by Nevada Barr
A barely audible rustle as Joan pushed herself up on her elbows sawed across Anna's nerves with the impact of sandpaper on a sunburn. No second hand to measure it, time did not tick by but pulsed, expanding and contracting like the air in her lungs as Anna forced herself to breathe.
"Do you think—" she whispered.
A snap of wood.
"Shh."
A growl broke the night above them and both women screamed. The growling increased in volume and moved down the length of the tent. On this circuit the bear leaned in, no longer brushing but caving the tent walls in with its weight. Formless, terrifying, Anna felt the nylon push hard against her shoulder, the side of her head.
Hands—Joan's—fumbled over the front of her sweatshirt, closing on the cotton. "Down," she was hissing. "Fetal position."
Anna's training came back to her. Play dead. Try and protect the soft white underbelly. Curling in on herself when every ounce of her being urged her to break out of this North Face sarcophagus and run, actually hurt, stomach and leg muscles trying to cramp.
The growling ebbed and flowed but remained in one direction as if the animal stood outside the front-zippered fly talking to itself, deciding whether they were to live or die.
Anna flipped through her brain looking for anything she'd done to attract the animal, to hold its attention for so long. Nothing. Under Joan's watchful eye she and Rory had put everything that could be of any interest whatsoever to bears into the red bear-pack: lip balm, insect repellent, sunscreen, deodorant, toothpaste, virtually anything liquid and/or scented. Even if it was sealed in glass, Joan insisted it go in the bear-bag, which was hung with the food fifteen yards from camp.
The mental listing was cut off. The bear was roaring, raging. "Holy shit," Anna said. Her own voice scared her. "Is it hurt, you think? Wounded?"
"God, I hope not," Joan said fervently.
A blow struck the tent then and they heard nylon ripping.
"Shit," Anna said.
"Quiet."
Nylon tearing. Roars that cut through the dark and tore into Anna's bowels. Joan breathing or crying on her neck. Her, gasping or sobbing on Joan's.
Noise from without went on for what seemed like forever but was probably only half that long. Crashing. Roars. Fabric ripping. Thumps as if the bear threw or batted things from one place to another. Swooshing and flopping. Digging. Bass gutteral grunts pushed out with the sound of frenzied destruction. Impacts against tent and earth as if the beast tore at the ground.
"What in hell?" Anna whispered.
"Beats me," Joan whispered back.
Soul splitting, a roar broke close and vicious. Blows began falling first to one side of the tent then the other. Anna felt a cut through to her right shoulder.
Blood. Now there would be the smell of blood.
The lightweight metal tent frame collapsed with a second blow and Anna felt weight slam down on the back of her neck. Habit or instinct, she threw her arm over her face and pushed down tighter around Joan.
The animal had gone mad. The deep-throated anger of nature turning on humankind. Then came crunching and a prolonged rustle. Rolling on the downed tent? Burrowing through the thin stays in the fabric? A high wild roar, a shriek in gravel and glass.
"Rory," Joan whispered.
"Shh."
A crack. Maybe a tent pole, maybe a peg jerked from the ground by the elasticized cord and shot into a tree.
Abruptly everything stopped. Deathlike stillness. Anna was dizzy with the quiet. The rage of the attack ended as a candle's light is ended when the wick is pinched.
Nothing moved: not Anna, not Joan, not the bear. For what seemed a very long time, Anna waited, muscles in body and mind drawn tight, waiting for the slash of claws to rake blood from her back, the smell of an omnivore's breath before the puncturing canines pierced skull and bone.
The crunch never came.
Fear did not diminish but increased. The fear that if she moved, even so much as an eyelash, if her pulse fluttered or her skin twitched, the narrowly averted disaster would be brought down upon them. Either Joan felt the same way or she'd fainted.
After a while Anna thought she heard the passage of a large creature a few yards away. Maybe the bear had crossed the meadow soundlessly and now pushed into the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.
"Gone?" Anna whispered. Her throat was dust-dry. The word came out as a croak that sounded scarcely human.
"Wait," Joan replied.
Handfast like children lost in the wood, Anna and Joan lay in the wreckage of their tent. Anna could feel the nylon fallen over the side of her head and neck. A cold draft came in through a tear someplace.
Unmeasured, time passed. With no new horror to stimulate it, the fear response began to wane. Anna's heart rate dropped, muscles unclenched, breathing slowed and deepened. She began to be embarrassed by her hold on Joan's hand and pulled free.
"I've got to move," she whispered. "See what's going on."
Joan thought about it so long Anna feared she was going to have to prove insubordinate their second night out. She couldn't lie there any longer, unable to see, to move, to think.
"Okay," the researcher said at last. "One at a time. Move slowly. You see the bear, stop. Stop everything. Just lie wherever you are."
"Got it."
"Don't fight."
"No." "Don't run."
"No."
"Okay."
Trussed in tent, fly and sleeping bag, Anna found escape impossible without some squirming and thrashing. An unpleasant image of her cat, Piedmont, waiting in total stillness till an unwitting mouse or squirrel thought in its silly little rodent brain that the world was safe once again. Then, as the helpless nitwit began to creep from its hidey-hole, Piedmont would pounce. The ending was seldom a happy one for anybody but Piedmont.
With each twitch and rustle she made as she turned her body around and pushed her way feebly toward the end of the tent that held the zippered entrance flap, Anna was reminded that it was infinitely better to be predator than prey.
The front of the tent had suffered the worst. Poles were bent or broken but still strung together by the elastic cord running through the sections of hollow tubing that fitted together to form the tent's infrastructure. The result was a laundry basket of funhouse corners and shredded walls.
Without a light, finding first the tent zipper then the fly was proving impossible. Spending more time head-down in the suffocating folds of night and nylon was unthinkable. Anna was not yet so far gone that she slept with her Swiss army knife in her pajama pocket. She regretted that inconvenient sign of sanity.
Then she discovered that the bear had done for her what she could not do for herself.
A long gash had been opened through tent and fly. Resisting the impulse to fight her way clear of the entrapping ruin of fabric, she pulled the nylon open a finger's width and peeked out.
After the pitch dark of the tent, the clearing, lit by a half-moon and stars, appeared as bright as a staged night for actors. When she'd satisfied herself the bear was gone, she crawled out.
For a long moment she crouched just outside while the shakes took control of her body. She felt like laughing and wanted to cry. Breathing deeply to dispel the hysteria, she let it pass. Having pushed herself to the balls of her feet, knuckles down in a runner's starting position, she turned a slow circle, searching the black woods pressing close—surely closer than when they'd retired for the night—seeking any sign of movement or sound.
Finding none, she said, "All clear." It came out in a weak kitten's mewl. Clearing her throat, she said it again. Better.
"Help me," Joan's muffled call came from within the pile.
Anna held the tear open, and within a moment Joan wiggled free, caterpillar from cocoon.
"Rory!" they both called at once.
"Flashlight," Anna demanded and Joan grubbed in the tangle for her day pack.
"Rory!" Anna called again.
His tent was in w
orse shape than theirs. In the colorless light of the moon, it lay like a ripped and punctured balloon. Anna grabbed handfuls of nylon. "Rory," she called a third time.
Joan had found the flashlight but Anna didn't need it to know Rory was gone.
4
Luke!" Joan screamed the name of her younger son, the one who bore such a striking resemblance to the Van Slyke boy. Dropping the flashlight, she fell to her knees and began digging frantically through the collapsed tent, clutching at the lumps of his pack and boots as if they were severed parts from his torn body. The courage and control she'd exhibited when the danger was merely to herself were gone. She was reacting as a panicked mother might.
"Joan," Anna said, then more sharply: "Joan!" The researcher was beyond the reach of human voice. Anna waded into the mess of fabric and aluminum tubing, knelt and grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her tight, pinning her arms to her sides. For an instant she thought Joan was going to fight but the solid reality of the embrace brought her down from panic. She tried to get up. "Stay," Anna commanded.
"The bear must have dragged him out, taken him into the woods," Joan said. She sounded stunned, incredulous, but no longer out of control. Anna let go of her shoulders but kept a firm grip on her hands. Joan fell back and they sat face to face, knee to knee on Rory's tent.
"Maybe not," Anna said. She'd been hoping for calmness, rationality, but her voice shook, tremulous and childlike. "Do bears do that?" she had to ask, Night of the Grizzlies notwithstanding.
"Not often," Joan said. "Rarely. Almost never." She was reassuring herself. Anna let her.
A quick glance at her watch told her it was at least three hours till dawn. The faint light of the clearing, seemingly so bright after the inside of the tent, would not penetrate the thick canopy of forest. Had the bear dragged Rory into the woods to feed on, there was a chance the boy was still alive. An even better chance he wouldn't stay that way long.
Pursuing a grizzly into the forest in the dark, a grizzly already enraged by something and now, perhaps, with food in the form of Rory Van Slyke to defend, was the rankest madness. If the bear took the boy, they would most likely find his corpse half eaten and buried in a shallow grave raked out of the duff. If they found him at all.
Not going after Rory was going to be one of the hardest things Anna had ever done. Because, if he was still alive and they could find him, there was a chance—always a chance—that they could frighten the bear away before it killed him.
Crazy to try and save him.
"Stay here," Anna said, retrieving the flashlight from where Joan had dropped it. "It's too dark to find anything, but I can check the edges for—for anything obvious."
"I'm not staying."
Anna could delude herself sufficiently to put her own life at risk but not so completely she could endanger anybody else.
"You've got to," she said. "If Rory ran off, then comes back and we're both gone, he'll freak. You know he will."
"If Rory ran, the bear would have chased him," Joan said stubbornly. "That's what they do."
Anna couldn't remain still any longer. "You'll stay?"
"I'll stay."
"I'm not going far. Not out of earshot."
Cold and cutting, a new wave of fear met Anna at the edge of the clearing. Standing beside the tiny stream, moonlight silver on the grass, the music of water over stones in her ears, she stared into the ragged, unremitting night beneath the fir trees and she could not move.
Since she was a child Anna had felt a kinship with animals. She'd never been afraid of them. As she grew, she came to respect their ways and not tread on their taboos, putting them and herself in danger. The animal that had circled their tent, ravaged their camp, was different. Though it went against logic she felt, on a level too deep to argue with, that it had been toying with them. The circling and circling, the sudden rage, the fury of the violence, the abrupt cessation, as if a malevolent plan were behind it.
Walt Disney lied. It was the Brothers Grimm who had the right idea: witches baked little girls, stepmothers poisoned them, bears ate them.
"Get a grip," she whispered, dizzy with the nightmare she'd just dreamed. "A bear's a bear's a bear." It crossed her mind that by demonizing the animal, she might just be seeking an excuse not to step across the stream into the woods.
"Make noise." Joan's shout woke Anna to her responsibilities.
"Right," she called back. The objective was not to sneak up on the bear but to frighten it away should it still be in the vicinity.
"Rory," Anna called and, "Hey, bear," indiscriminately as she pushed under the draping branches of the first fir. Between cries she listened. There'd been no special reason she'd entered the woods at this point. In darkness, if the bear had left any mark of its passage over the meadow, she'd not seen it. She just had to start somewhere.
Anna had been working wilderness parks for many years but held no illusions about her own powers. Better outdoorsmen than herself, without compass or a view of the stars or horizon, would get lost in these woods at night. Keeping the clearing in sight on her left, she worked her way around the edge of the meadow. A complete circuit revealed nothing. It was too damn dark.
"Anna," Joan called.
"Here." She flashed her light toward the camp and stepped out of the trees. The search was as futile as she'd feared it would be. Joan's hail gave her the impetus to give it up.
"The bear didn't take him, at least not from his tent."
Joan was so cheered by her good news Anna hesitated but had to ask. "What makes you think that?"
"The zipper. Look."
Anna crossed the small clearing. Joan held up the tattered remnants of Rory's tent and rain fly. "Both unzipped. Bears don't do zippers. No thumbs. No patience." She laughed, the burden of the boy's life lifted from her. At least for the moment.
So bleak had been Anna's thoughts, she resisted the optimism as she might a trap. "Rory could have been sleeping with them open," she said.
Joan gave her a look that even in the ghost light of the moon glowed with mock scorn. "Yeah. Right."
"Right." Of course he wouldn't. Mosquitoes had disappeared around eleven when the temperature dropped below their comfort zone, but Rory would have been closed up tight, keeping the scary outside out. Thin, man-made cloth against four-inch god-made claws; an illusion, only, of safety.
Unzipped zippers didn't mean Rory was unharmed. They only indicated he'd not been dragged from his tent. Several scenarios, equally grim, presented themselves in Anna's brain. Panicked, the boy might have fled the tent. Maybe the bear did chase him when he ran. That would explain the abrupt end to the bear's attack on their tent. Anna had heard nothing to indicate Rory'd made a break for it, but then she couldn't swear she hadn't had her hands over her ears like a little kid. Rory might have been outside the tent when the bear arrived, taking a leak or whatever. If that was the case, he might have gotten away. Then again, he might have made a noise or a movement that drew the bear away from camp and down upon himself.
These alternatives to salvation-by-zipper would occur to Joan soon enough. Anna wasn't sure how she'd react. The frantic call of "Luke!" still resounded in Anna's skull bones. Motherhood was an alien world. Who could predict which forms of insanity were fostered there?
"Hot drinks," she declared, naming the universal panacea for all wilderness ills.
"Shouldn't we ... We've got to . . ." Joan cast vaguely around for an action. Logic won. "Okay."
Glad to be doing something, Anna headed to the far side of what had been their stargazing rock and now looked unsettlingly like a sacrificial altar, to where they'd hung the bear-pack. Each step closer to the black beneath the trees drove fear up into her innards. Beyond fear: a rudimentary, gut-wrenching terror of the dark and the ravening beasts that have awaited there for tens of hundreds of thousands of years. To give in to it would be to crawl into a cave in her mind that she never wanted to visit again. Once was enough. She'd seen those cold blank walls in Missi
ssippi when a man had beaten her nearly to death.
Narrowing her mindscape to the next few seconds and the task at hand, she forced fear to a level that didn't impede her functioning. Eyes and ears open for movement from the woods, she and Joan kept up a running patter, meaningless, to provide a level of human noise a bear— a normal bear—would find off-putting.
As she loosed the rope from the tree trunk to lower the bear-pack, a moment's panic knifed through her: a sudden vision of herself, arms laden with food, becoming an irresistible target, the shadows in the wood coalescing, the gleam of teeth, a rake of claws.
Breathing it out as if it were poison, she blew the image away and watched the red pack, colorless without the sun, separate from the greater darkness overhead and descend to the ground.
Once past the idea that the aroma of Constant Comment tea would bring certain death rushing from the trees, they began to enjoy the hot drinks working their dependable cure. The night was no less cold, the ruin of the camp no less stark, but sitting in the warmth of down bags, their backs against the solid reassurance of the rock, both Anna and Joan felt less afraid. Anna was able to let her thoughts off such a tight leash, and Joan's motherhood was being shoved back into its box by the scientist and researcher. Neither spoke of Rory Van Slyke. Until the sun rose he was in the hands of the gods. Or the belly of the beast.
"You're hurt," Joan said. "Your arm."
Anna looked down her right shoulder and remembered the pain slicing through it in the tent. In the feeble light of the setting moon it showed only as a black stain on the pale sleeve of the gray turtleneck she slept in. She'd not felt a thing since. Too much adrenaline in her system. Now that Joan called attention to it, she was aware of a burning sensation.
"It's not deep," Anna said.
"Only a flesh wound?" Joan laughed and it made Anna feel better than even the hot tea had.
The role of caretaker slipped over the researcher's own fears. She found the flashlight and shined it on Anna's arm. The jersey was torn and there was some blood. Joan set the flashlight on the rock, the beam pointed toward Anna. Pinching up the sleeve she said, "May I?"
