by Nevada Barr
The rumble from the Coleman stopped. An angry voice, just one, the words unclear but the savage tone unmistakable, made the decision for her. Setting her mind beyond the pain in her leg, Anna moved toward the source of the noise with infinite care, one step, one tree at a time. Twice she was stopped. Twice she thought she heard the stealthy padding of oversized paws on the pine needles in the darkness behind her.
The steps stopped when she stopped. Maybe it was only the crush of her own booted feet placed with such care. Maybe she imagined it. Whatever the source, Anna no longer wanted to run away. The terror behind her was as insistent as that which lay ahead.
The ranting voice, though more unsettling, was easier to track through the dark than the amorphous hiss of the stove had been. A person venting with such energy also made enough of a racket to cover the unavoidable sounds of her progress; she covered ground quickly.
Speed acted against her in a peculiar way. The faster she moved, the more she believed she was being pursued, the better she could imagine the glowing eyes and bared teeth inches from the nape of her neck. It took effort and a damaged knee to keep her from giving in to childlike panic and running toward the sound of a human voice.
A misstep. The knee twisted and Anna was forced to a halt. Her breathing was ragged. She'd broken a sweat that would soon turn to chill. Out of control, she warned herself, and Breathe.
Not making noise in body by movement or in mind by fear of the dark and the monsters that dwelt therein, Anna began to hear distinct words: "Out. Not a fucking game. By Christ I will."
Sobered, she moved again. Closing out the vision of the bear, she returned to the calming slowness that had marked her progress in the beginning, careful to make no sound, barge into no solid objects in the dark.
Another minute and she stopped abruptly. Perhaps fifteen feet in front of her was a dark form. A man, she guessed. He held a flashlight that he was pointing into the woods in the opposite direction from where she stood. By its backwash she could see he was tall and under his right arm he held a long-barreled rifle. In the pale spill of the flash she saw Joan and Rory.
Joan's face was colorless but for black around one corner of her mouth that could be blood or dirt. Her wrists and ankles were tied together so she had to sit hunched over, elbows around her knees. Rory was beside her. His ankles had been lashed together but his hands were free. He held them palm up in front of his face as if he felt for raindrops. At his feet the Coleman stove lay on its side, a pan tipped over nearby.
Rory'd been put to cooking, Anna guessed. In a rage the man with the flashlight had kicked over the stove, burning Rory's hands in the process.
"Goddamn it," the man bellowed. The light swung like a sword, piercing the darkness several feet to Anna's left. Staring right at her, Bill McCaskil screamed, "Come out now or I'll blow their fucking heads off!"
23
The McCaskil who held the rifle and the flashlight was a different man than the shifty Lothario Anna remembered. Days alone in the wilderness had had an adverse effect on the city boy. His beard was rough, his hair matted and spiky by turns, his clothes dirty. The biggest change was the eyes. McCaskil was scared, scared to the point of unreason. Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight Anna could see his irises were entirely ringed in white as his facial muscles pulled the lids away. Whatever edge he'd been running toward when he came to Glacier, McCaskil had been pushed over it.
A crazy man, a scared crazy man, with a rifle and hostages. In law enforcement this was what was referred to as a worst-case scenario.
"Out," McCaskil cried in a voice ugly with fear. He swung the rifle toward Rory and Joan, and Anna raised her hands, stepped forward. She never made it into the light. McCaskil was wheeling, screaming, the flashlight raking the trees. He'd not seen her.
"I'm not going to hurt him." His voice became wheedling as he turned. Silence followed, deepened by the darkness and the trees. "Balthazar's mine!" he shrieked and Anna flinched. Whomever he shouted for, it wasn't her. Joan and Rory must have told him they were alone. Anna blessed them for their courage and began creeping around the circle. McCaskil was beyond negotiation even if she'd had anything to negotiate with. Running away was the best option. With the cover of night she could do it easily if she left Joan and Rory.
A gut-numbing roar froze the cowardly thoughts; bear—the bear— close by. McCaskil screamed high and shrill, and the rifle at his side fired, the glare of the muzzle harsh and bright and then gone, leaving a red wound seared across Anna's night vision.
"I'll kill them. You'll have killed them," he screamed into the night. "Like you killed that Van Slyke woman. Butcher. I'll do it."
A great gush of terror brought the contents of Anna's stomach into her throat and she had to fight to keep from retching. The slicer of faces was somewhere in the darkness with her. He, and a great bear that seemed to have an agenda of its own.
Run away, run away, she thought and moved to the next tree, closer to Joan and Rory.
The two of them sat shoulder to shoulder about fifteen feet from the mad McCaskil. Ranting, a second round fired, the thrashing of his booted feet as he made short, aborted dashes at sounds only he could hear, covered the noise Anna made as she moved.
The west-facing slope was dryer than the valleys, and there was little undergrowth, not much in the way of cover but shadow and luck. Behind Rory and Joan, several yards in the woods, Anna parked herself in the shelter of a tree that she hoped was wide enough to hide her should McCaskil's light come back around. Her shirt was gray, her shorts green— all to the good—but in the near-perfect darkness under the pines, should light touch on her bare arms, her legs or her face, they would shine like beacons.
Making herself small in mind if not in body, she wriggled out of her day pack and set it squarely in front of her where probing light would not fire its burgundy hue in a dun and green landscape. Working by feel, Anna groped through it. Her breath was coming in short shallow gasps, audible, panicked. Her scalp was tingling and she was losing sensation in her hands and feet. Hyperventilating, she warned herself. Too scared. Lifting the pack to her face in lieu of the traditional paper sack, she breathed into it, then out. The smells of her short history in Glacier were all there: peanut butter, skunk, sweat, fish guts, grease, dust. The skin on her head loosened, her heart ceased to pound in her ears, her fingers began to feel like fingers. Ten breaths more, counted out over a brief eternity, and she put the pack down again. In her hand were the wire cutters, quicker and more sure than a Swiss army knife dulled from years of promiscuous use.
The light flew erratically past. She waited a moment for the sound of a rifle shot and the sudden blasting away of an exposed elbow or knee, but she'd not been spotted. Further out into the trees, drowned in the impossible ink of a woodland night, she heard the stealthy sound of padded feet moving over duff.
Nothing she could do about that. She pushed it from her mind.
A quick peek let her know McCaskil had turned again and faced away from her. He stopped shouting. In a voice dead calm and more frightening because of it, he spoke to the darkness, "In one minute I will kill the boy. You can save him. Balthazar's life for the boy's. One minute." He began counting down in a loud voice.
Out of the frying pan, Anna said to herself and rolled from the cover of her tree. Ignoring the burst of pain in her injured knee, she moved as rapidly as possible toward the others. In seconds she knelt behind Rory. "Not a sound," she hissed in his ear. She showed him the wire cutters and he understood. Quickly and quietly, he swung his feet around.
Joan's head turned. Without light Anna could not read her expression. She trusted in Joan's good sense. What she could not know was how much of it fear had eaten away. As there was nothing to be done to reassure either the researcher or herself, Anna ignored her.
Closing her mind to the possibilities, Anna felt at Rory's ankles. Thin, hard plastic; McCaskil had bound his prisoners with the disposable cuffs policemen carry as spares. Clearly he'd c
ome prepared. Though virtually impossible to break, he couldn't have picked anything more vulnerable to fence pliers, and Anna was grateful.
"Twenty-nine," McCaskil called. "Twenty-eight."
Snip, snip.
Anna clipped a bit of Rory's flesh along with the plastic and he hollered, "Ouch!" The wretched rotten boy actually said ouch. "Sorry," he whispered too late.
"He's turning," Joan hissed.
"Run," Anna said and pushed Rory to his feet, "run!" She shoved at unidentified bits of boy anatomy as she scrambled to her feet to follow.
A hailstorm of words, shrieked and screamed from what sounded like the throats of a multitude of demons, rained down. McCaskil's threats, Rory's squeaks, Joan's exhortations and Anna's own sailor-like vocabulary of meaningless obscenities. McCaskil's flashlight shivered and snapped. In her mind Anna heard Teddy Pinson, an old college friend, intone, "'The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!'"
Rory disappeared in darkness followed by a gunshot close and loud, a blow on Anna's eardrums. Cutting through trauma-induced deafness came a scream. Anna's mind folded down in confusion. The metallic swallowing sound of a bolt-action rifle and another round was chambered. Anna'd fallen. Had she been shot and screamed? Had the bullet found Rory in the dark? Before enough time had elapsed to draw a full breath, Anna knew she'd not been hit. Her knee had given out as she'd lunged for the cover of the woods.
"No!"
That was Joan. Anna rolled and the butt of McCaskil's rifle pounded down, not the killing blow to the back of the head he'd intended, but a glancing strike to the shoulder that made Anna cry out.
McCaskil had thrown aside the flashlight. The beam ran along the ground catching up the rust of the needles, illuminating the man's booted feet. Anna bunched up her weight on her left hip and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected with McCaskil's ankle. Fierce pain shot up from her bad knee but she scarcely felt it. McCaskil went down on one knee.
Writhing across the slippery bed of needles, as single-minded as a sidewinder, Anna struck out again, connecting this time with his shin. The man bellowed in rage and fell back on butt and heels. No time to rise and shine. Knowing she had more strength in her legs than her upper body, Anna propelled herself after him. Crablike, snakelike, scuttling like a scorpion, hoping like any low and little thing to strike quickly enough and with enough venom to survive one more day.
McCaskil retreated. He hit the fallen flashlight and the beam spun, a drunken beacon, then stopped, spotlighting the two of them. McCaskil had the thirty-ought-six, a Weatherby, Anna noted from habit, raised to his shoulder, the barrel pointed between his knees past the toes of his boots at her face. Even a madman would not miss at this range.
"Easy, Bill. You're okay, Bill. It won't work. Rory's gone; a witness. You can't do it, Bill. Give it up, Bill."
Joan was talking: smooth, calming as if to a wounded and wild beast. She was doing, saying all the right things, using the man's name, trying to bring him back to himself.
It was too late. Whatever indicates reason, an indefinable inner light in the eye, had gone out in Bill McCaskil. Shadows scraped up from the cockeyed light, making of his nose a mountain that eclipsed one side of his face from the piecemeal sun. His upper lip, long, well formed, the skin darkened with a week's growth of beard, curled up exposing teeth that shone white and feral. With that small movement McCaskil's face ceased to be human and Anna knew he was going to kill her. She did not want Bill McCaskil's to be the face that went with her into eternity. She turned her head, looked at Joan Rand.
A roar shattered the tableau, so close, so visceral, the wild rage of the world and of the mind gathered into a sound so dark and awful, the night itself seemed to have turned on them. Mingling with it were terrible screams and the hopeless sound of a David being torn to pieces by a Goliath of fur and fury.
"Rory!" Joan cried.
McCaskil jumped. The rifle barrel moved an inch off center. Anna grabbed the barrel and kicked at his knee. Bones loosened by the thunder of the bear, McCaskil let go. Anna yanked the rifle from his nerveless fingers. Dragging it, she crawled away in an undignified but necessary retreat. Close fighting was not for the small of frame.
The horrible roaring deepened, intensified, and Anna found herself crouched, gun across her knees like a frightened hillbilly. Breathing past the primal terror, she forced herself to her feet, braced her back against a tree to stop her shaking and to take the weight off her weak knee. McCaskil made no attempt to rise, to run, to finish killing Anna or to be killed by her.
The roaring went on and on pinning him to the ground, Anna to the tree and Joan to the tiny patch of earth her bonds had made her home for too long.
The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. Anna's arms were quivering, the rifle hard to hold. Thin whimpering percolated through the new-made stillness: hers, McCaskil's, Rory's, Joan's— it was impossible to tell.
The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. Anna leveled the Weatherby at the manifestation and waited somewhere beyond fear, just this side of insanity.
Ripples of gold unsettled the shadow, catching the imperfect light of the flash. Out of the woods padded the great grizzly, beside him the crying boy with the smile of a saint. On the bear's other side walked Rory, the same Rory whose screams had indicated he was snack food.
The spinning effervescence of a fairy tale snatched up Anna's brain. This bear was with them, of them, glittering gold protector of babes lost in the woods. A dozen stories of wild things become human, princes enchanted, curses fulfilled, were physically manifest and Anna was ensorcelled, charmed, turned to wood and bark like a recalcitrant wood nymph. Her limbs could not move. Her voice had locked itself away deep in her throat.
"Don't shoot him," the boy said, as if Anna could have destroyed that much beauty even to save her own worthless hide. "His name is Balthazar."
"How do you do?" Anna croaked idiotically. To her amazement the bear raised a single huge paw to shake and she laughed, sounding, at least in her ears, a little on the hysterical side.
Recovering from the bear theatrics—given that Rory's skin was still whole and he was in it, that's what the roaring must have been—McCaskil crawled toward the enclosing ring of darkness. The bear's enormous head swung toward him and an echo of the bone-melting roar rumbled in his chest.
"Keep that goddamn bear off me," McCaskil cried, his voice ragged from yelling.
"Balthazar doesn't like him," Geoffrey said. "When we were little he used to tease us something awful."
We. The boy and the great bear had grown up together. Staggered by the unreality of the scene, Anna found herself wondering if they were brothers.
Enough of her training survived this onslaught of otherworldliness that she continued to watch McCaskil with one eye and half of a reeling brain. He feared Balthazar more than he feared her or the Weatherby.
"You can't let that bear come after me," he said. "That's illegal."
Anna said nothing. Should the bear eat William McCaskil, her greatest concern would be for the animal's digestion.
Her head hurt, her knee was killing her, she was very tired. Overriding these fleeting discomforts was a bear of legend not ten feet from her. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, play with him, listen to the stories he might tell. It crossed her mind to let McCaskil go. His nerves shot, his rifle taken, he was of little threat to a party of five souls, particularly when one of them weighed over a thousand pounds and came from the factory equipped with an astonishing arsenal of edged weapons.
Ruick would pick McCaskil up in the frontcountry or the Montana state police would nail him eventually. Maniac turned craven, the man actually looked rather pathetic oozing toward the woods and temporary freedom. Being captured by a crippled-up lady ranger would only add to his humiliation.
That thought brought with it the tug of petty revenge that pulled Anna back to
a sense of duty. "Stay," she ordered McCaskil.
"You can't shoot a man if he runs. Not unless he's a threat to life. I read that," McCaskil said, but he made no move to test the theory.
"You qualify," Anna said flatly. McCaskil had given up. Anna did not think she was fooled. She'd seen it enough times: the deflation as the tension of keeping up the fight, or the lie, or the act was given over. Still, she did not lower her guard. Cleverer people than she had been tricked, and died because of it.
Rory found the wire cutters and freed Joan. Joan held the flashlight and Anna the rifle while McCaskil bound his own hands and feet with more of the plastic disposable cuffs Geoffrey found in his pack. Balthazar, the great golden bear, sat on huge haunches, ancient eyes watching like a primitive god.
The sense of unreality was such Anna felt giddy and could not stop herself from being flippant and cracking jokes. Tension still on but terror fading, the others, with the exception of William McCaskil, caught her mood and the dark between the trees took on a mad-tea-party feel.
Checking McCaskil's bonds, Anna had to force her discipline, school her mind to pay attention to detail, to take seriously the business of catching and keeping a felon.
When their makeshift camp had been made as safe as plastic ties could make it, Joan righted McCaskil's stove and boiled water for hot drinks. Anna would have traded her boots for a good dollop of brandy to give her tea backbone but was grateful for the beverage even without it.
Given the homely activity of serving tea and cocoa, normalcy might have been expected to return but for the fact that a huge bear sat among them, his dark eyes following their puny movements, his pale golden belly round and Buddha-like under paws the size of serving platters.
We'll talk," Anna said when the rushing of the stove was silenced and she'd once again checked on McCaskil, cuffed and chained to a tree with the links that usually served as Balthazar's lead.
"Your name is not Mickleson-Nicholson, but Geoffrey Micou, isn't that right?" she asked.
