Part 7
Megan was already moving. She tore open her parka, reached inside, and pulled out the last syringe. She’d been keeping it against her own skin since the cabin. Hollis got the bear’s head in his lap and held the jaw open while she found what she needed and pushed. Then she pressed her bare palm flat to the great chest and held it there, waiting for the drug to find the heart, counting under her breath in a voice that cracked on every number.
Hollis watched the bear’s nose. The light grew. The thudding in the sky got louder. Down the river the headlights resolved into four machines.
The bear’s ribs heaved once, raggedly, as if she’d remembered something.
Then again.
Megan sat back on her heels and covered her face with both hands. She stayed like that until the first sled pulled up beside them. Dutch Amundsen climbed off it, stiff-legged, with two county deputies behind him, and stood in the gray light looking at the whole scene: the old trapper with a grizzly’s head in his lap, the young woman crying into her gloves, three men tied up and leaning on a cargo sled.
“Well,” Dutch said, and for once didn’t seem to have the rest of it.
The helicopter set down on a wide bar of ice a hundred yards off, throwing up a blizzard of its own. People in insulated suits came running with a stretcher, a heated crate, and IV bags, and Megan was on her feet giving them orders before they reached her. The deputies took the three men. Hollis heard Danny start talking before anyone had asked him a question, the words spilling out of him in a flat, frightened rush.
Dutch put a hand on Hollis’s shoulder. It was the only thing holding him up, and both of them knew it.
“Cody came by a little before midnight,” Dutch said quietly. “Wade had him load the sleds at supper. Took the boy five hours to decide it didn’t sit right.” He looked away up the river. “I called the sheriff before your little orange box ever went off. The warden in Libby’s had that cable since yesterday noon, and we came past the Hendricks landing on the way in. Nobody there but a loader froze to its tracks. I just never figured Wade would move that fast.”
Hollis nodded. There wasn’t anything to say to that, so he didn’t try.
They loaded the bear first. Before the crate door closed, Megan stopped by Hollis for a second. Her face was still smeared with soot, and there were tracks through it.
“You did good,” he said. It came out rough. “You didn’t quit.”
“I did quit. Danny didn’t let me.” She almost smiled. “You didn’t either.”
Then she climbed into the helicopter after the crate, and the snow came up around it and it was gone over the ridge.
The weeks after that happened mostly to other people. There were statements in Libby and again in Kalispell, a federal agent with a laptop, and a long afternoon in a room that smelled of floor wax. Hollis told it the way he told everything, short and in order, and didn’t try to make himself look like anything. Kessler’s lawyer tried for a while to make it a story about a crazy old hermit who’d attacked men on a peaceful outing. The hole in the snowmobile, the bread bag from Dutch’s kitchen drawer, the loop that had ridden out of the fire in Megan’s parka, and the stamp of the crimping tool in Kessler’s shop said otherwise. So did Danny. He took a plea and four years, and asked his lawyer to tell Hollis he was sorry. By February the rest of the case belonged to the federal court.
The bear lived. The surgeons in Kalispell saved the leg with plates and screws and a stubbornness Megan described in a letter as unscientific. Since she couldn’t den in the wild that winter, they gave her a dark concrete room with a bed of straw at a state facility, and she slept there until March as if nothing had happened.
At the courthouse in Libby, on the last day Hollis had to be there, Megan caught him on the steps. She held out an envelope. It was the reward from the state’s poaching tip line, she told him; it went to whoever brought in the case.
He looked at the envelope and then at her.
“Spend it on whatever she eats,” he said.
“Hollis, you don’t have a house.”
“I’ve got a hill and a chainsaw. Dutch has a spare room and too much coffee.” He shook his head. “Feed the bear.”
She put the envelope back in her pocket. She didn’t push, and he liked her for that.
He wintered at Dutch’s. He split Dutch’s wood, fixed his porch, and went with him to the county meetings Dutch still attended out of habit. Without much noticing it, he started talking to people at the Mercantile, and they started talking back. He didn’t have much to say about the night on the river, and that only made the story grow. By spring he’d heard three versions in which he’d wrestled the bear out of the fire bare-handed. He let them be.
In May, he and Dutch started laying the first course of new logs on the old footprint. The ground was black under the snowmelt, and grass was already coming up through the ash.
The mail came up with Dutch on a Thursday. There was a large envelope with the agency seal and a smaller, handwritten one tucked inside.
The photograph showed her standing in an opening above treeline, broad and shaggy, squinting into the sun. A radio collar sat high on her neck. Across her right wrist ran a pale, hairless line where the cable had been. Behind the photo was a printout of a map: a scatter of dots high in the mountains a hundred miles east, collar locations from her first two weeks out.
The letter was short. She came out of the trailer, stood for about a minute, then went straight uphill without looking back. Typical. The program wants a name for her file instead of a number, and I told them you’d pick. — M.
Hollis read it twice. Then he put it in his shirt pocket, picked up his rifle, and walked down off the hill, past the place where the toboggan trail had been, onto the creek trail.
He had not walked this way in nineteen years. The alders were swelling green at the tips and the creek ran high and loud and brown with melt. At the bend below the falls he stopped. The eddy where Ruth had wanted to look for ice lay open and turning in the sun.
There was a track in the mud at the water’s edge, fresh that morning: a bear, a big one, not her. His hand found the rifle sling on its own and closed on it. He stood that way for a while, listening to the water. Then he let go of the sling, sat down on the flat rock above the eddy, took the pencil stub from behind his ear, and wrote on the back of the photograph in his slow, square capitals.
LARCH.
He sat a while longer, the photo drying on his knee. Then he got up and walked back along the creek the way he’d come, and he took his time.