If I had the rifle, I’d have plugged him where he stood, burst my eardrums in the process, and then taken the dive.
If he’d had the rifle he’d have chewed it like licorice.
All of this took but a flash, three fast heartbeats, a single fart (from him). Then he came down on all fours and charged.
Most of this (like my face) is a reconstruction. He must have hit me head to belly, bowling me backward down the chute, the two of us rattling across the bars of ivory like madmen playing Chopsticks, my ribs popping while his merely bent and bruised, him bawling and chuffing in that deep ugly way they have when they’re frightened or hard hit by a big bullet, claws rattling against the ice and around my ears, the stink of his winter-rancid hair in my face (I hugged him as I’d never hugged Josey, tight around the neck, my nose in his armpit) all the time gone and only the blue rapids of ice beneath and around and within us, until we hit bottom.
Whuff. Again. From both of us.
But his rage was more complete than mine. His nervous system, simpler in the realities, sent him back onto me, arms slapping and grabbing as Gainey’s had, so ineffectively, on Sam. Then his right paw taking my head behind the neck and stuffing it, eyes first, into his wide mouth. I felt his tongue on my chin, like a hot towel in a barbershop, his claws forcing my skull into that gap, the two of us spinning and whirling, over and over down the scree, the slime of Doctor Moran’s guts thawing in my nostrils, and I forced my left arm up into the gap between his molars, taking the brunt of his bite on my forearm.
I could feel—I remember it clearly, and the scars will prove me true—the raking locking touch of his canines on the back of my skull. I heard my head pop like a pecan in a nutcracker. And I remembered the first and only rule that applies when you’re being mauled by a bear.
Play dead.
I went limp as a brainshot wolf. Tried not to breathe (try it sometime when you have to). Let him bat and chaw some more—arm, foot, shoulder. Heard him huffing hard, smelled his stink, through my slitted eyes saw the mass of him, shag against the hard blue sky, fleas crawling on his slack belly, my own blood matting his clacking, foamy jaws. His eyes looked away from me—good. He figured me finished. Slowly I felt his rage subside, and faster than that the sting of the wounds he’d paid me for my rude intrusion.
He wandered off, I think.
I slept.
When I woke, he was off at the edge of the scree slope, whacking at a rotted blowdown, hoping, I guess, for maggots.
The Mannlicher was ten yards away, at best.
Yet, if he stayed that way, his back toward me. . . . If his rage was indeed blown from the fight. . . .
I could only see out of my right eye. Maybe he was closer. Maybe I was dead.
My knees worked. My elbows. The adrenalin was still up so that the pain lay perhaps ten minutes in the future. The rifle was closer.
When I moved, he chuffed and stood up, ears cocked, eyes focusing that long long way to where I lay. Maybe twenty yards.
He ran toward me with a kind of chortling, whuffling grin on his face, then spun around on his haunches and scratched himself with his right hind leg. He licked his paw. He rubbed his ass on the gravel. He ambled back down to the log.
I crawled toward the rifle, inch at a time, minutes between inches, aches turning to stabs, stabs to saw cuts. Time was running out.
He came up the slope in that late light, blue now in the setting sun, and hit me once or twice with his right paw—the one he’d licked for my blood. He grabbed me by the shoulder, carefully, with his jaws and lifted me up and shook me. I stayed limp. My head shook. My jaws clattered. My tongue lolled. I rolled my eyes back into my head. Dead as he could ever wish.
He dragged me toward a stack of brush, winterkilled runoff brush at the edge of the Alugiak, then thought better of it. Question: Do grizzly bears understand spring runoff?
Probably. When the river rose at breakup, it would sluice his rotten tidbit away.
He carried me back up to the cave mouth and flopped me down within arm’s reach of the Mannlicher. Then he waddled off down the scree slope, figuring maybe to stow me later, up in the ice cave, where he’d eaten the good Doctor Moran.
My arms still worked, though slowly. I took the rifle down 106 from its leaning perch on the ice-scrubbed rock. I saw him down there, at his log again, heavy back humped silver in the last light, the long-nosed snipy face in profile, and laid the sights on his ear. He was chewing like a dog on a deer leg.
I blew his brains down into the snow.
The shock of the recoil against my dislocated shoulder opened the floodgates and the pain came crashing down on me so that the whole world thinned and went white and I could see millions of tiny bright particles shooting at me from the horizon fast as the speed of light and the stones themselves went porous. When it all came together again, the sun was nearly gone. Where the bear had fallen over the rotting log I saw a raven, bobbing its head at me, its eyes bright as it chortled deep in its throat. I could not see the bear. The raven spread its wings, puffed the feathers on its throat, and flapped off into the dusk.
How I made it back to the cabin I do not know. I have vague, perhaps imagined, memories of sliding on my side through cold mud, and of Ulf emerging from the dark to whine and lick at the blood on my face, and perhaps he grabbed my collar and helped me drag myself along. Nor do I know how I managed to rig the noose over the ridgepole in the cabin and slip the hand of my dislocated arm into it, and then throw my whole weight downward in an effort to snap the head of the humerus back in its socket. But it worked. When I came to, dangling from the rope, my shoulder once more could flex.
Later, I found that half the bottle of codeine pills we kept for emergencies was missing, so I must have eaten them. I recall trying to drink a glass of brandy to ease the pain, but the liquid slopped out of the sides of my mouth. My jaw hung down on my chest. Then I remembered Josey’s basting tube with the suction bulb on the end. I blasted my glottis with brandy and water and made my way to bed.
Perhaps a kind of subliminal shock wave rolls out from the epicenter of a wilderness calamity, or maybe it’s just the gathering of carrion eaters, but miles and miles away up Carcajou Creek, Charlie Blue knew I was in trouble. I heard him singing and whooping long before the hiss of his sled runners announced his arrival. For days, it seemed, I had lain there in the slow wash and ebb of fever, broken and stiff and half blind, crawling the few feet to the stove only when the cabin’s chill set my hot skin to aching, boiling up a can of pea soup or tomato soup, sucking it down through the baster, stoking the fire, while the dogs howled and the wolves joined their chorus from the hills beyond the ice.
I heard his footsteps on the stoop.
“Strange,” he hollered. “No smoke from the chimney, yet the airplane is parked on the river. No sound from within, yet the dogs are silent. No sign in the snow, yet the ravens gather as if to eat.”
I mumbled something through my broken jaw.
“What’s that? An animal inside the cabin. A wolf? A lynx? Surely not a bear.” I heard him lever a round into his battered .300 Savage. I mumbled louder, trying to call his name.
The door opened and the muzzle of the rifle peeked in. Half delirious, I half hoped he would plug me and put me out of my pain. Then his hooded head eased around the doorframe and he peered into the darkness. He sniffed.
“Hmm,” he yelled, “smells of blood and shit. Someone’s been cooking pea soup.” I mumbled again, unable to articulate, and he ducked back, slamming the door. For a long while, I heard him conducting a learned dialogue with himself as he sat on the porch, debating what could be causing the noises within. Then at last he hit it. “Aha! Slade is in there! He is hurt! He cannot speak, so he mumbles! What could have hurt him so badly? A bear.”
I heard him walking away from the cabin, probably to look for the signs of the fight. I slept for a while, and then I heard him returning. This time he came right into the cabin. Took the brandy bottle from the shelf and uncorked it.
Glug glug. Then he lit the kerosene lamp.
“Poor Slade,” he said.
By the time Josey returned four days later, he had patched me up pretty well. He stitched my torn scalp and poulticed it with moss and lichens. He bound my cracked ribs with torn sheets. He rearticulated my jaw with powerful fingers and sewed up the slashes the bear’s teeth had left in my thigh, my shoulder and my face. He cooked for me and fed me, cleaned me with hot water, made me get up and work the stiffness out of my wounds and my muscles. He forced me to drink herbal infusions that eased my fever. And all the while, he sang. It was driving me nuts.
I heard an aircraft motor circling overhead, and the splash and revs of the landing, the grating of floats on gravel. Only then did I realize that breakup had come and gone. I must have been delirious when the ice went out, although I do recall strange dreams in which the roar and rumble of ice played a prominent part. Josey’s footsteps sounded on the stoop and Charlie led her in.
“Oh God, Jack,” she said, looking at me. “Oh God.”
Behind her loomed another figure, black against the lighted doorway. It was Sam Healey.
“I don’t know about you, honey,” he said, “but I think it makes him look prettier.”
PART TWO
SAM HEALEY
1980
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BUT GOD he was a mess. His head looked the size of a basketball, and lines of black stitches zigzagged across his scalp, down his forehead and over his left cheekbone. His left eye was puffed shut and he never would regain full vision in it. His nose was broken and his jaw hung crooked and there was a deep slash across his throat, stitched up by the Indian now, but from then on he would talk in a hoarse whisper, like some racetrack tout with a hot tip or a stumblebum asking for a handout. We tried to cheer him up. Old Jack was tough all right.
The girl was something else. Not much of a looker in my book and a real Goody Two-Shoes in many ways, but she was clearly head over heels, changing his bandages, plumping his pillow, feeding him tea and soup, sitting next to him when he slept so that if his fever came back she could lay cold compresses on his torn head. I’d picked her up in Gurry Bay. She’d been Outside, she said, to bury her mother. My pardon came through, finally, and I’d flown in from Juneau with the company plane to see the old gang and find out how Jack was faring.
After the dustup on the dock, I’d made a beeline for the Canuck border, put down in Whitehorse, and sold the Dakota to a couple of guys who planned to head down to South America and see what was happening air-freight-wise. Then I lined up a job roughnecking at an oil camp near Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories. Under a phony monicker, naturally. The outfit was Morgan Petroleum, Jep Morgan’s show, just getting under way in the business that would ultimately make him the biggest independent north of the border.
Jep was a long drink from Louisiana, a big, hamhanded, walnut-faced redneck with an eye for the main chance. He’d come out of the Marines a bird colonel after the war and made a killing in cheap housing. He wanted to get into the oil game down home but all the good leases were sewed up tight, so with the dough from his ticky-tack developments, he headed north and began wildcatting there in the tundra. He hit a couple of good wells and sold them off to the big companies, and with the money from that he started expanding. By the time I got to know him, he had four rigs, two canneries, ten salmon seiners, a small logging company in Southeast, half a dozen whorehouses up and down the coast from British Columbia to Nome, and lots of political clout in Juneau. My kind of guy.
In those early days, Jep still catted around with the crew, played a lot of guts poker and slugged back the hooch with both fists. He liked his nookie. Thanks to my bush flying experience, I knew every worthwhile split-tail in the North and fixed him up with some good stuff. I let him know I was on the lam and that I was a damn good flier. Pretty soon, I was his personal pilot and he went to bat for me with the law on the Olds charge. Things were pretty loose back then, and it was easy enough to fix.
As luck would have it, Jep had a marriageable daughter, Ellen, kind of an ugly duckling, like her dad, but shy and awkward. It was a cinch to get into her pants. For real fucking, I like ’em dim and dirty but good looking. This twist was none of the above, but she was bloody rich. The only reason to marry.
I filled Jack in on this one afternoon as we sat on the gravel bar watching the Alugiak flush past, full of grit and the last chunks of the winter’s ice. It was warm but the flies weren’t out yet. Josey was out back chopping firewood and Jack lay on a mattress she’d hauled out there for him. His bruises had gone kind of a dirty yellow green and his puffed eye was opening, glinting in there out of focus. Charlie Blue was gone, God knows where.
“I’m glad you’re doing okay, pal,” he croaked.
“What the hell,” I said. “We’re doing okay, partner. We’re still partners, you know. Soon as I get back to town, I’ll send you up a check for your share of what I got for the Dakota, a couple of grand anyway. And now that I’m with Morgan, I can steer a lot of business your way, hauling gear and people to Jep’s drill sites.”
“No,” he says, “I’m through with flying for a living. I want to turn this place into a good hunting camp. Maybe with that dough, I can get a leg up on it. Anyways, with this goddam walleye the bear gave me, I’d never get my commercial license back.”
“Well, if it’s hunting, shit, I can help you out there too. We’ve got a lot of wild-ass Texans who love to hunt. Krauts too, rich ones, and a few Arabs. Big money there. But you’ll have to fix the place up nice and comfortable for them.”
The shack they lived in was a dump. You could see he’d socked it together without any professional help. They didn’t even have electricity or an indoor can. How the hell the twist managed to pee during the winter without growing icicles on her pussy, I’ll never know. Maybe she did. Jack wouldn’t know the difference.
“You’ll need separate cabins where they can bring in their ginch, and a big fireplace for them to loll around at night and swap lies. A long bar like Norman Ormandy has in the Blue Bear. Lots of stuff.”
“Yeah,” he says, “well I haven’t got the money for that. I had a plan to get some but I thought better of it.”
“Money’s no problem,” I tell him. I’m getting excited now, I can see it all taking shape. “I’m sure I can sell Jep on the idea. A special hunting camp for his rich-bitch pals in the oil business. Fly ’em here in the Bonanza, loaded for bear. You line ’em up with big trophies, I line ’em up with some of my cuties. A great working vacation.”
He looks at me with that weird eye, like some kind of evil hairy toad.
“If I do it,” he says, “they’ll work for their meat. I’m not staking out targets for them. I don’t want any slob hunting here. Fair chase or no chase.”
“Sure,” I said. I guessed we could work that out when and if. Anyway, he was still punchy from the bear whacking him around. He’d come to his senses when the money was whistling in.
“Another thing,” he croaks, “Josey.”
“What about her?”
“I don’t want her becoming just a chief cook and bottle washer. If we’re to do this right, we’ll need a regular staff, a chef and sous-chef, people to clean up and chop firewood, a couple of wranglers for the horses, some good hunters—pros—to back me up. Would your guy Morgan go for that?”
“I think I can sell it,” I told him.
“What kind of money we talking about?”
“I’ll have to work that out with Morgan.”
That night after dinner—Josey had a touch, I’ll admit, at least with wild meat—I knew they wanted to talk so I took a rod and went down to Carcajou Creek to try for some trout. Ulf, their big Husky, came with me to keep a lookout for bears.
There wasn’t much action so I circled in behind the cabin and looked for that oil seep I’d spotted when we were forced down on the glacier. It was still there—I could smell it a hundred yards away—and from what I’d learned
about oil in the NWT I had a feeling that this could be a seep from a big pool. It would be another selling point as far as Jep was concerned. He always had his eye out for new ground. Slade and I were into this homestead thing fifty-fifty, equal partners, and once I’d arranged the deal with Morgan to develop the place as a hunting camp, he’d be in debt to me. When the time came to make use of the oil rights, he’d be bounden, unable to say no. All the more reason to cave in to his whims. Why the hell did that bitch need a chef and a sous-chef?
When I got back to the cabin, I could hear them talking 116 about the deal. Okay, I’m an eavesdropper, always have been, but how else do you really learn what your friends are thinking?
“You call him your friend,” she was saying, “but he left you holding the bag in Gurry Bay. You could have been convicted for that. You lost your license over it anyway. What kind of a friend is that?”
Jack mumbled something I didn’t catch, but I heard her sniff. What a ballbuster! I bet her cunt was lined with sandpaper right then.
“Okay, so you’ll have full charge. Fair chase. Fine. But remember what you said about Outside? You’ll be inviting Outside in.”
“Only for a little while,” he said.
“You tried it the other way,” she yipped, “and now you want to try it this way. Neither of them will work.”
Grumble-scrape-grunt, from Jack.
“I don’t understand you.”
“Look, this is what I want more than anything,” he grates. “Nearly anything.”
“What else?”
“I want us to be married, and for you to stop worrying about if I can handle this, and let me be your husband and take care of things.”
There’s a long, long silence and I can hear her padding back and forth on the planks in her mukluks.
“Maybe so,” she says finally. “I told you before I wasn’t ready for it, but it looks like now I am.” Her voice is gone softer now, kind of little-girl wheedling, the way they do when they got you where they want you.
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