by Pam Withers
We stare at each other, this Mr. Kim I don’t know and me.
“Does Granddad know, or does he just drink your tea to be polite?”
“It help him.”
Of course Granddad doesn’t know. He had vowed to mount the head of the poacher who is out pillaging bears for their body parts and their cubs.
Oakley has moved into the room now, his grin revealing stained teeth. “New helper,” he says in a pleased voice.
“First feed bears, then collect bile,” Mr. Kim tells me. “Oakley train you.”
I bite my lip, contemplating what will happen if I refuse.
“Someone will come find me. And arrest you guys,” I say.
“No,” says Mr. Kim, “you run away, your grandfather say. Too sad about Mommy go away. No one know where you are. Great Bear Rainforest is very big.”
Very big. Twelve thousand square miles. More than thirty thousand square kilometres. And he’s right. By Dad’s and Granddad’s reckoning, I could be anywhere, not to mention unwilling to be found. Will Dorothy clue in?
I decide my safest course is to play the game. “You’re right, I’m a trained vet,” I say defiantly. “And you’re doing a rotten job on your percutaneous biliary drainage. The area around the catheters is vulnerable to infection. And bile can leak back into the abdomen, killing the bears. They’ll live longer and produce more bile for you if I take over.”
They stare at me like they’ve been struck dumb.
Making my voice meeker, I add, “I didn’t know you were helping Granddad like this, or Min-jun.”
“I’ll train this varmint,” Oakley says, squinting his eyes at Mr. Kim. “Dismissed, Chee.”
Mr. Kim winces at the name, throws me a half-apologetic look, and hands the keys to Oakley, who tosses them back into the desk drawer. Mr. Kim turns toward the door obediently as Oakley settles into the office chair. “I see you later.”
“Later,” Oakley mumbles. Mr. Kim shuffles through the door and pads down the corridor.
“Still got your ugly ear,” Oakley tries to razz me. “Thought a rich boy like you might git plastic surgery, make it all handsome agin.”
“You think I don’t remember that camping trip,” I retort.
“I know ya don’t. Your granddad says ya don’t ’member a thing. Only reason I got asked along was ’cause he hated the idea of babysittin’ ya by hisself. So it was the three of us, gone campin’. ”
I squeeze my eyes shut. The scene is stored away in my brain somewhere. If only I could coax it out intact. I reopen them and stare hard at Oakley, trying to imagine him without the beard. That’s when the black and white film starts playing again, slowly at first, then faster …
I’m alone in Granddad’s big canvas tent. I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, shivering. Something is outside the tent, sniffing, grunting, moving around. I slip deeper into my sleeping bag and whimper, “Granddad? Mr. Logan?”
Then I hear them, snoring. Outside the tent. I’m alone and it’s very dark. Panic grips me. But I bite my tongue and move, very slowly, toward the tent flap. I peek out and scan the campsite. The campfire has gone very, very low. It’s hardly burning at all anymore. An empty whiskey bottle sits between my two adult guardians, Granddad asleep in his camping chair, an open bag of wieners within reach. Mr. Logan is slumped against a large log closer to the tent.
A monster-sized grizzly is standing erect on the other side of the campfire, sniffing. My heart pounds so hard I nearly fall over backwards. The bear lowers its body, lumbers toward the package of meat, and places a paw on it, just feet from Granddad. In fact, it seems entirely unconcerned about the sleeping humans. I hold my breath, terror ripping through me. Don’t wake up, Granddad. Stay sleeping, Mr. Logan. Don’t anyone move till it’s gone.
“Hey!” the young and unbearded Oakley shouts, sitting up suddenly. He scrambles backwards toward the tent on elbows and buttocks, frantically trying to find his gun in the dark.
“Daniel!” he calls in a choked voice as the bear looms over Granddad, his takeout meal in hand.
The bear’s going to kill Granddad now, maybe Mr. Logan, too. The men are too close, not even a 747 wingspan away from the surprised animal. Even at age five, I know the 747 rule.
I dash out of the tent, pick up a rock, and toss it straight at the bear, hitting its chest. Then, keeping the campfire between us, I pick up a metal-pronged marshmallow roasting stick from the fire and shake it at our camp visitor, distracting it away from Granddad. In my mind, I’m an armoured knight with a sword, and the dying campfire is a foolproof shield the bear can’t cross.
“Get away!” I scream. “Leave us alone!”
The bear widens its eyes to a scary yellow, flattens its ears, and barrels toward me. I scream loud enough to wake up every bird and animal in the forest as the grizzly swats the left side of my head, sending me flying. I land hard on packed dirt and rocks, the world spinning, and wait for the grizzly’s body to crush me, the claws to puncture my small frame, the teeth to tear off my scalp. By then, Granddad and Mr. Logan are up and shouting, spraying stuff that drifts down to me and stings my eyes. I squeeze my lids shut tightly, waiting for death. My heart’s pounding too hard to hear anything after that. But I feel the ground rumble as the grizzly turns and gallops off.
It was capable of killing us all but was more interested in hot dogs that night. Thank God.
Granddad picks me up gently, examines my head, and applies pressure on the ear wound with a clean cloth. When it stops bleeding, he washes it with soap and water, then puts a dab of cool antiseptic cream on it from his first-aid pack. All that as Oakley Logan now stands guard with a gun.
“Yer a brave and lucky tyke,” Granddad’s saying, head shaking, a warmth in his voice that melts the edges of my icy fear. “A crazy eejit to be sure, without a speck of outdoors sense in you yet. If you’d left him be, he’d have moved on, grandson. Didn’t need yer suicidal heroics. It’s all yer fault he got in a flap, Ray. But …”
I don’t remember anything after the “yer fault,” a phrase he repeated endlessly as they drove me through the darkness to the Bella Coola Hospital. Maybe he thought drumming that into me would protect him from my parents’ wrath over Oakley and him falling asleep with meat beside them while on child-care duty.
I don’t remember my parents’ reaction or anything about what the doctors did for my damaged ear. I blocked it all out, somehow, along with the bear attack itself — until just now. Mostly what stays is that moment before it all happened: the terror of waking up alone in the tent and knowing something was wrong. And the moment of waiting for the bear to finish me off.
No wonder I’m afraid of being alone in the woods and don’t have confidence in my so-called outdoors sense.
Technically, it was indeed my fault the bear got angry. And that sense of guilt may be why I’ve always refused Mom’s offers of plastic surgery to repair my ear. And because I’m as stubborn as she is, I made sure she couldn’t make me. Or maybe it’s just down to McLellan stubbornness, the same stubbornness that set Granddad against me from that day. “Yer fault. No speck of outdoors sense in you.” A refrain he has repeated all my life, no doubt because he was caught napping in a whiskey stupor and almost witnessed my death as a result. Both he and I conveniently forgot one small fact: I was only five years old.
“That bear could have killed all of us,” I say now to Oakley. “It wasn’t my fault. It was all about you and Granddad not returning the wieners to the strung-up food bag. And you waking up and yelling at the wrong time.”
Oakley’s neck goes patchy as he turns to me. “So ya do ’member somethin’. But ya don’t throw rocks at a bear, son.”
“And you don’t get drunk and fall asleep in bear country with meat next to you and a campfire going out.”
“You win,” he mutters. “It’s true you maybe saved my hide, me wakin’ up in an untimely fashion. Though I still think that beast took off ’cause he knew you was jist a cub. And he didn’t like th
e bear spray. As for falling asleep on the job, your granddad got in major trouble from your parents for ’t.”
“I don’t remember that,” I say, trying to picture Granddad cowering in front of my parents.
Oakley chuckles. “He’s a curmudgeon, your granddad. Ornery as they come. It’s what keeps him alive, ’long with the bile tea.”
So Oakley buys into the whole bile-as-medicine theory? With effort, I hold my tongue. Somehow I need to get out of this place alive. How? Get Oakley on my side?
CHAPTER TWENTY
MY SMILE DISAPPEARS. “Dad said you always wanted to be a vet.”
“Yeah.” He lifts his head and directs his gaze at the vet kit.
“How often do you collect bile from the bears?”
“Twice a day. Is quick ’n easy, even if they howl like bastards. Only hard part is settin’ up new bears that come in.”
“You mean having to cut a hole through their chests into the gallbladder to fit the permanent catheter?” I wince to even say it.
“Smart boy. Yup. Then we use a twelve-centimetre needle to git the bile flowin’ through the tube.”
I swallow my own bile down and avert my eyes from Hank.
“What about bears too big to, um, set up? You bait and kill them to cut their gallbladders out? How do you know what to use for bait?”
He grins proudly. “Sometimes we use a road-killed deer or dead beaver. But fruit cover’d in brown sugar works real good. So does vanilla extract!” He chuckles like a proud chef.
“Are you the drone operator, too?” I can’t believe he’s sharing like this. Does it mean he’s going to off me?
He grins. “We paid Mr. Dawson to outfit ’n train me. It’s fun, ain’t it, squirt?”
“Total fun,” I agree.
“Someone campin’ up top been at it today. One of your buddies?”
“Not that I know of. Hey, can I really help with the next collection?” It’s the last thing in the entire universe I want to do, but I’m forming an escape plan.
He shrugs. “Why not, vet kid?”
“So, when’s that? And we’re free till then?”
“Ten minutes. And I’m free till then. You’re in a cage, asshole.”
“Right. Well, ten minutes to kill, then,” I say casually, instantly regretting my choice of words. I watch as Oakley produces a dish and can opener from the desk, opens a can of dogfood, and serves it to Chief, who chows it down happily.
Oakley watches him, looking bored, while sipping from a water bottle. A beeper on his watch goes off ten minutes later. “Milkin’ time!” he announces, lifting the keys out of the desk drawer with a jingle and letting me out. I stretch in relief. Oakley reaches down beside the desk for one of the coolers. He lifts out some unpalatable-looking food and slops it into a bowl, then opens up Hank’s cage.
My hands dart in to encircle the orphan, and I manage to carry all one hundred–plus pounds of him to the office chair, where I place him on my lap. Oakley hands me the bowl of food and I lift it to Hank’s mouth. Oatmeal and honey. He just lies there limply. Oakley passes me a spoon and I try coaxing Hank like he’s a baby in a high chair. His pink mouth opens, and my heart weeps as he licks the spoon weakly, eyes unfocused on my face. He’s definitely not the healthy, happy, trusting orphan who slurped mashed fruit out of a bowl such a short time ago.
“Do you have local anesthetic, antibiotics, antiseptic, and sutures or staples to close some of their wounds with?” I ask Oakley.
He shrugs and points to the veterinary first-aid kit case. It’s basic, the kind sold over the internet. I go through it and sigh.
Next, Oakley clamps a muzzle on Hank. While his back is turned preparing the needle, I reach into my pocket and slip the sedatives I snatched from my parents’ clinic into my palm, then crush them on the desk with the forceps and funnel them into my captor’s water bottle. I’ve already judged the man’s weight, and I’m administering the correct dose, more or less.
Oakley hands me the syringe and barks directions at me that I don’t need and can’t stomach.
What I do next I will not describe. Except to say that Hank screeches like he is being tortured all during the procedure. They are the cries of a ghoul in everlasting pain. No wonder this place is rumoured to be haunted. Oakley just stands and watches, sipping from his water bottle.
As I finish the bile extraction, Oakley grabs Hank from my arms and returns him roughly to his cage, fetching the next prisoner. This one’s in worse shape, has clearly been here longer. His catheter insertion was a botch of a job, and his teeth are all but gone, probably from trying to bite his way through the steel bars. Unlike Hank, he has totally lost the will to eat.
“Faster,” Oakley orders, as I work my way through the bears, feeding and then milking them, all the while breathing through my mouth to avoid taking in the stench of their festering sores.
Finally, I turn to the recaged grizzlies I’ve just tortured against my will and against the veterinarian’s oath.
“Can I stay out of my cage now?” I ask, hands shaking, guilt suffocating me.
“Not likely, nut-kicker,” Oakley says, pushing me toward my cage, both the capture pole and the rifle within reach in case I try anything. I climb back in and sigh as he clicks the door shut on my chamber, locks it, and returns the keys to the desk drawer once again.
It takes almost an hour for him to doze off. During that time, I watch the light through the flapping plastic on the roof fade and then darken. It’s nighttime, and dead silent except for the disturbed breathing and movements of the cubs. I poke my arm through the rear bars and fish up my backpack again. Chief stirs and watches me.
“Here boy,” I say, stuffing what remains of the sedatives from the vet clinic into half of the ham sandwich I brought and extending my arm through the front bars to offer the treat to him. He snaps it up so quickly I momentarily fear losing my fingers. I stuff the undrugged portion of the sandwich into my mouth and begin the wait for the Doberman to hit Dreamland.
Now I reach into the backpack for my last remaining drone. It’s too large to slide into the cage with me, but I don’t need to. I need only the controller and my goggles.
“Okay, Skyliner,” I say, holding my precious prize in my palm outside the bars. “My skill, your hook, and we’re out of here, with all the photographic evidence we need.”
The dog stirs and lifts his head once as the drone starts up, then settles into a deep sleep. Hands on the controller, I direct my UAV to hover over the desk, then twist and turn him until he has lowered his hook through the drawer handle.
Accelerating him back toward me, I hold my breath as he pulls the drawer open, just a little, not enough to knock against the office chair and its deeply sleeping inhabitant. Now I have to wriggle Skyliner to get the hook out of the desk handle, back him up, and then have a try at snagging the ring of keys in the drawer.
“Don’t drop them on the dog or Oakley,” I whisper.
Yes! Like a well-trained retriever, Skyliner helicopters back over to me with keys dangling beneath his tummy. He hovers obediently outside the cage till I can reach through and grab them. “Good boy,” I say. With both hands stuck out of the bars like robot arms, I tuck the drone back into my backpack.
I listen carefully for a few minutes before finding the key that opens my cage. There’s no sound but the rasping bears, snoring man, and wheezing Doberman. I wish I could sedate the bears to ease their pain, but I didn’t bring enough medication.
Just as I free myself, Oakley’s phone buzzes. I whip it away from his shirt pocket and dash into the hall. No screen lock on his phone, and there’s a text from Mr. Kim: Anderson on way. Police have Orion. Make all cub and cage go away?
Lucky the call didn’t wake Oakley up. I reply ok, pocket the phone, and use Skyliner to record the room, cages, pitiful bears, and vet equipment. I do it again with Oakley’s phone as a backup. My heart goes heavy as I film the cubs. I can’t free all of them and make a quick getaway. Even Hank wo
uld be a dangerous burden. “I’ll be back,” I promise in a whisper. Finally, I step over Chief, shrug on my backpack, and tiptoe down the hallway.
I send Skyliner flitting along the corridor ahead to make sure I’m not going to walk into Mr. Kim. So he thinks he’s going to ditch the evidence for the Logan brothers, does he? As soon as I’m out of here, I’ll be phoning 911 on the stolen phone. In the big, echoing warehouse, I train my headlamp on the rotted floor-boards beneath my feet to make sure I don’t fall through. When I’m under the building’s collapsed roof section, I fly Skyliner up into the night to survey the grounds. “Find Mr. Kim,” I whisper. The UAV spots a weak light coming from the tiny clearing up the hill, the place where Stud Griz met his fate.
“Okay, spy, go film him,” I tell my night drone, and he’s off, high enough in the dark sky that Mr. Kim won’t easily see or hear him. Excited to experience Skyliner’s night-vision capabilities, I let him hover high above the site and record what the man is up to: He’s using a pole with a hook on the end to pull dark items out of a pit only feet from the leg traps and bear bait. As I zoom in, my heart drops. Bear claws. Dozens of them. He’s fishing them out of a deep, dark hole and loading them into a large backpack. At nine hundred dollars per claw (and five claws per paw), they must be worth a fortune. But my stomach turns over to think what was involved in collecting them.
“Bastard,” I say under my breath, as Skyliner collects the scene on his memory card.
Okay, I’ve now recorded the caged bears, the office, the hidden stash of claws, and the two men. Now I have to go hide with Skyliner till daybreak. But my last glimpse of what I’m filming chokes off my breath: Mr. Kim looking straight up into Skyliner’s eye and lifting his pole.
Just as I press the return-home button, my view goes all crazy, like Skyliner is tumbling through the air. Then the picture on my goggles goes dead.
No! Mr. Kim must have thrown his pole up like a spear and whacked my prince, and now Skyliner is lying wounded somewhere in that disgusting clearing, in serious danger. But no way is Mr. Kim getting his filthy hands on my genius! I sprint to the trap door, yank it open, and splash into the ankle-deep water. Then I hightail it up the hill.