Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  By the time the sun was at its midpoint they stood at the foot of the glacier. Pete looked up at the field of ice above him as Jane studied the map. “You know what I’d like right now?”

  “An ice-cream cone?”

  “A big box of dynamite. I’d wait until this guy was standing right about here and roll an avalanche down on top of him.”

  Jane surveyed the bright, frozen expanse. “It’s a dumb idea, but keep thinking. If he gets close, we’ll have to do something.” She folded the map. “We move west from here along the ridge.”

  “What sort of landmark are we looking for? I’d hate to miss it.”

  “We won’t. It’s called Hudson Glacier.”

  They moved rapidly along the jagged, rocky area below the crest of the mountain, their eyes down to watch where they planted their feet. It was another hour before Jane heard the bark of a dog, then a second dog answering. Pete turned to look behind them, but Jane grasped his arm and pulled him ahead.

  “If you do see him, he’ll already have seen you. The best hope is to keep moving.” This time her voice was tense, tight in her throat. She had been wrong again. The way up the mountain had not been hard enough. There had been no stretch where a dog couldn’t scamper up, so the man had not been held back at all.

  She tried not to think about the man, but it was impossible to keep him out of her mind. He must have been up all night, and most of the day before. He didn’t seem to need sleep, food, or shelter. He never gave up, he never guessed wrong. He killed anyone who might be Pete Hatcher, and anyone who might get in the way, and still kept coming.

  A chill suddenly made the hairs on the back of her neck stand. She had never actually seen the dogs. She had heard howling in the forest as something followed their scent. The rangers didn’t even allow anybody to bring dogs through the gate into the park. She shook her head to get rid of the feeling.

  She knew she had climbed to about nine thousand feet now, and the air must be making her giddy. There were crazy, malevolent people, but their craziness didn’t buy them the power to turn into dogs. They took shots at strangers with high-powered rifles. That was what she had to worry about, not old superstitions.

  When they rounded the slope at the foot of Hudson Glacier she began to feel stronger. If she was maintaining their lead, then for a while the slope of the mountain would be between them and the rifle.

  They turned northward, moving along the ridges, staying high, where there were plateaus with dead grass and stunted trees. The north wind picked up as the sun moved westward, blowing hard into their faces and making their progress slower.

  At two o’clock, she heard the dogs again, and they seemed to be closer. She turned, but she could not see them. She said, “Ready to run again?”

  As she ran into the wind, her steps were shorter, as though the air were catching her in midstride and pushing her back. She and Pete leaned into it, trying to stay low, but before long they were just scrambling over rocks and climbing up steep grades, buying each yard with too much of their strength.

  At four fifteen, when Jane had Mount Custer on her left and Herbst Glacier on her right, she looked back and saw the man. He was little more than a small vertical line of darkness against the horizon. She could see two more spots of darkness ranging ahead of him, low to the ground. Jane took out her binoculars and found him.

  She watched as he stopped, then sat on the ground with his knees bent, fiddling with something. At this distance she could not resolve any of the details of his face. Very deliberately he raised both arms in front of him at once. The gesture seemed oddly familiar. When his head cocked to his right, she shouted, “Get down!”

  They both dropped to their bellies, then heard the whip-crack sound as the bullet broke the sound barrier above their heads. Jane counted seconds, listening for the report of the rifle, but it never came. He still had the silencer. She lifted her head a little and saw the man running.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and pulled herself to her feet.

  She and Pete ran together, side by side. She heard the whip-crack again, and this time she saw chips fly off a boulder ahead of her as the bullet ricocheted into the sky. There seemed to be no hope. Each time they ran, he would shoot. Each time they stopped to hide, he would run closer.

  “We’ve got to get out of the open,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  They ran to the west, moving diagonally down the slope of the mountain. As soon as they reached the first stand of scraggly pine trees, the shooting stopped. Twice Pete let his momentum build up, tripped, and rolled, then stood and ran again. They ran until the sun was beyond the western mountains and the dim afterlight threw no shadows. They stumbled into a long, narrow valley meadow with thickets of berry bushes as the light began to fail.

  The bear was a hundred feet away, busily rooting on the ground, snuffling and grumbling to itself. Jane stopped. Her mind seemed to explode into fragments that scurried in several directions at once, looking for a way out. She knew immediately that the enormous tan animal was not a black bear. Its back had a big hump on it, and the profile of its face was flatter, with the snout turned slightly upward. Jane remembered the warnings on the little flyer she had picked up at the park entrance.

  Grizzlies stayed in the high altitudes in the remotest areas of the park, and if any place was more remote than this little trough between two mountains, then it couldn’t be reached by a human being. There wasn’t even enough animal traffic to make a path in the weeds. She could see the thicket was full of berry bushes. The bear seemed to be finishing off a low branch, and now it raised a paw and swatted the next one to shake the berries loose. That reminded her of another problem. This was the time of year when they were voracious, trying desperately to fatten themselves for the winter. Never hike at dusk. That was the part that had been printed in bold letters.

  In her peripheral vision she could see Pete slowly reaching into his pack for the pistol. She touched him and shook her head. Then they began to walk toward the far end of the narrow valley. It seemed hopeless. A bear could outrun a man. This bear was hungry. The gun Pete was still searching for would be about as much protection as a fly swatter if a bear like this one decided to come for them. Nobody even knew what made a bear decide to amble away one time and attack another time, but there were theories. Suddenly she remembered the rest of the warning. This was the reason no dogs were allowed in the park.

  She whispered, “Keep going. Don’t run, don’t stop.”

  He looked alarmed. “What are—”

  She pushed him forward, and he kept walking. She was aware of each pace he took as he moved farther away from her. Jane slowly turned her head to look back at the way she had come, then across the field to the far end. She carefully chose the spot where she would make her stand.

  The bear stopped eating the berries, shook its wide, shaggy body, and raised its head to stare directly into her eyes. She did not know if she was held in the huge animal’s gaze for a few seconds or a minute. The bear’s undistracted intensity brought back to her phrases from stories her grandfather had told. Bears could read minds. Probably in the Old Time, the listeners would all have known what it was like to stumble on a bear in the forest. They would have nodded their heads, maybe chuckled nervously at the memory of this stare. It was said that if he knew your real name, you couldn’t escape him, and to her it felt as though he were probing her mind for it now. The stories were proof that what was happening was unchanged since the beginning of time. There was only one bear, and one small woman walking through the wild country.

  The bear sniffed the air and smelled her fear. It took one step toward her, then another, tasting the breeze. She could see its ears move back and its face elongate, and she knew what was about to happen. There would be no chance to run, no way to fight. Her only chance was the one that had existed since the first Nundawaono woman and the first bear. Nothing had changed. Those who lived, lived by their wits.

  Jane knelt in the grass
, slipped off her pack, and watched the bear erupt into its charge. It surged forward with growing speed. As she fumbled in her pack, she watched the progress of his huge, powerful body across the field of dry grass, and said aloud, “Is it the truth, Nyakwai? Are the old stories true?” She whispered, “They had better be.”

  Her hands shook as she tore open the packets of honey and peanut butter, raisins and dried meat, then dropped them into the plastic bag with the garbage.

  The bear was almost on her when she sprang to her feet. As Nyakwai always did in the stories, this one reared back on its hind legs. It seemed to Jane to be eight or nine feet tall as it towered over her, its thick, powerful forelegs opened wide to grasp her in its claws and hold her while it gnawed through her neck.

  Jane flung the plastic bag of food and garbage hard at the bear’s chest. As they always did, Nyakwai’s lightning-quick animal reflexes clapped his big paws together and caught the bag between them, his long claws digging through it into the pungent mess it held.

  Jane pivoted and sprinted for the far end of the field. She judged it was a hundred yards of open grass before the ground again rose into rocky outcroppings and sheltering trees. By the time she had finished making her estimate it was eighty.… Now it was sixty. She clenched her teeth and pumped her arms, making her toes dig in and tear at the ground with each stride. Forty.… Thirty. Just before the trees began, she glanced over her shoulder, then kept running.

  In the stories, the trick was to get the bear to catch a small log, and then quickly swing a war club down on the top of its skull. But this bear was still in the spot where she had left it, peacefully rooting deep in the plastic sack, lapping out the fatty meat and peanut butter, the sweet, sticky honey and the crumbs of biscuits.

  Jane took one last look at the bear. “Stay right where you are, Nyakwai,” she whispered. “Something is coming—something evil.”

  Earl trotted down the steep hillside after the dogs. Everything seemed to come hard to him this trip, like the stiff north wind smacking into his face all afternoon. He had run until he had thought he would have to stop, and then he had at last spotted them on the bare ridge ahead. He had kept his head and run on, trying to gradually shorten the distance and buy himself the best shot. But he had seen the woman stop and turn around, so he had gone low and used the telescopic sight of the rifle to see what she was doing.

  When he saw that she was holding a pair of binoculars, he’d had no choice. The range must have been a thousand yards. He had known that even though he was holding the best sniper rifle that money could buy, he was aiming it into the sunset at a receding target bobbing up and down over uneven ground with a forty-mile-an-hour wind blowing at him. He had tried to hold the man’s back in the crosshairs long enough, but it was a ridiculous shot, and the round had gone high. When the gun had settled from the recoil and he had found them again in the scope, he discovered they had dropped to their bellies.

  He had sprung to his feet and run toward them, using the time to shorten the distance and get into reasonable range. When they got up to run again, he had taken a second shot to make them go down again, but the tactic had not worked. Jane had obviously figured out that hiding while he moved closer could only end one way.

  She had dodged to the left, moving across his field of vision to make his shot even harder, and then scrambled down here into the gulch. The sparse smattering of scraggly pines on the slope would not have provided cover from fifty yards, but from eight hundred, the tree trunks had multiplied in the scope’s optics into an impenetrable wall.

  Jane was a clever bitch. She had taken Hatcher from a mountaintop, where he’d stood out against the sky, down into a narrow mountain pass the sun had not reached for an hour and where enough soil had been deposited over the eons to let thick, leafy vegetation grow.

  This was the moment he had known for days would come. Some runners would just keep running until they dropped, and then lie there to get their throats cut. But Hatcher had already shown that he wasn’t one of those. Linda had taken a gun off him in Denver, and that meant he was the sort that would probably make some lame attempt at fighting. Jane was a pro, so it went without saying that when running got to be pointless, she would still not concede that she had used up her options.

  Earl took long, leaping steps, almost flying a few feet and landing on both heels to stop himself, then taking a running start and doing it again. When he reached the bottom he moved out of the trees into a long, narrow meadow. The light was fading quickly, and the sky above him had already dimmed into that gray opaque surface that would turn deep later when the stars began to show.

  A shiver of anticipation began in his spine and moved up to the back of his neck. He could feel that they were straight ahead, waiting for him. He cocked the slide on his pistol to chamber a round, then lifted the precious rifle across his chest like a skeet shooter and held it ready. Then he turned his face to the dogs.

  “T-Bone,” he whispered, and swept his hand to his right. “Rusty,” he whispered, and swung his hand to the left. The two big black dogs began to advance through the meadow on either side of him. He could see they smelled something ahead in the meadow.

  They stalked with their ears pricked forward, their necks extended, and their bodies held low to the ground. This was it, all right. He saw that there were bushes growing in big clumps, like haystacks here and there in the open field. Most likely the man and woman were crouched behind one of them, or even in the middle. Hatcher would be clutching the one little pistol he had bought that Linda hadn’t gotten, probably sweating so much he could barely keep the grip in his hand.

  Manhunting was all strategy, and Earl had them this time. If they stayed put, the dogs would sniff them out and Earl could lie prone out of pistol range and keep piercing the bushes until he had bagged them. If the dogs flushed them, they would have to run the whole length of this narrow valley to get out of the open. Earl could fix them one at a time in his flashlight beam and pop them at his leisure. It occurred to him that he didn’t even have to do that. He could let the dogs run them down and tear them up first, then shoot them on the ground.

  T-Bone and Rusty both stopped, stood stiff-legged, and began to growl. At first it was low, a sound like anger building. But then they began to move forward again, still low but faster now. He could see their muzzles contort to bare their long, glowing teeth—not just the biting fangs this time, but the big jagged grinders in the back for gnawing through bone.

  Earl rasped, “Abschuss! Kill!” The word was more a cheer than a command, because they seemed already to be in motion when it began, streaking forward toward the big thicket ahead of him.

  Earl chose a standing position so he could sidestep quickly to either side. He held the flashlight in his left hand under the foregrip of the rifle so that it would throw its beam wherever he aimed. He pushed off the safety and waited. The dogs tore into the thicket from both sides.

  In the dim remnants of light from the sky he saw T-Bone take a hard run forward, his teeth bared to emit a sound that was half growl and half cry of joy. As T-Bone left the ground, Earl knew he was leaping for a throat. At almost the same time he saw Rusty dash in low from the other side of the thicket, and he knew they were attacking the way he had seen them go after the bloodhound—one for the throat and the other for the hamstrings. Earl danced to the right, trying to create a better angle in case the dogs had left one of the runners unoccupied.

  Earl heard a sound that made him drop the flashlight in his haste to push the switch. The air seemed to turn thick with it, a noise that had a groan in it like the roar of an enraged man, but a noise that had fangs and hair, far too loud and deep to have come from a human throat.

  Earl saw T-Bone fly through the air, spinning a little to land in the tall weeds. Then Earl saw the bear. It charged out of the thicket after Rusty, its maw wide open in a crocodile gape as it tried to corner the dog.

  Earl found his flashlight and caught the bear in it. The head, a foot wide w
ith a wrinkled snout and tiny black eyes, turned to him in a snarl. The flashlight seemed to have enraged the bear, but it had blinded Rusty. The bear’s thick paw shot out, the black claws gleaming in the light like the teeth of a rake, and swatted Rusty’s side. Then the bear, with astonishing speed, disappeared behind the thicket again.

  Earl thought he saw the bushes move. He raised the rifle, fired, cycled the bolt, and fired again, but the bear had somehow gotten ahead of him in the dark. The bear found the dazed T-Bone and, in a second, reared up with his jaws clamped on T-Bone’s throat, gave the dying body a neck-breaking shake, then dropped the carcass and headed back toward Rusty on four feet.

  Rusty crouched, barking and snarling as the bear trotted toward him, then seemed to realize that he had finally met something he could not even injure, let alone kill. Rusty wheeled and began to run.

  Earl turned on the flashlight again. In the rifle scope he could see the bright reflection in the dog’s eyes. He could see its long tongue hanging out, and bright, honey-thick slaver dripping from it. Behind Rusty, the bear was methodically building speed, bounding along now, first both forefeet, then both hind feet, its close-set black pig-eyes gleaming. Rusty was running for his life now, to the only place where he would be safe. His idea of sanctuary was leading an eight-hundred-pound bear right back to Earl.

  Earl steadied the rifle and held the running animal’s head in the scope. He placed the crosshairs between the two rust-brown spots above the eyes and fired.

  Rusty’s forelegs crumpled and he collapsed, dead before his muzzle hit the ground. The bear stopped, gave a quick swat with his claws, and made sure the dog was dead.

  Earl quickly switched off the flashlight and crouched, holding the scope on the big black shape. The wind was blowing from the bear’s direction. Earl made no noise. As he watched the shape of the bear he tried to remember. He had fired once at Pete Hatcher, then once more. He had fired at the bushes twice: four. Then one for Rusty: five. But was he really sure he had started with ten rounds? Old hunting stories came back to him. People had shot grizzly bears ten or twelve times in places that were supposed to be fatal and they had not even slowed down. Earl kept his eye in the scope, slowly and quietly released the box magazine from the rifle, found the full magazine in his pocket, and clicked it in place.