A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  Mutt, who had been appearing and disappearing in front of Kate for the last hour, rematerialized to nip at the cuff of Kate’s jeans. She turned, looked over her shoulder, gave a peremptory bark, leaped over a fallen tree, and vanished again. Kate clambered over the same trunk and was suddenly and blessedly in a large clearing on the south-facing slope of a small hill. She stood there blinking in the bright sunshine, breathing in deep gulps of cool, clean air. She felt as if she had just emerged from a long, underwater swim.

  She looked around for Mutt, spotting her at the top of the clearing, fifty feet away. Mutt was dancing impatiently in place, giving out an occasional imperative yip. At her feet was a haphazard pile of dead brush and leaves lumped together over something else, at which Kate was instantly certain no one was going to want to take a closer look.

  The five men thrashed their way out of the brush and came to a stop behind her. “Oh man,” Matt said, spotting Mutt immediately. “I was really hoping …”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Mark said.

  Something caught the edge of Kate’s vision and she looked around, scanning the edge of the clearing. At almost the same moment something large started thrashing through the bush about halfway between them and Mutt.

  “Oh fuck,” Dan said, followed by the sound of safeties coming off all around.

  Kate was still holding her rifle in front of her but she didn’t raise it to her shoulder or sight down the barrel. Mutt hadn’t charged or put herself between Kate and the noise.

  The crashing came nearer, and the bear whose food cache they’d just stumbled on came growling and stumbling into the clearing, bringing the better part of a dense clump of alders with him.

  Only it wasn’t a bear. It was Old Sam, and he wasn’t growling, he was swearing, loudly enough to be heard all the way back to the road. He stumbled to a halt, spit out an alder leaf, and glared at them.

  “Something chasing you, Old Sam?” Dan said.

  “No, there is nothing fucking chasing me!” Old Sam Dementieff, a lean and leathery old fart, near as anyone could figure ninety-five going on forty and cranky with the wisdom of accumulated years, drew himself up and bent a fulminating eye on the ranger. “I was looking for you. Heard you had a search party going. Figured I’d lend a hand.”

  Kate looked at the toes of her wet boots with an intensity they did not merit. Matt was inspecting the straps on his pack, Mark was whistling a happy tune, Luke was scratching at a nonexistent mark on the immaculate barrel of his .30-30, and Peter was squinting at the cloudless sky in search of the next incoming front.

  Dan eyed the well-worn, well-kept Model 70 Winchester over Old Sam’s shoulder. From years of long and usually alcohol-involved conversations over the bar at Bernie’s Roadhouse, Dan knew that Old Sam believed absolutely in the hunter’s maxim “Use enough gun.” The Model 70 was known to the cognoscenti as the rifleman’s rifle, and Old Sam’s had a serial number well below 600,000, making it a drool-worthy object of desire to any hunter worthy of the name. His preferred cartridge was the .458 Winchester Magnum, which could put down half a ton of bear and an incoming ICBM with equal efficiency.

  It was the half-ton bear, however, that more nearly concerned the chief ranger, steward of everything on two wings and four legs within the twenty-million-acre Park.

  Dan looked at Kate. She had her back to him, now absorbed in examining the inside of one of Mutt’s ears. The Grosdidiers had double-checked all the equipment they carried, and had fallen back and regrouped at a safe distance.

  Absent a carcass—an ursine one—there wasn’t a thing Dan could say, but he gave Old Sam a hard look anyway, just to keep in practice. Unintimidated, his usual attitude, Old Sam gave him a hard look right back. Kate said, “Let’s see what we got here,” and walked to the pile at the top of the clearing.

  They came to a halt in a loose half circle. It wasn’t pretty, but no one humiliated themselves by averting their eyes. “Oh, great,” Dan said, sounding more irritated than horrified.

  The Grosdidiers said nothing. It was obvious that no heroic efforts at saving life and limb would be necessary today.

  The brilliant spring sun shone down without mercy, illuminating a scattering of moose droppings, an eagle feather, and a jumble of human remains.

  The body proved to be in several, well, actually, many pieces. There seemed to be no head. Nothing was left of the torso but a gaping hole, at the back of which the vertebrae, amazingly still attached to one another, could be individually counted. Both femurs were visible through scraps of torn flesh upon which the blood had dried hard and brown. All of the bones had bite marks, and one of the femurs had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out.

  What remained had been scraped together and covered with a loose layer of dead spruce boughs, dry grass and brown leaves, and dirt. There were claw marks all around the pile, as well as bits of clothing, a dark blue flannel cuff, the waistband of what had been a pair of Levi’s.

  Kate picked up a pair of white men’s Jockey briefs, an elastic waistband barely attached to a ripped-out crotch.

  The men cringed and squeezed their knees together in a single involuntary action.

  Kate let her hand drop and bent a thoughtful gaze on one particular, very large set of claw marks that had ripped through a clump of moss campion, leaving four very clear parallel scars in the earth beneath.

  “He’ll be napping close by,” Old Sam said. “When he wakes up, he’s going to want seconds.”

  “I don’t know,” Dan said, “looks like he pretty much licked the plate clean on the first serving. He’s probably long gone.”

  If Old Sam didn’t look at the ranger with outright contempt, he did give a comprehensive snort. The Grosdidier brothers began to cast nervous glances around the clearing.

  “Why take the chance?” Kate said. “Let’s move like we got a purpose. Get out the bags while I take some pictures.” She pulled a digital camera from one pocket and took shots of the remains from every direction and several establishing shots to show them in relation to the rest of the clearing. “Okay,” she said, stepping back.

  The Grosdidier brothers produced heavy black plastic bags right out of the air, one each, and there was a concerted rush as everyone leaped to pick up the body part nearest to him and stuff it in the bag. There was no reverence displayed toward the remains and no horror or disgust, either, just a single-minded haste to finish the job and be away from the clearing as soon as humanly possible.

  “Okay,” Matt said, scooping up an arm whose hand flopped horrifically from its wrist, “that’s it.” The words were barely out of his mouth before the four brothers had vanished one and all into the undergrowth, black plastic bags slung anyhow over their shoulders.

  “Right behind you, buddies,” Dan said to the air, and followed them.

  Kate looked at Old Sam.

  If it had been anyone else, any other Park rat, he might have looked conscious, ashamed, possibly even repentant, but this was Old Sam. “I would have reported it.”

  “You used somebody’s dead body for bear bait?”

  “I would have reported it,” he said again.

  “Yeah, sure, Uncle,” Kate said, “after you got your bear, and after you’d skinned him out, and after you’d packed out the bladder and the meat and the hide.”

  “Come on, girl.”

  She looked at him in amazement. It could not possibly be that Old Sam of all Park rats was going to try to justify his behavior, and to someone fifty years his junior at that.

  And then he broke out the uncle grin, one part Gabriel to nine parts Beelzebub. “You know I don’t like bear meat.”

  Kate’s search for words adequate to the purpose was futile and brief. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. There was never any getting one up on the old man. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Old Sam raised a critical eyebrow. “You’re crankier than usual, girl. What’s going on?”

  Kate, exasperated, said, “We’re like two seconds a
way from vivi-section and you want to have a conversation?”

  She turned and got one foot out before he grabbed her arm and spun her around like a top. “I taught you better than that, girl,” he said, Old Sam at his sternest. “You speak respectful to your elders.”

  “There isn’t a bay handy you can toss me into today, Uncle,” she said. “Let’s move.”

  “We’ll move when I say we move and not before, girl.” Again with the stare that seemed to see all the way through to her bones. “That boy okay?”

  “Johnny’s fine,” Kate said. “Johnny’s great.” The truth of that statement made her voice soften, and they both relaxed some. Neither noticed when Mutt’s head whipped around. “Johnny’s a gift. Jack left me the best part of him. There’s no trouble there.”

  Old Sam grew more forbidding. “Jim giving you a hard time?”

  “No! No,” Kate said. “There’s nothing wrong, Uncle, or there won’t be, so long we get moving.”

  Mutt’s eyes, fixed on the edge of the woods, narrowed, and the hair on her back began to rise. Again, nobody noticed.

  “It’s the job then,” Old Sam said.

  “It’s not the damn job, Uncle,” Kate said. “I can handle the job, and even if I couldn’t it’s only another year.”

  He squinted down at her, steady dark eyes on either side of a hawk nose, that and his height handed down through four generations from a Norwegian whaler on his mother’s side, brown skin already darker from a day in the spring sun inherited from a series of Native ancestors starting with Park rats—and if you went back far enough there was probably some Inupiat and Yupik in there somewhere, too. Old Sam was a mongrel, like Kate. And like Kate, he knew bullshit when he heard it.

  He wasn’t hearing it now. He cocked his head and said with unaccustomed gentleness, “What is it, girl?”

  He was the only one who had noticed. Or the only one who asked. “I’m just feeling, I don’t know.” She hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Crowded,” Kate said.

  Her answer surprised them both, Old Sam because it wasn’t the one he was expecting, and Kate because she hadn’t known it was there. She tried to make a joke of it. “The world is too much with us nowadays. It didn’t used to be.”

  “Crowded,” he said. “Huh.” Old Sam looked thoughtful. “Mine getting to you, girl?”

  “No!” He cocked an eyebrow at the explosive emphasis of the word. “No,” she said again. “It’ll be a good thing, Uncle. There will be industry, and a tax base, and jobs to keep the kids home. Villages are dying up and down the river because the kids are leaving. Chulyin, Potlatch, Red Run. There’s no one left in Tikani except for Vidar Johansen, and he’s older than you.” She paused. “Auntie Vi sold her B and B to the Suulutaq Mine people this morning. She’s going to run it for them.”

  “No shit?” He shook his head, it looked as if in admiration. “How ’bout that old broad. I hope she held them up for all the traffic could bear.”

  Kate told him about the zeroes on the check.

  He whistled, long and low. “All right, Vi.” He looked down at Kate’s woebegone expression. “ ‘All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage.’ ” That grin broke out again at her look of astonishment. “Sam’l Johnson. What, you thought you were the only one in the family who ever read a book? Girl, I got—” He broke off, looking over her shoulder.

  Kate turned to follow his gaze and beheld a Mutt who had retreated all the way back down her genome to the Jurassic era. Her ears were erect, her hackles were standing straight up, her back was arched, and her lips were drawn back to expose all of her teeth all the way up to her gums. Her head was sunk down between her shoulders, her front legs were spread and planted, and she was en pointe. As if she had only been waiting for their complete and undivided attention, she let forth with something between a snarl and a sonic boom.

  Which was about when the noise registered on Kate’s consciousness, a not-distant-enough sound of brush crunching underfoot from beyond the edge of the lower side of the clearing. It seemed to all three of them to be coming nearer, fast.

  Kate looked around. The guys were long gone.

  Mutt took a step forward. “No, Mutt,” Kate said as forcefully as she could. “No.”

  Mutt snarled, yes, snarled at her, and Kate cuffed her once, hard on the side of her head. “Mutt! No!” Mutt whined once but she didn’t drop and roll, and Kate knew she had to get them out of there pronto or there would be blood spilled. She didn’t want it to be Mutt’s. She jerked her head at Old Sam. “Come on, Uncle, time to go.”

  They retreated backward, away from the increasing crashing and thrashing in the bushes, the tops of which were now moving violently, as if in a strong wind. Whatever it was was moving pretty fast, and to move that fast through that primeval old-growth forest it had to be pretty big.

  Old Sam carried his Model 70 at the ready, the business end pointed at the noise, backing up, mouth spread in a rictus of a grin, a demonic light in his eyes the twin of the one in Mutt’s eyes. His legs were twice as long as Kate’s but he was moving half as fast. “Uncle, come on,” Kate said through her teeth.

  Old Sam spoke without looking around. “What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”

  “Not one inch,” she said.

  He threw back his head and laughed, a resonant sound that rolled across the clearing and did not go unnoticed by whatever it was that was coming down on them like a freight train. There was an immediate protest from the violently moving brush, a cross between a pig’s squeal, chalk on the blackboard, and screaming tires on pavement. Kate had heard that sound before.

  “Sounds cranky, don’t he,” Old Sam said. He was very calm. “Don’t know how comfortable I’m going to feel with that breathing down my neck on the way back out to the road.” He looked at the shaking brush, calculated the trajectory of the force behind it, and then made the mistake of looking at Kate. She stood there, all five-foot-nothing and 120 pounds of her, a scowl on her face that would have put the fear into Hannibal Lecter. “Mutt,” she said, the name cracking like a lightning-struck tree, but he knew she meant it for both of them.

  Old Sam sighed, lowered his rifle, and turned to slide past Kate, moving with a swiftness and a silence remarkable for the same man who had come crashing out of the brush an hour before. He was noticeably lacking any of the unseemly haste displayed by the Grosdidier brothers and Dan O’Brian in their retreat, of course. It was a matter of pride.

  Well, pride goeth before a fall, because Old Sam tripped over something and went sprawling flat on his face. He flung out his hands to catch himself and lost his grip on his rifle, too, an unpardonable sin, a Park rat would rather lose his life than his firearm. It disappeared into the edge of the forest.

  “Uncle!”

  “Shit,” he said, more in disbelief than in anger.

  Mutt went from malevolent to hysterical, barking and growling and snapping at the air, straining forward as if against a leash. “Mutt! No!” In a moment, Kate knew, there would be no restraining her. There was nothing else left to do, so she planted herself in front of Old Sam’s prone form and raised her rifle, pulling the stock into her shoulder and sighting down the barrel on the tiny bead at the end of it. Her heart was beating so fast and so hard it felt like it was going to explode out of her chest. She ignored it as best she could and con-centrated, taking in a long, deep breath, blowing it out again slowly through pursed lips, another.

  There was a long, lingering moment where everything seemed to sloooooow down, to decelerate, where the world stepped on the brakes with a firm, insistent foot. It was a moment, too, where someone seemed to have turned the volume button all the way down to one. On Kate’s peripheral vision she could see Mutt barking savagely, spittle flying from between her teeth in an almost graceful arc. Behind her she could sense Old Sam scrabbling to his feet. She knew he must be cursing, knew that the brush was rustling as he searched for the Winch
ester, but she couldn’t hear it.

  Her attention never wavered from the opposite side of the little clearing. She was ready when she caught just the merest glimpse of sunlight on a rich shining hide before the grizzly exploded into the clearing. He was running flat out, straight at them, squealing and growling a challenge, turf kicked up behind him by those long, sharp, deadly claws. Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, Kate could feel his weight hitting the ground, a steady, rhythmic vibration up through the soles of her feet. His thick, gleaming hide rolled in loose, flapping folds around flesh diminished by a winter’s hibernation.

  He couldn’t possibly have been moving that fast before, the thickness of the brush would have impeded him as surely as it would have stopped Kate and Old Sam’s escape. Once he was in the clearing he moved at a flat-out four-gaited gallop, the hind legs following the forelegs in a dedicated integration of muscle and bone and attitude that she would have recognized as sheer beauty if she hadn’t been the prize at the finish line. He was the size of a Humvee, coming at her with the hammer down and armored with teeth and claws, and she concentrated all her awareness on the tiny bead at the end of the barrel of her rifle. She blew out another breath, and held it.

  The bead wavered a little before steadying. Bead and bear’s head sprang into acute and equal focus. His head came up in mid-stride, some instinct as primeval as the forest behind him alerting him to the danger. For a fleeting moment their eyes met, and it flashed through her mind that she had seen that expression or something very like it before. The eyes, dark, near together, nearsighted, and bent on the annihilation of his target.

  Looked just like Harvey Meganack when he was intent on scoring against Kate at an NNA board meeting.

  She pulled the trigger without volition, an act of instinct and self-defense. As if it came from a great distance, she heard the report of a rifle shot. After what seemed like forever felt the rifle’s butt kick into her shoulder.

  The bullet penetrated eye and occipital bone and ricocheted around the inside of the skull. The bear’s head flung back with such force that it broke his neck. His front legs went out from beneath him, but the forward motion backed by his mass was so great that he slid the remainder of the twenty feet between them.