by Lauren Esker
***
Fortunately for the naked and unconscious Bobby, it wasn't a long trip through the woods. His sister, who introduced herself as Brenda, insisted on staying human-shaped to support him on Jack's back, even though she was blue-lipped and shivering by the time they emerged from the trees at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside.
To Casey, it didn't look possible to climb it without shifting to a form that had hands, and preferably rock-climbing equipment. But Brenda vanished into a thick clump of ferns, and when Casey put her head through, she saw a narrow path going up the cliff face.
Bears, at least small bears, were good climbers, but Casey wasn't sure if Jack could navigate a path that narrow without shifting. Jack apparently felt likewise; after taking a look, he shifted, and staggered a little as Bobby's unconscious body slithered off into Brenda's arms.
"I can carry him, but I might need a little guidance," Jack said.
Right: he was nearsighted, and as a human, he wouldn't be able to see even as well as a bear could see in the dark. Casey shifted, and said, "One of us can go in front, and one behind. Would that work?"
Bobby stirred, raising his head, which had drooped onto Brenda's shoulder. "I c'n walk," he mumbled.
"No, you can't," Brenda protested, but he struggled to his feet and stood swaying. "C'mon, Bob, don't be stupid. Shift back, why don'cha?"
"He'll probably pass out if he does," Jack said. He had more experience than most people at the difficulties of shifting while injured. "And then we'll have a bear to carry instead. Come on." He took Bobby's uninjured arm, but not roughly.
They went up the path single file, with Brenda helping Bobby, Jack just below him in case he fell, and Casey bringing up the rear. It wasn't a fun climb. The path was wet, slippery, and overgrown with scruffy weeds. Halfway up, Casey gave up on climbing human-shaped and shifted to her warmer and more surefooted lynx shape. This was better: she felt almost fresh by the time they got to the top, while the other three were shaking and stiff-limbed with cold.
Like the path, the siblings' "house" was well hidden from passing observers. In the dark, even with lynx eyes, all Casey could see was brush and ferns, though her nose brought her an odd mix of smells: plastic, badly cured hides, spoiled food. Brenda pulled a heavy piece of water-soaked deadwood aside, and drew back a dark-colored tarp. "In here," she said, with visible reluctance.
It was almost completely pitch-dark inside, which Casey thought might be a mercy, from the pungent smells. Dry leaves rustled underfoot, and she sat down on a pile of them. Rough fur pressed against her suddenly. Jack had shifted, and now he almost completely filled their end of the cave, blocking the way out. Casey had to control a surge of claustrophobia, which she knew was ridiculous; they could both get out easily if he shifted back. Still, she hated the idea of being trapped in this dark, stinking place.
Light flared at the other end of the cave. Brenda had used a cheap Bic lighter to light a Coleman lantern. She set it on a rock, and now Casey got a better look at what was around her.
They were inside a narrow, tall cleft in the rocks. A crude ceiling had been improvised out of wood; the cleft had probably been open to the sky before the siblings got done with improvements. The floor was piled deep in leaves, and at Brenda's end of the cave, other stuff was heaped carelessly: clothing, empty tin cans, random mismatched shoes, plastic bags, and various other trash. One of the items, Casey couldn't help noticing, was a larger-than-life-size and bright blue plastic cast of a human foot. No mystery where those Bigfoot tracks came from ...
Bobby, still human-shaped, was lying in the leaves at Brenda's feet. Brenda rummaged in the mess, found a tattered blanket, and covered him with it. "Can you help him?" she asked anxiously.
Jack shifted. He swayed a little when he tried to stand up. The frequent shifts were starting to wear him down. He also had to duck, unable to stand up straight with the low ceiling. "I could help him better if you'd let me take him back to my truck," he said. "We're all going to end up hypothermic if you don't have some way of getting it warm in here. Don't you have a stove or a fireplace, anything like that?"
Brenda shook her head. Her hair, like her brother's, was chopped off crudely at shoulder length, and hung in matted hanks around her face. "We don't make fires in the cave, not since we almost burned everything down."
"Do you have anything we could wear?" Casey asked, shifting so she could speak. The idea of putting on anything in that squalid pile was unpleasant; even her less sensitive human nose was assaulted by the stench of mold and decay. However, she could feel Jack shivering against her, and knew she would be too in a minute, if she didn't shift back.
Brenda found mismatched items in the pile, shirts and ponchos for the most part, along with some blankets. "I didn't steal," she said defensively. "I found 'em."
Casey had her doubts about that, especially considering items like the relatively new-looking Coleman lantern. Still, she wasn't about to accuse a bear shifter of being a thief while trapped in a cave with them.
Jack drew a musty blanket around his shoulders and knelt beside Bobby. "I'm going to need water to clean his wounds. Can you bring me some?"
Brenda stood up and pushed up a loose board in the ceiling. Cool air blew into the cave. Stretching on tiptoe, she brought down a tin can half full of water, then another, that had been sitting on the roof and collecting rainwater. "This gonna be okay?"
"It'll do." Jack found a ragged T-shirt in the mess. "For the last time, are you absolutely sure you don't want to take him somewhere he can get better medical care than I can give him? None of this is even remotely sterile. Shifters heal well, but-"
"No hospitals," Brenda said flatly. "No doctors."
"Doesn't even have to be that. I have a first-aid kit in the truck, with antibiotic ointment and sterile bandages. If these get infected, your brother could die."
Brenda's belligerent facade collapsed, and she just looked young and scared. "Maybe later?" she said cautiously. "Can't you just ... fix him?"
"I can't fix him, but I can at least see how bad it is."
Casey held the lantern while Jack used the wet T-shirt to wipe away blood around the bullet wounds. Bobby had been hit solidly in the arm-there was no exit wound-and winged twice, once across the ribs and again on the hip. All of his injuries were already starting to heal as his shifter healing kicked in.
"Arm's broken, I think," Jack said. "I'll straighten it so it doesn't heal crooked. Casey, Brenda, hold him down in case he wakes up in the middle of this."
Casey obeyed, taking his legs. Brenda hesitated, then put her hands on her brother's shoulders. In the lantern light, Casey could see that both siblings had scars all over their bodies-not bad ones, but small mementoes of cuts, gouges, and animal claw marks. One of Brenda's fingers was slightly twisted, as if it had broken and not healed straight.
"How long have you two been out here?" Jack asked, gripping Bobby's arm above and below the bullet entry wound.
"Since forever," Brenda said. Rather than averting her eyes, she stared fixedly at what Jack was doing, with a fierce intensity. Hurt him and die, that look seemed to say.
The muscles in Jack's arms and shoulders bunched as he applied pressure to Bobby's arm. Casey felt a spasm go through Bobby's body. His eyelids flickered and he let out a choked cry, then went limp. Brenda cried out too, as if his pain had hurt her.
"He's all right," Jack said, pressing his fingers to the pulse point in Bobby's throat. "As all right as he can be after taking three bullets and ending up naked in a cave. Just get him warm for now, and find me a couple sturdy sticks to use as splints."
Casey was pretty sure she saw something small and furry skitter out of the pile of clothes as Brenda shook out items and piled blankets, rabbit hides, and random pieces of clothing around Bobby. Like the floor of the cave, the pile probably should not be examined too closely or she'd run screaming out of the cave and never come back.
"You made those tracks around the trailhe
ad, right?" she asked, reaching out to finger the blue plastic of the Bigfoot print cast.
"I didn't steal it," Brenda said with knee-jerk defensiveness. "I found it. Somebody threw it away beside a trail."
"Campers drop all kinds of things, I bet," Jack said. Having finished splinting Bobby's arm, he was sitting with his back against the wall of the cave, knees drawn up under the blanket. Casey, wearing a musty shirt and nothing else, nestled in beside him and pulled the blanket over both of them. She was pretty sure she was going to be cold for days.
Something small and skittery brushed her foot. She resisted an instinctive urge to pounce, and instead pulled her toes under the blanket.
She was also going to take a lot of showers.
Hot showers.
Very hot.
"We pick up stuff, just what we gotta have to live," Brenda said.
"What about destroying Park Service cabins?" Jack asked. "Was that necessary to live?"
"Yes," Brenda said sharply. "Too many people comin' in. Tourists." She brushed Bobby's cheek with the back of her hand. "It's too crowded now. Our houses keep getting found, and the rangers clean them up, so we have to go somewhere else. We just wanted 'em to know to stay away."
"I hate to break it to you," Casey said, "but you really couldn't have picked a better way to make sure you have even more people walking around in your part of the woods."
Brenda looked baffled. "They shoulda been afraid. We wanted 'em to think the woods guardians were angry."
"They're not afraid of Bigfoot. They're curious."
"People don't make sense," Brenda moaned. She tucked up her knees and rested her head on them.
Jack and Casey glanced at each other. "Is it just the two of you out here?" Jack asked gently. "You and Bobby."
Brenda nodded.
"What about your parents?" Casey asked.
"They're dead. Hunters shot 'em. Long time ago."
"And you raised yourselves," Jack said.
"We took care of each other," Brenda corrected. "I'm the older one. Four minutes old. So he's mine to take care of." She growled, with a hint of bear quivering underneath. "I'll make 'em pay for hurting my brother."
"No, you won't," Jack said sharply. "Those were a bunch of kids you attacked out there, hardly older than you. They were defending themselves. You have teeth and claws; they don't."
"They shouldn't'a been in our woods at all!"
"They're not your-" Casey began, but Jack hushed her with a touch.
"The human world doesn't understand your kind of ownership," he said. "They thought they had every right to be here."
"Well, now they know better," Brenda said belligerently.
"No, that's what I'm trying to explain. Now they know there are bears in these woods that attack humans, and that's going to make more people come back, with bigger guns. They will either shoot and kill you, or they'll trap you and drug you and put you somewhere else in these mountains, very far away from your familiar caves."
Brenda bared her teeth. "Then we'll kill 'em if they try."
"You might kill one or two, maybe a dozen. Brenda, the world is bigger than you can imagine, and full of more humans than you can comprehend." He touched his chest. "My job is protecting people. Sometimes that means protecting shifters. Sometimes it means protecting humans from shifters. I can't let you attack and kill humans, or break their things. If you keep doing it, and if the humans don't get you first, I'm going to have to take you out of these mountains and put you in jail."
"Jail?" Brenda repeated, aghast.
Jack began ticking off on his fingers. "You destroyed things belonging to other people. You attacked people. You-"
Brenda scrambled to her feet. A growl rumbled out of her throat, and suddenly the narrow end of the cave was filled with angry, frightened black bear. The burning lantern tilted. Casey yelped and dove to rescue it, under the claws of the rearing bear.
Jack growled too. He hadn't shifted yet, but from the way his shoulders were hunched, he was preparing for it.
"Whoa. Hey. Guys." Casey backed toward the door, lantern in hand. The last thing she wanted was to get in the middle of a bear fight.
"Casey," Jack said without looking at her, "go outside."
"No," she shot back.
"That's an order, trainee."
"You're scaring her!" Casey said. The words came up from inside her, from the frightened and lonely orphan she'd once been. She had never been as alone as Brenda and Bobby, but if not for her grandmother and her now-dead best friend Wendy, maybe she would have been. "She's not stupid, Jack. You can't keep threatening her with jail and taking her away from the only home she knows."
"You got a better idea?" Jack wanted to know.
It was a serious question, not a rhetorical one. He was asking her opinion. As Brenda continued to growl at both of them, backed as far into the corner as she could get, Casey struggled to find a solution. Something kept nagging at the edge of her mind, something she'd seen earlier that had brought a hint of familiarity.
"I ... I might," she said cautiously. Taking the lantern with her, she stepped outside the cave.
It was raining again, a light drizzle misting her hair. She shielded the lantern with her hand and crouched on the path, shining the light over the scraggly weeds they'd walked on to get into the cave.
Jack stepped out of the cave with the blanket hanging off his shoulders. Brenda's querulous growling had stopped, and Casey hoped being given a brief respite from their presence in her haven would help a little.
"I can't tell if you actually decided to follow my order or if you thought of something," Jack said.
"I may have thought of something. Jack, do you remember the plant the park ranger showed us at the trailhead, the one behind the yellow tape? Isn't this the same plant?"
Jack knelt and examined it in the lantern light. "I guess it could be. I'm no expert on plants."
"Me neither, but it sure looks like it to me." Casey held up the lantern, surveying the cliffside. "It's all over the place. Brenda? Come out here a minute, please."
There was a long hesitation before Brenda, still looking frightened and belligerent, put her head out of the cave's makeshift doorway. At least she was human-shaped again, though she looked as if she was prepared to shift at any moment.
"Brenda, does a lot of this plant grow around here?"
"I guess," Brenda said, and then offered, with a little more animation, "It's got pretty flowers in summer."
"If this is what I think it is, it's also very rare. Maybe we could get your part of the park declared off limits to visitors because there's so much of this plant here. Jack, do you think the SCB would be able to help with that?"
She looked up to see Jack's eyes sparkling at her in the lantern light. "Trainee, I think you have the makings of a damn fine agent."
***
