But he moved forward all the same.
He thought briefly about bears. Holding the shotgun between his knees, he cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Dad!” he shouted with as much volume as he could muster.
He didn’t expect his dad to hear him. But if there was a bear nearby, it could consider itself forewarned. No point startling any wildlife at close range.
When he reached the first of the creek crossings, Ethan nearly turned back. The water was fast flowing, and probably deeper than his knees. It flowed over smooth stones that Ethan imagined would be slippery and treacherous. And he couldn’t imagine walking on along the trail with his boots full of water.
Rufus bounded across, splashing Ethan as he ran, and Ethan sank into a squat and contemplated his options. Then he plunked into a sit and set the shotgun on the dirt. He untied his bootlaces, pulling off his boots and socks. He rolled up his jeans legs as best he could, but they were snug and wouldn’t roll past his calves.
He stood—holding the boots and the shotgun up higher than necessary—stepped into the flowing water, and shouted out his alarm.
“Ah! Man! Holy crap, that’s cold!”
On a lovely warm day like this one he’d expected to step into lovely warm water. Instead he found himself up past his knees in water that felt as cold as the snow it had so recently been. It soaked the rolled legs of his jeans.
He slipped once on a smooth stone and almost went down, but he managed to right himself in time.
He stepped out onto the dry trail again, leaving wet barefoot prints in the dirt. The trail had a scattering of small stones that bit into his tender feet.
Rufus looked back to see what was taking so long.
Ethan looked down at his bare feet, then up at the trail ahead. It was probably only a hundred feet to the next stream crossing. So he tied the laces of his boots together and draped them over his shoulder. He moved slowly and carefully along the trail, hopping and cursing as sharp stones bruised the soles of his still-freezing feet.
By the time Ethan had inched his way almost to the crest of the second pass he was sweaty, out of breath, and thoroughly exhausted. He turned and looked back the way he had come and realized he’d hiked over a mile into the wilderness. Maybe closer to two miles.
The trail up to the pass was more a collection of rock shards than it was dirt, so of course Ethan had snugged his socks and boots back on before attempting it.
Ethan stopped to breathe again, looking up at the narrow keyhole between mountains, gauging the distance until he could stop climbing. Maybe then he would see what lay ahead of them. Maybe he could even cruise downhill for a change.
There was something bleak about this part of the wilderness. Nothing grew here. No water flowed. There seemed to be nothing living at this elevation, and nothing about it seemed conducive to life. Just a place where two sheer, uncaring mountains came together at their bases, giving a person half a chance to scramble over and on to the next section of nothingness.
A chill ran through Ethan’s gut as it struck him again that he did not belong here. At least not alone.
He stopped and called for his dad again, more for the sake of bear safety than from any notion that it would help in his search.
Then he walked on.
A few minutes later he crested the pass. He stopped, leaned on his knees, and panted. Only when he had more air in his lungs did he look up at what lay ahead and beneath him.
“Wow,” he breathed aloud. The word came out long and modulated.
Below him the trail descended sharply to a miles-long, narrow valley dotted with twenty or more mountain lakes. The sun gleamed off their perfectly still water, which was so clear Ethan could see the rocky linings of the lake bottoms at their shallow edges. The flat land between lakes was a fresh light green from two or three days’ growth of new grass. Beyond the valley Ethan saw the towers of mountains he had never glimpsed before, peaks that could not be seen from home. They sat up, jagged and narrow, looking like pictures Ethan had seen of the Alps, or Patagonia, their tops still white with snow. The sky behind them was a perfect midday cloudless blue, a color of blue Ethan didn’t know a sky could achieve.
A huge bird with an amazing wingspan soared over the valley without once flapping its wings. Just riding effortlessly on a current of air. Ethan could see its long, separate, drooping wing tips silhouetted against the sky. They looked like fingers. As the bird coasted in Ethan’s direction, Ethan could just barely see that its head was white, which he figured made it an eagle. He just wasn’t sure enough.
In that brief moment Ethan thought he knew why people bothered to climb up to such remote places. But he didn’t think it in his head exactly. It was more like a knowing in a place between his throat and his belt. It was just there, something that had existed all along, but which Ethan had never noticed: an appreciation for something that could take his breath away.
“That’s so beautiful,” he said to Rufus.
He looked down at the dog.
Rufus stood with his head lowered, his hackles up. Ethan heard him growl deep in his throat, a strange rumbling that had never come out of his dog before.
“Rufus, what—”
Before he could even finish the question, Rufus charged. He took off down the trail. Then, once out of the narrow pass, he veered left and downhill, quickly disappearing over the side.
Ethan ran after him, desperately calling the dog’s name. He didn’t dare plunge down the edge of the steep and rocky slope, and he couldn’t see where the dog had gone. But he could hear Rufus, and it made his heart pound. Because these were noises he had never heard before. Somewhere between a bark and a bellowing of sheer canine fear.
If it’s so terrifying, run away from it, Ethan thought. Don’t run toward it!
Just as that thought finished its route through Ethan’s head, he saw his dog again, head low, running fast up the slope in his direction. Behind him, running much faster and closing the distance between them, was the very stuff of Ethan’s worst nightmares.
A bear.
A full-grown, full-size bear.
A bear with a long snout and honey-colored, ragged fur, which probably made it a grizzly.
Ethan felt himself vacate his own body. He only vaguely felt himself stumble backward. It seemed as though he was watching the scene more from above, and less through his own eyes. His heel hit a rock and he fell onto his back on the trail, hurting himself on the bulk of his pack and dropping the shotgun.
He unclipped the strap of the pack and left it on the ground, stumbling to his feet. He did grab the shotgun, of course. Because he was about to need it.
He turned to see Rufus scramble back up onto the trail, not twenty feet away, moving fast in Ethan’s direction. That was the moment when the full weight of the situation came to rest on Ethan, though he was far too panicked to register the details consciously. But the pattern was apparent. Rufus had smelled a bear. Charged the bear. Challenged the bear. Riled up the bear. Now the bear was charging in return, and Rufus was running to Ethan for protection. And bringing the angry beast along behind.
Ethan stumbled backward a few more steps and hit vertical stone, hard. There was no more room to stumble. He was back at the top of the narrow pass, hemmed in by sheer walls on both sides. He would have to run back down the trail into the smaller valley, back the way he had come. He looked in that direction. Willed his body to turn that way. Then he looked up to see it was already too late.
Rufus ran, panting, behind Ethan’s legs, wedging himself between Ethan and the sheer stone wall of mountain. He stuck his head out from between Ethan’s knees and bayed wildly at the bear, who was only a handful of loping paces away. It would be a matter of seconds before the monster caught them, and running didn’t seem like the answer. Ethan instinctively knew he couldn’t outrun the bear, not now. Not when it was this close. His only chance was to shoot.
He quickly wrapped one hand around the dog’s muzzle to silence
him. It helped, but not enough. The strange, strangled noises in Rufus’s chest and throat continued.
And Ethan now had fewer seconds. Two or three seconds, maybe. If that. He shouldn’t have wasted time trying to silence the dog. He should have fired the gun while he still had time.
In what felt like the last two or three seconds of his life, Ethan’s head leaped farther away from the scene, from reality. His hands did not move as they should have, as he instructed them to do.
He had a trace of a disconnected thought: He’d just recently been complaining that Rufus never barked. Never protected him. And this is the moment he chooses.
Then it was too late. Too late even to raise the gun.
Ethan looked up and waited for his life to be over.
The bear stopped a few feet away, and reared up onto its hind legs. Ethan looked up, the sun glaring into his eyes over the beast’s shoulder. He actually had to crane his neck to look up that high. Stretched up on its hind legs, the grizzly probably stood eight feet or higher.
Ethan felt the gun in his right hand. His finger was not on the trigger, but it needed to be. Fast.
The bear rocked from side to side and made a terrible noise. It wasn’t a huge noise, at least not for a bear. It wasn’t a full-on roar. More of a huffing. It seemed to come from deep in its chest and resonate through the massive expanse of its sinuses. Ethan could smell its fur. It smelled rank and musty, like a carpet that’s been left dirty and damp for months. He could smell the stench of the bear’s breath on each huff. There was something agitated and threatening about the way it rocked from side to side, blocking out the sun, then blinding Ethan as it unblocked the sun and allowed it to blast into Ethan’s eyes again.
For the second time in his life, Ethan thought he was already dead. That he knew how it felt to be on the other side of that ending.
The bear was getting higher. Taller. Ethan had to crane his neck farther and farther to look up at the vast silhouette of its head. Then he realized the bear was not getting higher, but rather Ethan was getting lower. His knees were liquefying, giving way, allowing him to sink until he was more or less sitting on his dog.
Still another second ticked by, and it was not the end.
Shoot the gun, a voice in Ethan’s head shouted.
But shoot it where? At the rocky trail in front of the bear, hoping to scare it away? Or directly into the living fur and flesh of the grizzly? And what if a shot at its feet did not scare it away? What if a shot into the bear did not kill it? Ethan had no idea what size pellets were loaded into each shotgun shell. It might only have been heavy enough shot to kill a rabbit or a bird.
What if firing the gun only made the bear madder?
Ethan saw and heard one huff that was greater than all the huffs that had come before it. The bear leaned in toward Ethan, who could feel the breath of the huff like a wind against his cheeks. It opened its mouth, pulling its lips away from those horrible teeth. One long fang was missing, or broken off.
Ethan’s finger found the trigger, and he knew he had nothing to lose. He could try this and then die, or he could die without trying.
He aimed at the rocky trail in front of the bear’s hind paws and squeezed the trigger.
The trigger didn’t move. Didn’t give at all.
Ethan looked down at the gun, wildly searching for the lever of the safety. He found it despite his panic, and flipped it off.
When he looked up again, the bear had dropped to all fours and turned its shoulder away. It looked around at Ethan—who was now sprawled on, and half crushing, his dog—and gave one final huff.
Then it turned its head away and took three unimaginably long strides toward the valley. It stopped. Looked over its shoulder again. Rose up onto its hind legs.
Ethan’s finger found its way back to the trigger.
The bear dropped onto all fours and turned away a second time, loping down the trail toward the lakes. Every ten paces or so it stopped and looked back at Ethan and his dog. Then it rose. Rocked. Fell to all fours and loped farther away.
He felt Rufus wiggle out from under him, dropping Ethan’s butt hard onto the rocky trail.
Ethan dissolved into trembling. Or maybe he’d been trembling all along but just hadn’t had time to notice.
Ethan stumbled along, looking more at the sky and less at the place where his feet touched the trail. At times the stumbling became quite literal. Still, each time he managed to right himself and move on.
There was something robotic in his movements. Ethan could feel that, but didn’t know how to change it, and was in no way motivated to try. He felt as though his true spirit, whatever essence of Ethan had animated his body in the past, was gone now. What moved him down the trail in its stead felt jerky, automated, and unemotional.
And there was a recurring noise. Something he kept hearing. As it got steadily closer, it began to sound like his name. Like someone calling his name over and over. But he couldn’t seem to connect with any sense of what the word meant, or how he should respond to it. It reminded him of that moment when the phone is ringing in your sleep, and it’s half waking you but you’re half still dreaming, and you can hear it perfectly well but you can’t remember what it means or what it wants you to do.
A hand touched his shoulder, and he shouted out a big sound, something from deep in his throat. It startled him so much that he fell over, part backward and part sideways. He landed on one hip, rolled over onto his butt, and looked up into the face of Sam. Sam was standing over Ethan, holding the reins of his mule Dora, who waited patiently behind him.
“Ethan?” Sam asked.
“Um,” Ethan said. “Yeah.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” he said, pleased with how it sounded. As if he were right there inside his body and knew exactly what he was doing.
Sam helped him to his feet.
“What’s wrong with you, buddy?” Sam asked, peering into his face.
“Wrong?”
“You look like you’re drunk or something.”
“Drunk?”
Sam sighed, and picked Ethan up. Just swung a big, beefy arm around Ethan’s waist and lifted his feet off the ground. The next thing Ethan knew, he was perched on the bulky western saddle on top of Sam’s mule. Sam let go and took one step back, as if to see how well Ethan would stay in place without help. But Ethan wasn’t balanced, and he swung dangerously to the right. Dora had to take a wild step to one side and square her stance to compensate. Ethan shouted out that strange grunting noise again and grabbed the saddle horn.
Sam steadied Ethan with one hand. Then, when he seemed sure it was safe to let go, he began to rummage around in one of Dora’s saddlebags. The bags were secured to the saddle behind where Ethan sat, and Ethan didn’t dare turn around to look, afraid of unbalancing himself again.
A moment later he felt a canvas strap wrapped twice around his waist. When Sam tied it to the saddle horn it jerked Ethan’s body forward uncomfortably.
Then they were moving. The mule had a rocking walk, jarring on each footfall, and Ethan could feel himself shifting slightly back and forth within the confines of the snug strap.
Sam walked ahead, and he didn’t have hold of his mule in any way. She simply followed.
Ethan looked around to see if Rufus was still with them. He was. He trotted placidly behind, looking tired but not especially upset. Some very distant part of Ethan’s brain marveled at that. Imagine being a dog and being able to leave an experience like that behind. Just come back to the moment. But it was a disconnected thought. Almost as if someone else were having it.
It was interrupted by Sam’s voice. “Where were you going?”
“Home,” Ethan said, wondering if it was only his imagination telling him he had established that already.
“I meant in the first place.”
“Oh.”
Ethan didn’t answer the question, because he didn’t understand it. He knew in a distant way that he should unde
rstand it. That it was simple enough. But he could make no sense of it. He furrowed his brow and decided the rocking of the mule’s gait felt comforting. Then he tried to drag his mind back to the question, but he’d forgotten what it was.
“Why were you even out here?” Sam asked.
“Now that’s a good question,” Ethan said.
He didn’t say it sardonically. It was an honest answer. He knew there had been a reason, some kind of thinking involved in his being out on the wilderness trails by himself. It wasn’t even so much that he couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking. More that he could no longer imagine why he’d found the collection of thoughts convincing. He wasn’t sure why he’d ever listened to them in the first place, not to mention obeyed their directives.
In other words, he knew only that it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Which wasn’t much to know.
Just as they crested the first pass—now the last pass between them and home—Sam attempted to talk to him again.
“Good thing you didn’t go in any deeper than you did. There was a big grizzly sow down in that second valley. Twenty Lakes Valley, we call it. And not in a very good mood, either. The sow, I mean. Not the valley. She had some kind of thorn in her butt. Figuratively speaking. I thought she was going to charge me and Dora when we rode back through. She did, really, but it was only a false charge. She never got very close. She was big enough I thought she was a full-grown male. But it was a sow all right.”
“What’s a sow?” Ethan asked. Or heard himself ask, anyway.
He could feel his brain coming back slightly. Coming around. But he still felt half asleep.
“Female.”
“I thought a sow was a female pig.”
“That, too,” Sam said. “Anyway, I’m glad I was the one to run into that lady, not you.”
“Actually,” Ethan said, “we met.”
Sam stopped. Dora stopped. Ethan rocked forward in the saddle. He looked down to see Sam staring up into his face—as if deciding whether to trust Ethan’s information.
Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Page 10
