by K. M. Fawkes
“I think he’ll be okay,” she said with a laugh.
“I’m going out!” the kid shouted as he ran past the living room at top speed.
Brad didn’t think Sammy had even heard their conversation; he was just very eager to get out and play some basketball. Maybe if he could work up the willpower, he’d challenge the kid to a game in a little while. A glance toward the window told him that snow had begun to fall lightly again. Maybe a different day, then.
“He forgot his gloves,” Anna said with a sigh as the door slammed behind her son. “I’ll take them out to him once we’ve picked our next album.”
Brad nodded. It would be harder to play basketball with the gloves on, but the dangers of frostbite were very real at these temperatures. “Good idea,” he said, getting back to the records. “We could always listen to—”
The scream that cut through the air stole his next album suggestion. Anna was on her feet a second later, running for the front door. Brad followed about half a second behind—he was quick on his feet, but no one moved faster than a mother whose child was in danger. Anna threw the cabin door open and then gave a shriek of her own, making Brad wince as he slid to a stop beside her.
What he saw nearly made his heart stop. A black bear stood in the front yard, only several feet from the steps of the cabin. It stretched its mouth wide and roared at the still figure of the boy on the ground.
Everything seemed to grind down to slow motion. Brad stared at Sammy. When he saw the boy’s back rise and fall with a breath, he managed to take one of his own. The kid wasn't hurt. Yet. Anna stepped forward and Brad jerked her back.
“What are you doing?” she cried. “We have to do something!”
“Go get the shotgun,” he ordered. “It’s in the kitchen. Hurry!” he snapped when she wavered, clearly desperate to reach her son.
With a swear, Anna took off back into the cabin. Brad stepped out onto the porch as the bear lumbered closer to Sammy’s trembling form. “Hey!” he yelled as loudly as he could. “Get out of here!”
The bear shied back at the sound, but then it roared again, dropping to all four legs and slapping the ground with one massive paw. Rather than being intimidated as he’d hoped, the bear was trying to intimidate him right back. That wasn’t a good sign for several reasons, but mostly because the bear really wasn’t small. Brad would have put him at close to five hundred pounds.
The bear snarled and Sammy cried out in fear as he threw his hands over his head. The bear definitely didn’t like the higher-pitched shriek. It moved sideways, shaking its head and growling low.
“I said get out of here!” Brad yelled once more, stepping forward and trying to look much bigger than he was. “Go!”
The bear reared once more and Brad knew that there was nothing he could do. The animal was hungry and he couldn’t scare it away. Anna skidded to a stop beside him and shoved the gun into his hands. Brad braced the gun against his shoulder just as the bear raised one of those huge, deadly paws.
The shot was clean, right through the animal’s head. The creature swayed and pawed at its left ear. Anna couldn’t resist anymore; she ran down the porch steps and grabbed Sammy, dragging him up onto the porch as the bear fell with a final, muted roar. She cupped Sammy’s face in her hands, looking into his eyes, scanning him frantically for injuries.
Though he didn’t look like he was physically hurt, the kid was obviously terrified. Sammy’s shoulders were shaking with the sobs that he couldn’t hold back, and his cheeks were wet with tears. They dripped off of his chin and onto his coat as Anna continued to pat him down.
“Are you okay?” she demanded. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
“No, I’m not hurt,” Sammy choked out. Then, he turned and threw himself at Brad. “I’m sorry! I didn’t do what you said!” he wailed.
Brad peeled Sammy back enough so that he could kneel down in front of him. He put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Hey, come on. Everything turned out okay, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Sammy said shakily, wiping his face on his sleeve. “But I didn’t listen.”
“I’m not worried about that right now,” Brad reassured him. “Why don’t you go and get cleaned up? You’ll feel better after that, and then we can listen to some music and get something to eat. Sound good?”
Sammy rubbed his nose with his jacket sleeve and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I will.”
When Brad stood up again, Anna grabbed him in a fierce hug and he felt her tears soak into his shirt. As she clung to him, he felt her beginning to shake as her adrenaline rush wore off. He wrapped his arms around her and held her steady.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome.” He rubbed his hand down her back. “Let’s get inside, huh?”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Right. Okay.”
Once the two of them were back in the cabin, Brad stepped off of the porch and looked down at the bear. It had rolled onto its back in death, looking oddly human with its paws flung out and its head thrown back. There was a deep wound on one of its paws, so he could be reasonably sure that this was the bear that had been stealing from their traps.
“What the hell made you decide to come here?” Brad asked under his breath.
He knelt down and leaned in to examine the creature for any signs of more significant injuries or diseases. A rabid animal might do something like this—approach a home that it knew was occupied. One that was driven wild by pain might do the same, but he didn’t see any signs of either of those things. There was the wound on the animal's paw, but that alone wouldn’t have caused it to go this far outside of its normal behavior patterns.
He continued to look critically at the bear. The only thing odd that he could see was that it was a little underweight for its upcoming hibernation, but surely it hadn’t been that desperate already—other animals might be a bit scarce, but they were still out there. Nothing about this bear’s behavior made sense. As he stood up and stepped to the side, preparing to begin trying to move the creature, he stepped on something that squished under his boot.
Brad turned with a sinking feeling. He didn’t even have to look down to know what it was. The deer guts that he’d buried the day before were scattered over the frozen ground once more. Long claw marks scored the dirt around them. The bear must have caught that scent and come looking for food. Guilt slammed into Brad so forcefully that he had to catch his breath. This was entirely his fault.
He knew he hadn’t buried them deeply enough. For that matter, he’d known they weren’t buried properly from the moment he’d pushed that shovel into the ground. But his hands had been so cold and he’d just wanted to get inside. And Sammy had nearly died because of his negligence and his eagerness to be comfortable.
As Brad kicked the intestines into a rough pile, he made a vow. He wouldn’t let it happen again. The bear would be taken care of. So would what remained of the deer. And he wouldn’t ever put his comfort over their needs again.
Anna had been right. Right to work so hard. Right to insist on work instead of play. He had assumed that they were safe here, had been lulled by the remote location and the ease of having supplies. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Brad walked back into the house to get his tools and went upstairs to check on Anna and Sammy before he headed back out to deal with the bear. The two of them were just leaving the bathroom. Anna still looked pale, but she wasn’t shaking anymore. Brad had been pretty sure that taking care of her son would help her level out again, and it looked as though he’d been right.
Sammy’s face was still a little puffy from his tears, but his voice was steady when he asked, “Can you eat a bear, Brad?”
Brad laughed and ruffled Sammy’s hair. “That’s the spirit, kid. And honestly, it depends. Some of them have parasites that can make you pretty sick if you don’t cook the meat properly. And all of them taste like whatever they’ve been eating lately,” he went on. “That one wasn’t
having the best luck with his diet, so I say that we take a pass on it this time.”
“It seems like kind of a waste,” Anna said as they walked into her bedroom for clean clothes for Sammy. “What about the fur? Can you do anything with that?”
“You’re absolutely right. A bearskin rug would look nice in front of the fireplace,” Brad agreed with false solemnity.
Anna grinned at him as she smacked his arm. “You know what I mean. It’s supposed to be really warm, right? And there is a lot of it.”
“It is,” he agreed. “And there’s definitely enough to use.” He shivered as he recalled the sheer size of the animal. And how close it had been to Sammy. “We’ll make sure that we find a way to use it for something, even if we can’t eat it.”
“Can I help?” Sammy asked.
Brad wanted to say yes, but he only glanced at Anna. He let it show in his gaze that he knew it wasn’t his choice. She looked down at her son and ran her hand through his hairs, smoothing it back from his face with gentle strokes.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You can just stay in here with me, where it’s warm.”
Sammy shook his head firmly. “No, I wanna help Brad. Maybe if I see it up close, it won’t scare me as much.”
Anna’s eyes widened at the mature statement. Brad patted the boy on the shoulder and Sammy leaned against him briefly, looking up at him with a quick smile.
“It shouldn’t take long,” Brad said to Anna. “Maybe some of that chili would be a good idea when we get back.”
She nodded, looking at her son with a mix of pride and a certain sense of loss. Brad didn’t have kids, but he’d seen that look on his own mother’s face when he’d learned to drive. It was the realization that you can’t hold on forever, and that you’d never realized how much you wanted to.
“I’ll have it ready by the fire when you guys come in,” was all she said.
Through determination and a wheeled cart he’d found in the tool shed a few weeks ago, Brad managed to get the bear down to the edge of the lake, cursing every bump and dip in the field between. He leaned over and caught his breath for a few seconds before he rolled the huge beast off of the cart and onto the sandy shoreline. Then, he handed Sammy a knife, and began the work of skinning the massive animal.
“This is going to take a while,” Sammy said, looking a little overwhelmed as he surveyed the splayed-out bear.
“Nah,” Brad said. “We’re going to do it the easy way.”
“There’s an easy way?”
“Yep. Basically, we’re not going to mess with trying to skin the head and feet,” Brad said. “Since your mom doesn’t want us to make her a bearskin rug and all.”
Sammy laughed. “Our neighbor had one. Mom said that she always felt like it was watching her when we were over there. I think she felt bad for it.” Given Anna’s aversion to skinning and gutting mammals, Brad was inclined to agree.
“Okay,” he said. “Watch and learn.” He cut through the tendons of the bear’s back leg. Then, he cut through the joint, rather than the bone. The foot fell off. “Can you do the same thing on the other side?” he asked, and Sammy nodded, crouching down and beginning to cut. All of the carving had really helped the kid out with his fine motor skills. His cuts were as good Brad’s already.
Once they had removed the bear’s skin, he doused the body with kerosene and lit it up. As he watched the flames rise, he remembered standing here just a few weeks ago watching a very different body burn. The memory of that still woke him sometimes, his heart beating so fast he had to swallow away wave after wave of nausea until he could breathe again.
“Are you okay, Brad?” Sammy asked.
Brad nodded. He had to be okay. It wasn’t like he could make an appointment with a therapist and talk it out.
“Yeah,” he told the kid. “Why do you ask?”
“You had a weird look on your face,” Sammy said. “What were you thinking about?”
Nothing much, Sammy. Just the person I killed a few weeks back.
Obviously, he didn’t say that out loud. Anna had asked him not to tell Sammy and he hadn’t planned on it. What would be the point? And…he had to admit it. He was scared of what the boy might think of him if he knew. He wasn’t even sure what he thought of himself anymore.
“Nothing in particular,” he said when Sammy continued to watch him. “Guess I’m just having hunger pangs.”
That had the benefit of being true, even if it was an excuse. He hadn’t had breakfast that morning and he’d been hungry when he’d come down from the attic. That was nothing compared to how hungry he was now that he’d skinned an entire bear.
As the flames finally got lower, running out of bear fat to fuel them, Brad turned to Sammy. “We’re almost done here. Why don’t you go on up to the cabin and get warmed up?”
“I was going to help you bury it,” Sammy said.
“I’m trying to help you not turn into an icicle,” Brad countered. The boy’s nose was bright red and so were his cheeks. “You can take the fur up. You know what to do with it, right?”
Sammy nodded, bundling the yards of black fur onto the cart. “I’ll put it on the rack in the cellar,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t need me?”
“I can handle it, kid. There’s nothing to bury but the bones,” Brad said. “Hurry up and get that into the cellar and then get cleaned up. I’ll be in soon, and we can eat.”
As Sammy wheeled the cart away, Brad picked up the shovel and began to dig. He made the hole underneath the bear, where the fire had thawed the ground. He remembered that trick now. It was something that Lee had taught him years ago, he just hadn’t remembered it until it was almost too late. His father had given him so much information that it was hard to keep track of all of it, no matter how hard he tried.
Brad made sure to dig deep this time. Probably much deeper than he actually needed to, but he wasn’t about to take any more chances. If another predator smelled these remains, it wouldn’t be as bad, because they were further from the cabin, but he still didn’t want to ring the dinner bell for whatever else might be roaming the woods. Once the hole was deep enough, he scraped the remains of both bear and deer into it and then filled it in. He patted the sandy soil down tightly before he turned and looked out at the lake, stretching his back and cracking his neck.
He’d started to sweat under his layers from the exertion and the heat of the fire, but with the cold air hitting him, he just felt clammy. It was his least favorite feeling. If the weather had been cooperating, he would have washed up in the lake as best he could before going in. As it was, the crystals of slush ice on the shore were a pretty good deterrent.
The surface of the lake hadn’t frozen hard yet, but it was getting there. In addition to the slushy ice on the shore, ice had formed on the pier in wild patterns from splashes. The late evening sun glinted off of it, making it look briefly like webs of spun gold.
Brad walked closer, listening for the sounds. Now that he was really focused on it, he could hear the echoing pings, thuds, and creaks of the freezing water. There was a brief crunch as a ripple forced one sheet of ice against another, and he turned to watch the water that was still liquid run up the cleft in between. With a sigh, he grabbed a few of the buckets he’d left on the pier and began filling them up while he still could. Lugging them back to the house didn’t improve his clamminess.
“If you want to wash up, I heated some water for you,” Anna said as Brad put the buckets down in the kitchen and pulled off his gloves so that he could unzip his coat.
“Thanks,” he said in surprise. Even though the chili smelled delicious, after skinning a bear, starting a fire, digging a grave, and hauling up half-frozen water, he didn’t want anything more than to feel clean again.
He jogged up to the bathroom and discovered to his extreme shock that “some water” had been a massive understatement on Anna’s part: she’d filled the tub for him. It had probably taken her nearly all the time he’d been gone to heat th
at much water. He tested the temperature and found it still on the hot side of warm, which was perfect for how cold he was.
He dropped into the tub gratefully, took a deep breath, and ducked down under the water. Brad closed his eyes and stayed where he was, simply enjoying the warm quiet for as long as his lungs would allow it. When he came back up, wiping the water out of his eyes and shaking it out of his ears, he took a deep breath and noticed that Anna had added lavender and chamomile to the water.
She’d been so happy to find those things in the stock at the cabin and, she’d admitted that she’d been a big fan of essential oils in the past. The fact that she could have saved these for herself and she’d used them for him made him smile as he began to soap up. She was probably simply grateful for the fact that he’d shot that bear, but he allowed himself to imagine that it might be something more. That maybe, one day, she’d look at him the way he was careful not to let her catch him looking at her.
He didn’t want to make things awkward by telling her how he felt about her. Especially with winter coming in. The last thing he wanted was to make her uncomfortable when she was already freaking out about the season itself. But he also knew that he wasn’t going to be able to talk himself out of the way that he felt about her. He’d always thought that she was beautiful. Now, he knew that he liked her defiance and determination, as well. He liked how she picked up new information quickly and was always willing to help.
Well, he thought as he ducked under the water again to rinse his hair, unless it involves skinning an animal. At least that was a weakness that she acknowledged about herself. He admired that, too. Knowing one’s weaknesses was just as important as knowing one’s strengths.
A rumble from his stomach interrupted his line of thought, which was probably for the best. The water was starting to get a little chilly, and thinking about what he couldn’t have wasn’t going to do him any good. He stood up and reached for a towel, drying himself vigorously to combat the chill in the room.
Once he was dry and dressed in clean clothes that didn’t smell like burned bear, Brad headed down the stairs to find Anna just dishing up the chili. She handed him the hot sauce before he even had a chance to ask.