7 Wild East

by Melanie Jackson

  Doc and Linda hurried out of their house.

  “Doc, look after the Flowers. Linda, get a rifle and come with me. Ricky’s in the woods.”

  “I thought someone was screaming about a bear,” Doc said. He was carrying his medical bag.

  “There is one—a young female. The surveyor panicked when he saw it. It’s okay, the bear went the other way.”

  Everything I said was true but it was also deceptive. There was no reason that the bear couldn’t turn right around and go back to her newfound berry patch. I was trying not to hand Judy any more bad news, but Ricky being in the woods without even a dog wasn’t good, and putting the bulletin on a silver tray with lace doilies didn’t change it.

  I looked at Doc over Judy’s head, willing him to keep quiet about any conclusions he might draw. Linda was already running for a gun.

  I got up, unable to wait any longer.

  “Max, Sisu—go find Ricky!” We had played this game before and they loved the canine hunter’s version of hide-and-seek. This time we were looking in deadly earnest.

  Linda reappeared with a rifle. She moved quickly for a woman of fifty.

  “Tell the others we are going toward Potter’s Ridge but will follow the dogs wherever they lead. Send small teams east, north, and south, but most of them should head toward Wendell’s or the Ridge. We’ll fire a shot in the air when we find him.” I didn’t add that more than one shot meant we were dealing with an aggressive bear.

  The Bones nodded and knelt by Judy who was trying to stand up. Her color was slightly better but a long way from healthy. Up the street I saw Big John coming. He had Fiddling Thomas, Pete, and the Wings with him. They were all armed. The market’s front door opened and Little Davy appeared, also armed.

  “Go! Big noise, Max! Big noise!” I shouted to the dogs when they paused at the tree line, waving an arm at the forest. They needed no second invitation but ran on into the trees howling dramatically. Normally I would make the dogs stay with me, but they could get to Ricky long before anyone else could and they were his only defense if the bear came back. Let them bay like hellhounds and keep the bear away. We would just have to track their prints and make damn sure we didn’t lose them in the forest. I’m pretty good at tracking. Linda is even better.

  There wasn’t time to fall on my knees and pray for Ricky’s deliverance, but the impulse was strong. I would have to settle for a less coherent prayer while running.

  Let him be with Chuck. Two Mounties and Wendell would keep him safe.

  And if he wasn’t with them then we would find him—and everything would be fine.

  * * *

  The Wings was sitting at a corner table in the Lonesome Moose, trying to wrap his brain around the manual he was supposedly studying. He was sure that he would do okay with his test once he was in the air—after all he’d had these checks before and they were usually nothing. But reading the book made him uneasy. They sure had thought up a lot of regulations since he got his license. How was a man supposed to remember all these rules?

  He looked up as a stranger, dangerously red in the face, burst through the door.

  “Bear,” he gasped. “Boy in the woods—Big John.”

  It wasn’t coherent but the Wings got the point and shouted for the mayor. He reached under the table for his rifle.

  “The gun cabinet is over there,” he told the surveyor. “Get a rifle.”

  Then he went to the phone and cranked in triplets until his cousin, Fiddling Thomas, picked up. Once again the phone tree was activated and this time it wasn’t to call a town meeting.

  * * *

  Thomas may have doubted the bear stories were real earlier that morning but he didn’t doubt them now. Even before the call came on the old crank phone, Wendell said he recognized the distant howling as that of Butterscotch’s Max and the boy’s puppy, Sisu.

  “It sounds like they’ve spotted a bear.” Chuck lost his color at Wendell’s words. He said something in Gaelic and Wendell shrugged.

  “Probably.”

  The ancient sound sent shudder after shudder down Thomas’s long spine. He had wondered if someone was pulling his leg with those fake bear tracks, trying to deter him from interacting with the surveyors who he suspected were the object of some organized plot. But both Wendell and Detective Goodhead were far too grim for this to be any kind of a joke and not even the best actor can make himself go white on demand.

  Thomas had to admit that he was feeling grim too. The thought of a little boy running into a bear was terrifying. He feared for Butterscotch too though she would have a gun. The talk of bears in the woods hadn’t frightened him before because he had doubted that any actual threat was nearby. But now he knew there was at least one bear out there. Thomas was not completely ignorant of what bears could do. He had read reports and seen photographs of bear attacks as part of his training to become a biologist. A small child could be literally ripped to shreds. The town could end up having another funeral for a hand.

  Wendell’s “dogs” ran ahead of them. There were two of them, the ones he said were the best bear trackers. Their answering wails and yowls raised the hair on his arms. Wolf hybrids be damned. He hadn’t specialized in mammals, but these were pure-blooded timber wolves or he would eat his pressed wool hat. And knowing they were facing the meanest and strongest animal in the forest, he wasn’t prepared to quibble about anyone in town keeping them, even supposing there was any kind of ordinance against it, which seemed doubtful.

  They were running flat out to keep up with the wolves. Thomas just hoped he didn’t disgrace himself by passing out from lack of oxygen. He jogged in the city—three miles every day—but that was nothing like running through a mountainous forest, thick with undergrowth and hidden ravines that could maim or kill the unwary. All he could do was pray that Wendell knew what he was doing and that they got there in time.

  * * *

  I know the woods well, but that morning it felt like Linda and I had wandered into a dangerous fairytale where there could be dragons and gargoyles and wendigos hiding behind every rock.

  Have you ever noticed that some trees—some species of trees—have identities? That they are individuals, each as different from each other as people are? They branch oddly and often seem more sinister than friendly. No one has ever done an estimate of how many trees there are per acre around the Gulch, but it is a lot of them, and I swear every last one of them thrust up a root and tried to trip me or clawed at my face with wooden fingers.

  My imagination needn’t have tried frightening me with hideous fairy stories of malevolent trees and supernatural beings. The thought of Ricky running into a bear was as horrifying as anything my mind or the Brothers Grimm could think up. After all, adrenaline in homeopathic doses is good, but not so great if it keeps pumping into the system until the heart explodes. I needed purpose, will, and energy, not mindless dread. I had to get on top of the fear though I was damned if I knew how.

  The morning was advanced and the trees filled with sun which became a moving kaleidoscope of light, a distraction I wished would go away.

  “There he is!” Linda gasped.

  I looked up to see that Max and Sisu had taken up positions in front of Ricky. They weren’t dancing around in happiness at having won the game. They were silent and snarling at something in the trees. The crashing noises were moving away, but they did not relax their guard. If they could smell a bear then the bear was too close.

  * * *

  Thomas and Wendell burst into the clearing right behind Chuck. Wendell’s wolves had joined Sisu and Max and were standing guard over Ricky—who was fine, standing still with a pillowcase flung over his back. There wasn’t so much as a smudge on him. Nor did he look frightened. Chuck almost collapsed in relief.

  Across the glade, Butterscotch and Linda were approaching slowly, guns ready but not aiming at anything in particular. They were breathing hard.

  “The bear?” Wendell asked as they got close.

  “You
ng female,” Butterscotch answered. “She came for the berries at the crash site. She’s headed toward the Big Bones.”

  She meant what the locals called the assumed Sasquatch cemetery.

  Butterscotch let Wendell put the dogs on a down and reward them with pets and praise as she slumped against a boulder. She looked exhausted as she raised her shotgun in the air and let off one round. That was the standard sign that the lost party had been found.

  The Mountie shook off his lethargy, caused by the sudden drop in adrenaline that follows a life and death situation, and went over to hug his wife.

  “Thank God you’re alright,” he said into her hair which was full of dead leaves and twigs.

  “Mountie, shouldn’t we follow the bear?” Thomas asked.

  Chuck exchanged glances with Wendell. The bear was headed someplace that the locals shunned.

  “No. Never follow a bear if you don’t have to,” he answered.

  “Not even with four dogs. There is a good chance that she isn’t alone,” Wendell added. “We could run into a sibling.”

  * * *

  The journey out of the woods was a lot slower than the one leading into it. Aches and pains and minor cuts and abrasions were making themselves known, and it was after noon when we made it back to town.

  There was much relief and an urge to celebrate the averted disaster, so everyone went back to the inn for a drink. They had also resumed speaking Gaelic.

  “So it was your dogs I heard in the woods. They sure sounded like wolves. Scared me witless,” Pete said to me as I sipped at my soda and he gulped his whisky. He had helped Mark down from his bedroom so that he could join the party and hear the bear stories, and the boy was having a good time though everyone was speaking a foreign language.

  The Flowers and Ricky were the only absentees. I hoped that the Flowers had stopped crying.

  “Probably. They get noisy when they smell bear.” This wasn’t completely true. They got noisy if I told them to. But no way was I going to admit that I had terrorized him on purpose.

  Chuck took my hand. He was looking as wan as I felt.

  “I sure am sorry I didn’t believe you folks about there being bears out there. I have never, in all my years of survey work, heard of bears in this part of the country.”

  “You aren’t alone in that,” I said. “No one else believes us either. Until we send them the bodies.”

  “No, you aren’t alone in your skepticism,” young Thomas admitted, taking a seat at our table. “I’m a biologist, did you know? Bears aren’t my specialty but of course we studied them at school. I hadn’t heard anything about there being bears here. This is something that needs study.”

  A biologist? I looked at Chuck. Why hadn’t he mentioned this? Or had he? I had been awfully distracted.

  “No! No studies,” I said without thinking. “For Godsakes. Just leave the bears alone. We don’t need any more—” I stopped myself before I said “any more strangers around here.” “We don’t need anyone else getting hurt. Every time outsiders go into the woods we end up with someone dead. Just leave it be. Please.”

  “I’m with you. Leave the damn things alone.” Pete nodded and then got up to go get another drink. If he didn’t slow down he was going to pass out. But perhaps that would be for the best.

  “An enclave of Gaelic speakers is culturally significant too,” Thomas said and Chuck groaned for both of us.

  “Only to the two dozen people on the planet who study dead languages. Thomas, what you and the surveyors—and the rest of the frickin’ world—don’t get is that we want to be left alone.” Chuck’s eyes got big. I don’t go around dropping the modified f-bomb very often. “We don’t want to trade in our freedom of thought and action for television and cellphones. Most of us have had a good look at the outside world and don’t like it. We don’t live in this remote place because we are ignorant of what the modern world has to offer, but because we know it all too well.”

  “But surely it would be better to have hospitals and police and firemen.” I had the feeling he was playing devil’s advocate but answered anyway.

  “We have a doctor. As for police, we have Chuck. Anyway there is no crime here.” Though almost everything we did and were was technically illegal according to the rest of the world. “There has never been a murder here, not in two hundred years.”

  At least, no one in the Gulch killing someone from the Gulch.

  “There was a theft,” he said softly.

  “No, there was an act of self-defense and everything will be returned shortly.”

  Chuck’s eyes got bigger and bigger. He was thinking that if I kept on blabbing we would end up having to feed the Mountie to the bears. But Thomas wasn’t stupid and I thought he could be reasoned with.

  “Look, let me explain this another way. Out there, when you do something good, there is little chance that it will be noticed or rewarded—or even appreciated, right? Assuming you can even fight the inertia enough to get something done. And there is a very good chance of recrimination and punishment if you do something unexpected, or even if you do the right thing but others don’t approve. Especially if you are a civil servant, eh. I’ve watched Chuck and I can tell you, I’m not impressed with the forgiveness or fairness of the police force you work for. And truly, isn’t that why you want to serve in the outback? For a chance to do your job, to help people, without a lot of red tape?” I held up my hand to forestall more argument or answers. “We don’t have that bureaucracy here and we don’t want it. We have self-organized into a society that thinks of itself as family—because it is mostly family—and it runs itself that way. We rise together and we fall together. And mostly we just get on with life. Real life. Not something constructed by the social engineers of government, or the media, with their latest theories of sociology thought up by billionaires with too much time on their hands and an urge to interfere by organizing people according to their monetary convenience and distorted principals.” I took a breath. “If you want to get on here or anywhere else in the outback, just respect our choice to live as we do—and I promise that if you can do that, you will be welcomed. Chuck is part of the town now—loved like family. You can be too.”

  Chuck was looking at me with concern as well as curiosity. I just had to get to Seven Forks and find out if I was pregnant! The strain of not knowing was making me crazy.

  But Thomas was looking thoughtful after my speech, so maybe my frankness had paid off. I decided to leave things there.

  “Sorry, guys. I’m done. Today was traumatic and I’m not myself. I’m going to head home and have some lunch and maybe a nap.” I put a hand on Chuck’s shoulder, urging him to stay with Thomas. “A-nochd,” I said to the rest of the room.

  Chapter 5

  The shortwave radio on public display in the market is an artifact from an army surplus store. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It couldn’t with missing tubes. The real one, which the Braids concealed when strangers came to town, was kept locked away in an old desk designed for that purpose. It took only a moment to lift out the partition filled with pigeonholes that held useless papers. Kept near the dry-goods bins, there was plenty of room for people to gather around and hear the evening report. Every folding chair and wooden crate was in use. Latecomers stood in the back or sat on the floor. Tea and whisky were being passed around. We were all aware of the benefits of living in the Gulch. No community was tighter. But the greatest benefit was our nonexistence. If the pipeline went in that would all go away. Then where would we go, those of us who had already run to the ends of the earth to escape our old lives?

  There hadn’t been an occasion, or so I was told, since the last Great War when the whole town had gathered to hear a radio broadcast. Tonight it wasn’t a politician or newscaster who would address us. It was the survey team led by Whisky Jack and this would be his finest hour.

  It just had to be.

  I think we were all there, except for the Flowers and Ricky who were back at the
Moose where he was getting a bath and early bed with a pile of storybooks. Pete too had finally stopped drinking and succumbed to sleep well before sunset. Seeing the bear and then the hunt for Ricky had been an eye-opener, a real come-home-to-Jesus moment, and it had exhausted him physically and mentally. Judy would look after the guests if they woke and head them off if they tried to visit the market. I was grateful that Chuck was there with me and hoped there wasn’t any bad news about his father—or anyone else. Young Thomas had claimed to be exhausted and anxious for bed so Chuck had abandoned him and come to hear the progress report. We were all feeling expectation, but it was the kind that looked a lot like nervous dread. We were all very tired after our day in the woods.

  I looked out one of the few windows and saw dark clouds gathering under the moon. It wouldn’t rain, not that night. But soon. Autumn was almost upon us.

  Every eye turned toward the radio as it crackled to life. The Braids assumed her place. She was the best at making the thing work.

  “McIntyre’s Gulch, this is Survey One reporting in, over,” we heard Whiskey Jack say.

  “We read you, Survey One,” Big John replied. “How goes the surveying project?”

  * * *

  Anatoli sat on a rock at the edge of their camp doing his best to disguise the fact that he was still shaking like a leaf. Though he tried to drive the whole experience from his mind, he couldn’t help but return to the thought of himself dangling by his fingertips from the cliff face too scared to even scream for help. Then there was the hand that came snaking its way toward him. It grabbed his wrist moments before he was about to fall to his death. The hand was incredibly strong and above it was a face, a face that he recognized but was surprised to see.