Monster

by Frank Peretti

  With great relief she called back, “I’m through,” and stowed her camera and notebook in her backpack.

  Jimmy immediately turned his attention to Agnes. “All right. Let’s get a scent and track that baby!” The hunting party, with sniffing Caesar in the lead, nearly stampeded off the bridge and down the trail.

  They jostled past Sing as if she were an obstacle. She hurried up the trail, relieved with every step that put distance between them.

  The other team members were now covering the surrounding area in widening quadrants. She could hear them calling to each other, maintaining voice contact as they worked their way among the trees like fleas in a hairbrush. At certain moments she spotted some of them, but she hadn’t caught sight of Sheriff Mills to fill him in on—

  “Sing! Up here!”

  Ah. He was waving to her from the hillside above the trail. She selected a route up the embankment with sufficient footholds and branches to grab, and worked her way to him. At the top, Mills and Deputy Saunders were waiting for her. They were examining the campsite, two sleeping bags on a ground cloth, cloistered in a tight pocket among some trees. It wasn’t an instant find; as Reed had warned, it was hard to see from the trail.

  “Find anything unusual down there?” Mills asked her.

  “Besides everything?” She looked down into the draw where Jimmy and his hunting party lurked near the cabin, waiting for Caesar to show them the way. “That bear was very hungry or very angry at being so hungry, or . . . Well, let’s just say he was highly motivated.”

  “But no sign of Randy?”

  She hated to tell him, “No sir.”

  Mills’s expression was troubled as he scanned the forest in wide arcs, his eyes landing on the searchers below. “We need to find a body, Sing.”

  The deputy suggested, “Why don’t we get Reed over here so he can show us where he saw it?”

  “He won’t leave the search for Beck,” Sing cautioned.

  Mills gazed at the rough map Reed had drawn. “We’ve located the campsite and the stash of food containers between the two trees . . . but this tree right here, the big cedar tree where the body is supposed to be . . . Well, maybe it’s the right tree, maybe it isn’t, but there’s no body.”

  Then Jimmy cursed so loudly it startled them.

  Agnes started hollering, “Caesar! Caesar, come, boy! Come, Caesar!”

  Of course they had to watch. From up here the view was quite good.

  Caesar was trying to run up the trail away from the cabin, and Agnes was hot on his heels, leash in hand. The dog stopped at her command, shied away again, answered her command again, then fidgeted, obviously wanting nothing but to get out of there. When Agnes finally snapped the leash onto his collar, he tugged at it, jerking in little circles, trembling and dribbling urine.

  “What’s his problem?” Jimmy demanded, rifle in hand but with nothing to shoot. “I said, what’s his problem?”

  “I don’t know!” the handler shouted back. “I’m about to retire him! He’s just never acted this way!” Her legs were getting snarled in the leash.

  “Well, does he track bears or doesn’t he?” Jimmy asked.

  “He tracks bears! Black bears, grizzly bears, any kind of bears!”

  “Well, he’s not doing us much good now, is he?” Jimmy turned toward the marksman behind him. “What did you say?”

  The marksman was not the kind to be intimidated. “I said, ‘Maybe this ain’t a bear.’”

  Now Jimmy was simmering at a temperature even Sing could feel from the hill. He pointed his finger at the man. “Excuse me, Janson! If you’re going to be on this team, you’re going to handle yourself and your mouth with professionalism, you got that?”

  “Yes sir, I got that.”

  Now Jimmy addressed all three people in a voice suitable for a hundred: “This is a rogue bear we’re after. It’s serious business. We’re going to keep our minds clear and straight ahead so we get the job done without anyone getting hurt, is that understood?”

  Janson nodded, the other hunter said yes, and Agnes just petted Caesar.

  Jimmy leaned in on her. “Agnes, we need a dog that’ll track this bear, and if your dog can’t do that, we need another dog. Are we clear on that?”

  “Clear enough.” Agnes steamed a moment, then led Caesar back up the trail toward Abney. “C’mon, boy. We don’t need any more of this!”

  Caesar led her, only too eager to go.

  Jimmy watched her go, then stomped around a bit, then conferred with his hunters, saying something about bait and bear stands.

  The show was over. Sheriff Mills turned back to Sing and Deputy Saunders. “We’ll give the searchers a few more minutes, and then we’ll have to get Reed and Pete over here.”

  Sing thought it wise to remind him, “Sheriff, every other aspect of Reed’s account holds up.”

  Sheriff Mills regarded the cabin below. “So you don’t think one man could do that kind of damage to the cabin?”

  She almost laughed. “Not even remotely. And if you’ll remember, Reed’s camera recorded pictures of the demolished cabin before it recorded pictures of Beck, alive and well.”

  Mills nodded but asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve spotted any bear prints anywhere?”

  She felt the strange sensation of thin ice under her feet—and maybe Reed’s. “Well, it is loose ground around here, lots of rock, lots of humus and pine needles that don’t register a print, at least to someone who isn’t a tracker.”

  “We’ll see what Pete says.”

  “Sure. We’ll see what Pete says. But, sir . . .” She felt nervous. “Reed never said anything about a bear. He provided no bear scenario. If there was foul play, if he had planned this—”

  Mills held up his hand. “You don’t have to sell me.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, sir.”

  Mills only responded, “But we’d better pray they find Beck.”

  Pete’s team was picking up some speed now that they knew what to look for. They’d worked their way up the hill another hundred feet while two trackers, accompanied by the marksman named Thorne, started crisscrossing their path a shouting distance ahead of them, hoping to encounter signs farther up.

  For Reed, it was all too tedious. Beck could die in the dirt somewhere long before they would ever find her. Cap must’ve sensed his mood, because he kept whispering, “Easy, now, we’re moving okay; we’ll find her. Got to do it right.”

  “What’d this thing do, have its claws cut?” Pete muttered.

  Then came a shout from one of the trackers far up the hill. “We’ve got something!”

  Pete told Reed and Cap, “Better stay here.” He and his men went on ahead.

  Time stretched into an eternity, but Reed had no hurry left in him. He could only stand there and take frightened, furtive glances as Pete and his men disappeared into the forest. For a long time—such a long time—Reed heard them pushing through the limbs and brush as they spoke in hushed, clipped phrases and moved in a wide arc. When they finally came into sight again, they were far away, their outlines broken by a jittery web of branches and limbs. He could just barely see them approaching the other team members and whatever the object was.

  Pete circled the object, then called out, “Come on up, Reed.”

  Reed drew a deep breath and wiped his eyes clear.

  “C’mon,” said Cap, touching his arm.

  They pressed through the pines and firs, approximating the path the others had taken. When they finally emerged from the insistent, aggravating, view-blocking fingers of the forest, Reed could see the others gathered in a wide circle in front of a huge fallen log, the two marksmen warily standing guard. In the center of the circle was a blue backpack, not set there but dropped. It was dirty and the frame was bent—as if it had fallen over a waterfall. Every eye focused on Reed, waiting for the verdict.

  five

  Reed’s voice quavered though he tried to control it. “It’s hers. She picked out the color.”
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  “Don’t touch it,” said Pete, looking around the area and at his two flankers, visibly bothered about something. He asked Reed, “Do you know if there’s any food in there?”

  “We packed some granola bars, and she may have had some of her lunch left over.”

  Pete went down on all fours for a closer look, studying the pack on all sides. “If I were a camp-raiding kind of bear, I’d be interested in that. This one wasn’t. This pack doesn’t have a mark on it.” Then he pulled out his tweezers again and probed at one of the flaps. “Got some more of that hair here, tangled up in the Velcro. Tyler? Let’s get those medics up here with one of those . . . you know, those bags. We need to bag the whole thing up.”

  Body bags, Reed thought. Pete wasn’t very clever at talking in code.

  Tyler got on his radio.

  “May I see the hairs?” Cap asked, leaning over the pack. Pete pointed them out and Cap looked at them closely. He even sniffed them, then sniffed the pack.

  “Any thoughts?” Reed asked.

  Cap backed away as if caught in an illegal act. “Oh no, no, no thoughts. Just curious.”

  “Got a pretty good toe print here,” Don reported from near the log.

  “We’re on him now,” said Pete, showing a hint of excitement despite himself.

  Cap went to have a look, hands clasped behind his back, unobtrusive.

  “Check that log,” Pete told his guys. “See if he went over it.” Then he sniffed the pack himself and made a face. “Reed? Come smell this.”

  Reed approached carefully, dropping to his knees, then all fours, crouching down to get his nose close enough to the blue fabric.

  It was a defining moment he hadn’t expected: a reassuring horror, a dreadful relief, an encouraging fear. He knew this odor; for him, it was the stench of Beck’s abduction, the reek of the creature that had chased them and taken her. It had filled the air the previous night and become a suppressed and forgotten ingredient in what he’d taken for madness, a crazed illusion he’d come to doubt. But that was then. Now, among friends and objective observers in broad daylight, it was real—horribly, reassuringly real! “This is what we smelled last night. The smell was everywhere!”

  “No wonder Caesar had a problem,” Pete mused.

  The flank men had reached the other side of the log and were checking the ground. “Got a heel print over here, deep compression,” Don reported.

  Tyler checked the top of the log, his head low, eyeing the aged, crumbling grain.

  “What do you see, Tyler?” Pete urged.

  Tyler looked at the heel print again, then at the top of the log again. “Looks like he jumped over.”

  That brought Pete to his feet. “Over that? Doggone, Tyler, I don’t need any more surprises!”

  Tyler explained, “We’ve got a deep push-off in that toe print and a deep compression on the heel over here, and nothing on top of the log.”

  Pete examined the toe print, then checked the top of the log with his light. “Don, I want you to tell me you’ve got some claw marks.”

  Don knelt and studied the print from several directions. “Can’t say I do.”

  “No claw marks,” Pete muttered, obviously fed up.

  “That thing jumped,” Tyler repeated.

  Pete looked back. “And that’s when Beck lost her backpack.”

  “We’re missing something,” Don objected.

  “A bear would’ve torn some pretty good claw marks in this log going over, especially if it was carrying a . . . carrying somebody.”

  “What are you talking about, ‘carried’?” Tyler said. “A bear doesn’t carry a body; it drags it in its teeth.”

  Reed gave up trying to contain himself. “It didn’t drag her. It carried her. I saw it lift her off the ground.” They all stared at him, so he threw back a challenge. “Have you found any sign that says different?”

  The trackers looked at each other, waiting for one of them to answer.

  “We’re . . . we’re missing something,” Don said again.

  “No, we aren’t,” said Pete, and Tyler agreed with a wag of his head. “Nobody got dragged. The sign says what it says.”

  “And what is that?” Reed demanded.

  No answer.

  “Tell me!” he shouted.

  Pete was thinking when his radio squawked, “Pete. Pete, this is Mills.”

  “This is Pete. Go ahead.”

  “We can’t find a body up here.”

  Pete made a curious face. “Say again?”

  Mills came back, speaking with forced clarity. “We cannot find a body. Do you copy?”

  Pete looked at Reed, but Reed was dumbstruck. “Uh, we copy that you cannot find a body.”

  “We need you and Reed to come and help us out for a few minutes.”

  First one blow, then another! Reed shook his head.

  Pete spoke into his radio, “We’ve found Beck’s backpack. We could be close.”

  There was a pause, apparently while Mills thought it over, and then Mills replied, “Pete, hand off to your flank men, let Reed stay there, but give him a radio so we can talk to him, and you come up.”

  Pete checked visually with Don and Tyler. They were ready to take over. He reassured Reed, “You can trust these guys.”

  “I’d rather you were here,” Reed protested.

  Pete sighed and spoke into his radio again. “Can it wait?”

  Mills came back immediately: “No, it can’t.”

  Beck’s head throbbed, her ankle shrieked, everything in between hurt, and it was getting hard to breathe with those huge arms squeezing her. She’d been hanging on to fistfuls of fur, ducking her head as branches swept close, and praying for an end to this for what seemed hours. The big female had climbed, galloped, strode, reversed course, run, reversed again, and run some more, penetrating miles of forestland and covering vast stretches of mountain slope to the point where Beck hadn’t the foggiest clue where on the planet they were. Everything—trees, gullies, ridges, boulders— looked the same. She couldn’t even be sure she was still in Idaho.

  But the creature was hurting too. She hobbled and wheezed, swaying unsteadily as she walked. Beck had the uneasy feeling she was sitting high in a tree that was about to fall over.

  She was right.

  With her last feeble steps, the big female pushed into a scrubby clump of trees, spun a few dizzying turns, then collapsed like a condemned building imploding, her legs giving way beneath her, her nostrils huffing clouds of steam. She bumped on her behind, teetered there a moment, and then, with a long, breathy groan, slumped onto her side. Her arms wilted like dying plants and Beck rolled onto the moss and uneven rock. Her clothes were dampened with the creature’s sweat, and she ached in every muscle, wincing from the pain in her ankle, and amazed she was still alive.

  Her hair-covered captor sounded like a locomotive leaving a station, chugging and laboring for every breath, holding her side. Her eyes were watery, filled with pain and unmistakable fear.

  Beck stared, unable to make sense of it. The beast is afraid? What could a beast of such power and size be afraid of?

  The female looked back at her, never breaking her gaze, until her expansive rib cage began to settle into a quieter, more restful rhythm and her eyes softened from fear to a kind of resignation. With a deep sigh and a swallow, she pushed herself into a sitting position and began peering through the trees like a soldier in a bunker, scanning the expansive landscape below, the deep amber eyes searching, searching, searching.

  Beck sat up as well and followed the creature’s gaze. The view was spectacular from here. Below them stretched a vast valley under a thin veil of blue haze, and beyond that, so clear it seemed one could touch them, a range of granite peaks took a jagged bite out of the sky. It even sounded vast up here: dead quiet except for the all-surrounding whisper of air moving through the trees and the trickle of a stream nearby. If Beck wasn’t so miserable, fearful for her life, and occupied with trying to think of the “ri
ght” thing to do, she could be enjoying this.

  The right thing to do? She wanted to cry. The right thing would have been to stay home where she had a warm bed, a latte machine, fuzzy slippers, and a nice shower with brass handles. This was unthinkable!

  The shadows were long now, the mossy rubble outside their hiding place almost entirely in shade. Not comforting. She’d learned the hard way what to expect in this weird, wild world at night, and she did not relish facing that alone and lost.

  She looked at her smelly, unknowable, unpredictable host, who was still looking out over the valley as if expecting an enemy. What were her plans? Had she captured Beck for a meal? Beck remembered something she learned at a zoo once, something about gorillas being vegetarians. This creature seemed to like berries.

  But so did bears.

  Keep thinking, Beck; keep thinking!

  Okay. What was it going to take to survive? Shelter. Water. Food. In that order.

  She considered shelter. If she could move, if she had some tools, if there was anything with which to build a shelter . . .

  Well, what about the next one? She hadn’t had any water since last night, and that stream was calling to her. She craned her neck but couldn’t see where— Whooa! Hands wrapped around her like a big sling, and she was in the air again. No freight-train speed this time, though. As the creature ambled with smooth, bent-kneed strides through the trees, over rocks, and down a shallow draw, Beck felt a sensation much like floating over the ground on a ski lift.

  They found the stream, sparkling and splashing over broken rocks and forming pools from which to dip water. The big female set her down on a large, flat stone and then squatted next to her, dipping up bucket-sized helpings in her hands, slurping them down. Beck watched, wondering if it was safe to move, to take a drink herself. She leaned over the water, then checked with a sideways glance. The creature didn’t seem to mind; it may have been expecting it. Beck prayed silently, Oh Lord, don’t let me get beaver fever—whatever that is, and then started dipping and drinking.