CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  It was all Ernie could do to hold on. He kicked back wildly with his right leg and cried out.

  His hands held onto the luggage rack, and he struck the young bear. It released its bite. Quickly, his right foot landed back on the windowsill, and he pulled himself up onto the roof.

  He rolled over onto his back. He saw snow clouds overhead in the dark sky. Night had come without hesitation.

  The air was cold, and Ernie’s left ankle was demolished. He looked down and saw his foot hanging at an unnatural angle. He didn’t have time to think because the big bear hit the right side of the van again, and the whole thing rocked up on its left two wheels. The bear roared.

  It pushed at the right side of the van.

  Ernie felt the van tilt, the bear pushing it over. Ernie rolled over and lay facedown on the roof. He grabbed hold of the luggage rack in front of him, and the van rocked over on its left two wheels.

  Ernie heard the bear roar, and he realized that the van was going over.

  The van stood precariously on its left two wheels for a moment, but then the whole thing went over. Ernie fell out onto the ground. A wrenching metal sound filled his ears, and he fell out away from the roof.

  The van lay on its left side. Dust filled the air. Ernie saw snowflakes falling from the sky.

  He tried to climb to his feet but only his right leg would support him. He managed to lean up against the roof. The sliding door gaped open to the sky.

  Ernie grabbed the top, open side of the door and tried to pull himself up and into the van. He felt something strike his left leg again, and he felt pain like nothing else he’d ever felt in his life. Blood gushed from the bottom of his left leg, and Ernie fell inside. He screamed.

  Darkness now inside the van. Ernie clambered around trying to get a sense of the situation.

  He was in the van. The van was on its left side. The front window was still intact and both back doors had remained shut. The only way into the van was through the open sliding door, which was now like a giant sunroof overhead.

  Ernie tried to reach up and close the sliding door overhead, but it was jammed. He couldn’t stand. He tried to brace himself and grabbed the door handle overhead.

  Suddenly, he heard a scraping sound, and the big bear’s head emerged in the opening. Ernie screamed.

  The bear lunged down through the opening. Ernie beat at it, but the bear got him. Its mouth enveloped his shoulder.

  Ernie screamed and pounded at the animal, but the bear went wild shaking him. It pulled him out of the van and swung around to the left side of the camp site. Ernie’s head hit something metal as he was ripped from the van.

  He was aware of being thrown to the ground like a rag doll. Something penetrated his skull. He couldn’t move. He lay on the ground ten feet from the van. He heard the bear move towards him. He felt something of incredible weight step on his chest. His eyes filled with blood, and he saw the bear’s face over him.

  He had a half second to think: I don’t want to die!

  Seven

  By the time Angie finished dinner, night had set in and the snow had picked up. It looked like the eight to ten inches that weather forecasters had predicted earlier in the day had finally arrived. She lit a fire in the fireplace with logs from a stack out behind the cabin. The newspaper story regarding her renting the place and the man who’d hung himself was open on the kitchen table. She’d picked up a copy from a park bench in Telluride, and now, she sat down and read the article closely.

  It described the cabin, the very cabin she was in right that moment, as “cursed and haunted.” A string of tenants, most of them in their thirties and forties, had each died at the place of unnatural causes.

  One had fallen down the front porch steps and broken his neck. Another had been run over by a tractor-style riding lawn mower. One had slit her wrists in the cabin’s only bathtub, and a fourth had blown his brains out with a twelve gauge while talking on the phone to his wife in Long Beach, California.

  He’d said, “Hold on a second, hon,” placed the phone on a coffee table, and then his wife had heard a gunshot. She was eight hundred and seventy miles away at the time and had no idea that he was even suicidal.

  A fifth tenant had died of a heart attack while shoveling snow between the front porch and driveway—the only natural death of the bunch—and then the sixth tenant just eight months ago in the dead of winter had used a step ladder and a string of barbed wire to meet his maker. A coroner’s report estimated he’d hung from the tree for two hours before breathing his last breath.

  Bizarre.

  Angie whispered aloud, “You got a lot to live up to.”

  She folded the paper shut, stood up, and walked over to the fireplace. She threw the paper on top of the blaze and then walked over to the front door. Angie glanced out the windows at either side of the door and stepped out onto the front porch.

  It was cold outside, and her breath steamed. She could see snow on the ground and heard the million rasping snowflakes alighting on the ground all around the cabin. It was dark, and she could just barely see her truck in the drive.

  Why are you here? she thought. Is this really where I’m supposed to be?

  Just three years before, she’d been a respected wildlife biologist. She had a job at the University of Arizona. She had her whole life ahead of her, but it had all come to an end with one widely publicized tragedy and she’d been struggling to gain her footing ever since.

  She was too controversial to be offered a job teaching anywhere, and she had spent up all of her savings just trying to live day to day for three years. She had a book deal that fell through the cracks when her agent couldn’t find a publisher, and no one seemed to want to see her on TV anymore. It was when she was at her lowest that she’d received the most out-of-the-blue phone call of her life.

  A person on behalf of the Colorado governor had told her that the governor wanted to meet with her. A fiery Boulder native, Janet Creed had a job for her. Creed had made a career out of playing against stereotypes and was one of the most outspoken environmentally conscientious Republicans in the country. She deferred to wildlife over big business nine times out of ten, and she loved it when people underestimated her or formed fixed opinions about her politics.

  The Saturday meeting had taken place over lunch at the 400 East 8th Avenue governor’s mansion in Denver, and all of Angie’s expenses were paid for during the weekend.

  Janet Creed, Angie thought. There’s a piece of work.

  She stepped back inside the cabin, closing the front door behind her. The fire blazed in the fireplace, and Angie looked up the little wooden flight of stairs toward the darkened rooms on the second floor. She glanced at the stack of grizzly bear books on the coffee table.

  She had a great deal of work ahead of her.

  • •

  Two men stood twenty feet deep in a stand of ponderosa pines behind Angie’s cabin. One had a pair of binoculars.

  Three hours earlier, both men had been on the eastern San Juan range about ten miles over the mountains from Angie’s cabin. Both men had watched Ernie Houseman and his New Jersey tags cross Mineral Creek, climbing up into land recently acquired by W.D.A. Corp. in a Bureau of Land Management auction. Both men looked like locals, but within three minutes of Ernie’s disappearance up into the hills, they received a satellite transmission while standing at their jeep. The transmission told them everything anyone would want to know about Ernest Reginald Houseman’s life history.

  The B.L.M. auction topped at four hundred and seventy-nine million dollars for the six-thousand-acre tract. The B.L.M. was a non-profit government organization designed to administer public lands, mostly in the American West. Because the five fastest growing states in the country were Western states, the B.L.M. had come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for how it acquired, leased, and traded wilderness land.

  On the surface, it couldn’t have been a more noble organization, but because of the enormous influx of people into We
stern states, it had become increasingly political. Opponents argued that greater regulation should be enforced, and that the Bureau traded, leased, and sold land too often for political purposes.

  The Recreation and Public Purposes Act set no limitation on the amount of land that may be leased, and environmental groups were suspicious. Each year, more and more public land was auctioned for development, but the six-thousand-acre tract that Foxwell’s W.D.A. Corp. acquired was one of the largest that the Bureau had ever sold.

  The two men were not friendlies.

  They’d watched Angie Rippard for the last half hour, despite the falling snow. From their angle on the hill, they could see in through the brightly lighted windows of her living room and the back two bedrooms. They watched her walking around inside the cabin. They saw her reading a newspaper. They saw her put the newspaper on the fire.

  Right now, Angie was at a sofa in the living room. It was pitch black outside the cabin and the snow was falling, but it looked warm and cozy inside. She was reading some sort of book.

  “What is it?”

  The man with the binoculars adjusted the focus. The snow landed on his arms. He wore a ski jacket and gloves. His breath steamed out into the night air.

  “Some sort of book,” he said. “There’s a picture of a bear on the front.”

  “Let me see.”

  He handed over the binoculars. The second man looked.

  “Grizzly bears,” he said. “I can almost make out the title if she’d just hold still . . . Ghost Grizzlies . . . the author’s name is David Petersen.”

  He held the binoculars away from his face for a moment and looked at the cabin with his naked eyes.

  A sound like a sword pulled from a scabbard made him turn. His associate had pulled a machete from its sleeve on the side of their ATV. He held a rubber mask in his right hand. The mask was green.

  He lifted it up and pulled it onto his head. It was a Yoda mask with twin pointy ears sticking straight out on either side.

  He swung the machete back and forth through the air, making a whooshing sound.

  “May the Force be with you,” he said.

  The man with the binoculars said, “Trick or treat.”

  • •

  She was reading about hibernation. Bears, unlike chipmunks and ground squirrels, were not true hibernators. They were considered “super-hibernators,” which meant that their body temperature and respiration did not drop like true hibernators, and sometimes grizzly bears stayed out all winter.

  One survey indicated that Yellowstone grizzlies began to den in preparation for winter between late October and mid November. She didn’t have a lot of time. If there were grizzlies in the San Juan Mountains, they would probably follow a similar pattern to Yellowstone grizzlies.

  Telluride was five hundred miles south of Yellowstone National Park, and so she may get a few more weeks to work with but it wouldn’t be much. By mid November—early December at the latest—grizzlies in the San Juans would be underground and could stay underground until March or early April.

  “That’s if there are any grizzlies,” she whispered.

  As soon as the winter snow thawed, W.D.A. Corp. would begin clearing timber for the new resort. Janet Creed had spelled it out pretty clearly to Angie, “The only thing that can stop them now, would be an emergency Grizzly Preservation Act. I can get it passed, Angie, and it’ll halt construction, but there has to be a grizzly bear down there in the San Juans.”

  That meant she had until May. Angie was not naïve, though, and she’d done her homework before she signed any contracts. She wanted to know what she was up against, but what she found wasn’t encouraging.

  Janet Creed had had several political battles with W.D.A. Corp. CEO Abraham Foxwell and the politicians Foxwell’s money supported. One included a nasty publicity campaign funded by Foxwell’s people meant to destroy her political career. Angie figured grizzly preservation was only a drop in the bucket of her motivation. The real reasons were personal. Governor Creed loathed Abraham Foxwell.

  Angie placed a bookmark in the field survey and set it atop the coffee table. She glanced at the budget she’d started to work with on a piece of notebook paper.

  Her first month’s rent, deposit, a full tank of gas, and groceries had flattened her checking account. It was under one dollar. She was supposed to receive a check at the end of the week from the Colorado Game and Fish Department, which was how the governor had arranged for her to be paid, but if it didn’t show up, she didn’t know what she was going to do for food over the weekend.

  The thought scared her, but she said a prayer to allay her fears. Worrying wasn’t going to help, and besides prayer, there was not much else that she could do.

  Suddenly, she felt something at the back of her neck.

  She didn’t realize at first what it was, but after a moment, she realized that the hair on the back of her neck had started to stand up. Something had caught her eye, and she turned in her seat and saw someone standing at the window on the front porch. She gasped.

  A man in a green Yoda mask stood at her window. Angie stumbled up from the soda, nearly tripping over the coffee table, and moved toward the back of the cabin.

  The man just stood there, right outside the window in the dark. He stared at her.

  Angie hadn’t had phone service set up yet, and she didn’t carry a cell phone.

  The man raised an index finger and curled it for her to come forward. Angie glanced toward the kitchen. She saw the wooden knife stand still in a box needing to be unpacked.

  The man lifted up a machete, and Angie screamed.

  She ran for the kitchen, lifted the knife stand from the box, removed the newspaper wrapping, and grabbed a butcher knife. It was the only weapon she had. She swung back around towards the window.

  The man in the Yoda mask was gone.

  “God knows,” she said.

  She saw someone running out in the yard on the right side of the cabin. Quickly, she turned off all of the lights. She realized that the lights from inside were blinding her from seeing into the darkness outside, and with the lights on, it was easy for whoever was outside to see her. Now, the only light in the cabin came from the fireplace.

  She crossed to the back left bedroom and pulled the door shut behind her. The room was dark, and there were two windows in the room: one on the back wall and one on the left.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but she saw someone out by the woodpile. Someone else further up in the woods flashed a flashlight on and off, and the figure by the woodpile vanished up into the woods.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  She saw that her hands were shaking. She still held the butcher knife in her right hand and moved over toward the window to see out into the snow. The yard was now coated in about three inches of fresh powder, and she saw tracks from the side of the house, to the woodpile, on up into the woods.

  She was terrified.

  She thought about going for her truck. Her keys were on the kitchen table.

  Someone exited the woods and ran toward the right side of the cabin. She couldn’t see him very well, but it was an adult male, white, about six feet tall. Angie gripped the knife and strained to see out the window. The man ran past her line of sight, and her eyes rifled back toward the closed bedroom door.

  The doorknob glistened in the dark. Snow fell gently on the ground outside.

  She crossed to the door, turned the knob and looked across the cabin toward the kitchen table. She heard glass shattering outside. It was her truck. She ran to the table and grabbed the keys. She looked out the kitchen window just in time to see someone running from the driver’s-side door back toward the back of the house. The driver’s-side window was smashed open, and Angie stepped into the back right bedroom.

  The man ran through the yard and vanished back into the trees behind the woodpile. She looked around the yard.

  She was trapped.

  She didn’t know how many of them we
re out there, but she didn’t have a phone to call police.

  “Why would he break into the car?” she whispered.

  She stepped back into the living room. The fire blazed in the fireplace, and she looked out the kitchen window toward the truck again. The window was smashed wide open. She grabbed the keys.

  The snow continued to fall.

  Suddenly, she heard someone running outside on the left side of the cabin. She crouched down and crawled toward the window. The man in the Yoda masked moved along the tree line. The silver machete glinted in the darkness. She crawled toward the front door, stood up, and threw it open.

  Angie stepped out onto the front porch. She pushed open the screen door and stepped down onto the steps but slipped on the snow and fell down hard. The knife flew from her hand and landed somewhere in the powder at the base of the steps, and she tumbled to the bottom.

  She was dazed but willed herself to stand up.

  Frantic, she tried to spot the knife. She swore.

  She swung around and saw the truck. She’d jammed her finger into the key ring and so had managed to keep the keys in hand. Angie ran towards the driver’s-side door. The ignition was ripped out and hanging from wires, but she climbed inside anyways. She tried to put the key in the ignition, but it became clear immediately that it wouldn’t start.

  “Damn!”

  That was when she saw the headlights coming towards her from the woods back behind the cabin. It was an ATV.

  Angie threw open the door and started to run toward the front porch. The ATV raced down the hill toward her.

  The ATV engine whined loudly, and something hit her squarely in the back. She stumbled and fell face-first in the snow. Instantly, she popped up and saw the ATV race past the truck, heading out toward the forest road at the bottom of the driveway. Two men rode on the single ATV. The man on the back wore the Yoda mask.

  Her eyes went to the object that had hit her in the back.

  “Uhg,” she groaned, wincing and turning away.