troy’s spare snowmobile jacket out of the cargo box and zipped himself into it, the collar stinking of another man’s cigarettes.
Then he went to the bear.
Megan was already on her knees beside her, fingers pressed into the inside of the hind leg. “Pulse is thready,” she said. “She’s in shock. She’s cold. That took everything she had left.” She looked up at him, her face black with soot. “She’s dying, Hollis.”
He crouched and laid his bare hand on the bear’s flank. The fur was singed in patches and already stiffening with frost. He’d wanted this. For nineteen years he’d wanted exactly this, a grizzly dying in the snow at his feet. He waited for the thing he’d always imagined feeling, and it didn’t come. What came instead was heavy and tired, and it felt like losing.
“No,” Megan said. She was up and digging in the case. “No. I’ve got something for shock, something for her heart. But it’s sitting in a case at twenty below. If it’s half frozen, I can’t push it through a needle.”
Hollis held out his hands.
She looked at them. Then she put the vials in his palms, and he closed his fingers over them and held them against his belly, under his shirt, skin to glass, the way you’d warm a baby bird. They knelt facing each other in the snow while the cabin burned, and neither of them said anything. When she took the vials back, they were warm, and her fingers lingered on his for a second.
She gave the injections. The bear’s breathing deepened by a fraction. That was all.
Behind them, the roof came down with a long tearing crash and a pillar of sparks. Afterward the light dropped to a dull red glow and the cold moved in from every side at once.
“We go now,” Hollis said, “or we don’t go.”
He walked to the snowmobiles. There were two machines, one of them hitched to a cargo sled. He climbed onto the nearer one and turned the key. The engine coughed and died. He turned it again. Nothing. He swung off, crouched, and ran his hand along the hood in the dark until his fingers found the hole: neat and round on the near side, ragged on the far. Underneath, the smell of gas was rising off the snow.
Troy Mabry’s last shot had gone into the engine…
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