Claw

by Katie Berry

  She climbed into her truck, the cold, grey metal of her Remington bolt-action .30-06 glinting in the weak morning light. The rifle was not one of the highest-powered rifles out there, but she knew what counted most wasn’t the stopping power -- that was something she’d learned when she’d first started her training.

  Harvey Callahan, the officer that had mentored her firearms training, had been a long-time veteran of the forestry service. After thirty years, he’d been getting ready to retire and had seen it all, so to speak. He told her that one of the most important things to remember was that it wasn’t always the stopping power of a rifle that was important. You could have just fired the most powerful weapon in the world, but if your shot didn’t hit a vital organ, you might only succeed in pissing the thing off that you’re trying to kill. He’d also told her a single well-placed shot with a .30-06 was just as capable of bringing down a bull moose or seven-hundred-kilogram grizzly, as a high powered .416 magnum was, as long as the shooter was accurate. And accuracy was something that Christine excelled at, scoring top marks in her class at the target range.

  With plenty of time to do so, she mentally ran through her agenda for the day as she slowly drove down her lane into the anaemic daylight now leaking through the fog. She could see that the five-kilometre drive from her rented house into the town of Lawless was going to take a while longer today. The density of the fog varied in consistency between cotton candy-like wafts of fluffy mist to full-on ‘can’t see your hand in front of your face’ fog banks. There was only so much that the high-intensity fog lights attached to the top rack of her truck could do.

  Rounding a corner, Christine found herself face to face with a pair of coyotes standing over a small, unrecognisable piece of roadkill in the middle of the highway. She braked hard, and the two scavengers disappeared into the mist like ghosts as if they’d never been there at all. Thoughts of the occupant in her chest freezer sprung to mind. The coyote’s enjoyment of their roadkill repast was the reason for the freezin’ of the carcass at the shop, she thought with a grin. The door to the garage couldn’t be left open all the time to keep the remains frozen as she had on the first day. The last thing she needed was to attract the pack of coyotes living along the shores of Kokanee Lake, only a kilometre or two from the city’s downtown. These compact predators regularly prowled the garbage cans and dumpsters of Lawless in addition to stalking the local pet population in the dead of night. She certainly didn’t need to attract them or anything else lurking out there in the fog.

  Lawless was having a problem with coyotes just like other areas in the province, and she knew they were high on Austin’s list as animal control officer for the city. It was going to be a hard go and that she knew it might be necessary to cull some of the pack. She recalled the coyote problem in Vancouver that one of her instructors had told her about while she was training. There were literally tens of thousands of coyotes living within the city limits of Vancouver. Most residents were utterly oblivious to these unseen, silent predators. In fact, many people would be shocked at the surprising locations that some of these urban scavengers had made their homes. Sometimes all that was needed for a family of coyotes to move in was a small opening in a crawlspace underneath an abandoned house or a thicket of bushes in an empty lot. Many of the unexplained disappearances of cats and dogs in the Lower Mainland could be attributed to coyotes, rather than the commonly held tropes of petnappings or low budget restaurants opening in the neighbourhood.

  When the freezer arrived yesterday afternoon, she’d been glad to put the carcass on ice. Though she usually had a reasonably high tolerance for offensive smells, the stench from this creature was overpowering. Once she’d finished the deep freeze internment, she’d cracked open three lavender air fresheners she’d also purchased to celebrate having an odour free shop once more.

  After several more minutes of foggy navigation, Christine finally pulled into the rear lot of the conservation office. She unlocked the shop door but didn’t immediately enter. Instead, she stood in the darkened doorway, listening. After a moment she smiled, pleased to hear the freezer humming happily away in the corner of the shop, keeping its precious, smelly cargo frozen and safe.

  Enjoying the pleasing floral scent of the air freshener next to the door for a moment, she flicked on the lights as she walked through to her office. She sat down at her computer and brought up her email. To her surprise, her inbox was even closer to bursting than before, thanks to a series of new emails from Zelda. It seemed the girl must have woken early from her nap. In the last hour or so it looked like her colleague had been busy beavering away, sending more information for Christine to peruse through her high-bandwidth optical pipeline at the office. There looked to be over a dozen different emails now. Suffering an apparent zoological nerdgasm, Zelda had inundated her with a wave of information.

  Taking a sip from her travel mug of tea, Christine opened the email marked ‘raccoon summary’. This email provided a point by point summary of the vital stats on the raccoon that Zelda had told her over the phone yesterday. She shook her head in amazement. It was still mind-boggling that the thing could have existed all these years without ever being in contact with civilisation.

  But it was the casting of the print from the other, larger predator from the campsite that really intrigued Christine the most, and she was curious what Zelda could tell her about it. She clicked on an email entitled, ‘OMFG!’.

  Over the years, Christine had encountered more than her fair share of bear tracks. The accepted method of measurement was to base the calculation on the square-shaped front paw, rather than the elongated rear. The rule of thumb to size a bear from its print was to take the measurement of the bear’s forepaw, add an inch and you generally have the length of the bear in feet. She’d done the math based on the print in the earth near the fire pit but didn't think her answer could possibly be correct and thought it better to wait for verification from Zelda before saying anything to anyone for sure. After all, some expansion must have occurred to the print in the mud she surmised, because there was no possible way any living bear could be that large! She was sure that Zelda would have something to say about it, and she did.

  The OMFG email opened on her screen just as she started to take a sip of tea from her travel mug and she almost choked, the cream seeming to clot into a solid lump in the back of her throat. After several moments of intent study, Christine sat back and digested everything she’d read. She picked up the photos of the paw impression on her desk and looked at them long and hard. In the pictures, she’d included a ruler in the shot to get a sense of the scale of the impression. But she was sure she’d never have any problem remembering its dimensions as they were burned into her brain — from the back of the heel to the tip of the claw, the paw print measured almost seventy-five centimetres. The beast was a behemoth, and Zelda had now corroborated that fact. The track belonged to Arctotherium Angustidens, an unusually large, nasty, bear species found predominantly found in South America, but not any time in recent memory -- it had gone extinct over one hundred thousand years ago!

  Taking into account the pressure points of the animal’s pad and the depth it had imprinted into the earth, Zelda calculated that the creature currently stalking Lawless weighed-in at over two metric tonnes and it could look a two-metre tall human directly in the eye. Walking fully erect on its hind legs, it could look into the second story window of any house, as it would be just a hair over five metres tall! Her blood ran cold as she thought of the size of the creature now that it had been corroborated.

  She was stunned by the information on the screen in front of her and sat back in her chair. “Seriously? Where have you been hiding for the last ten millennia or so? Shacked up with my stinky little friend?” She nodded her head toward the humming freezer in the other room.

  My God, she thought, what kind of monster is this thing? She knew she’d need to get some warning signs together and post them around the area. But first things first; she needed
to inform Chief VanDusen of the situation, get him up to speed and on-board with the situation, then get the signs out and start warning the population.

  Christine picked up the phone handset on her desk and punched the number for the LPD. It was picked up after two rings, “Lawless Police Department, Desk Sergeant Paulson speaking, how can I assist you?”

  “Good morning Sergeant Paulson!” Christine said brightly, “This is British Columbia Conservation Officer Christine Moon calling, may I speak to the Chief, please?”

  “Officer Moon! Absolutely! Always a pleasure to hear from you again! Just one moment, please.”

  After what seemed like an interminable wait, Chief Reggie Vandusen finally picked up the phone, saying, “Well, well, Officer Moon, hope you weren’t waiting long.”

  “Not too long,” Christine said, wanting to say more, but didn’t. She needed his help and wasn’t about to burn any more bridges with the man, yet, especially after the incident in the mud yesterday.

  “That’s good. Listen, we’re pretty backed up here right now. What is it that you need?”

  “It’s not what I need; it’s what Lawless needs! We need signs up around town saying there is a dangerous predator on the loose!”

  “Now, you know there is no proof that there’s any such thing…”

  “Yes, there is! I just got confirmation from the zoology lab at SFU that the thing that ate those snowmobilers…”

  “May have eaten, we have no evidence...” VanDusen interrupted.

  “Evidence? I’m sure we’ll have more than enough, once that thing starts defecating human remains all over the place!”

  “Until the lab gets results back to us, you can’t go around screaming, “Killer bear on the loose!”

  “Look, whether anyone was actually eaten or not is irrelevant. Even if we allow for your supposition that the blood around the campsite was left behind by campers gutting their kill, we still need to let the public know that there is the possibility of a large, possibly carnivorous predator skulking around in the fog. They need to be told to keep out of the forest until we find this thing and kill it! The newspapers and radio need to be informed as well!”

  “Listen, officer, once I’ve heard from our forensics lab is when I’ll make the final determination about the danger and who to contact and not before! But fine, go ahead if you want, put up some of those nice, friendly, yellow ‘Bear In Area’ signs around the place. Will that make you happy?”

  “No! This thing is going to keep attacking, now that it has a taste for blood! This thing exists! It’s a reality, and it is still out there! It hasn’t gone anywhere! And whether you want to admit it or not, there is an excellent chance it’s already killed several people and many more could die unless we do something about it. I’m on my way up to the resort right now to check out some damage to the property last night that they think might be bear-related.”

  “Then I’d suggest you put out your little warning signs and then get out in the forest and find the goddamned thing!” VanDusen slammed the receiver down, ending the conversation.

  “Bastard!” Christine said, still holding the dead receiver to her ear.

  “All right,” she said aloud, slamming her own receiver down, “if that’s the way you’re going to play this, fine.” She picked the handset up once more and began dialling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The thin mist that graced the Golden Mile pass on the eastern side of the valley did not extend to the western side, much to Austin’s disappointment. It was far too thick for him to see anything beyond a few metres, let alone fire a Howitzer shell into the nebulous, grey unknown hoping to hit a mountaintop at the backside of the valley. It appeared the thickening fog was going to put the kibosh on his plan to knock down the build-up on Gold Ridge near the glacier.

  Austin pulled the truck over and looked over to Trip in the passenger seat then out the windshield at the grey void. He sighed, “Well, we might as well go all the way up to the resort and see if there’s any clearing higher up,” Austin said, putting the truck back in gear.

  Trip squinted into the greyness surrounding them. “Sounds good, boss.” He grabbed the last cruller in the doughnut box and slowly bit into it, relishing the last of his morning sugar fix.

  The Gold Mountain Casino and Resort sat at the top of a series of switchbacks that wound back upon themselves -- each curve so close to the next that sometimes it seemed they might swallow their own sinuous tails. The lack of snow over the past week had laid the road bare except for a thick crust of frozen slush on both sides. On their drive up the hill, Austin could see the thorough sanding job that Larry had done overnight -- all the curves in the road were well gritted to provide extra traction and make them as safe as possible. Austin, impatient as he was to get to the resort, had to grit his teeth on a journey that seemed interminable at times as he piloted the truck through bank after bank of fog.

  Trip looked glumly into the empty doughnut box in his lap. He was currently picking out the last few crumbs and bits of glaze from the bottom of the sticky cardboard box. Austin suddenly tapped the brakes, and Trip glanced out his window. His heart suddenly wedged itself into his throat when a large, dark shape loomed out of the fog into his peripheral vision. His hand moved toward Austin’s arm to make him aware of the danger, his friend’s name already on his tongue to warn him, but he stopped short at the very last moment.

  The distinctive noseless face of the Sphinx resolved out of the mist as the truck continued to roll along. The one eighth-scale Egyptian oddity stared blankly at him through the window as it stood guard duty at the entrance to the Golden Nugget Casino and Resort. Towering next to the Nile Cat, its spire disappearing into the mist over ten metres up, was the one-tenth-scale Eiffel Tower. Trip knew that when driving in the fog, it was sometimes difficult to judge how far along a road you were, until all of a sudden there’s a replica of a big-ass Egyptian human-cat hybrid right there next to you. He chuckled to himself.

  Observing Trip’s reaction, Austin laughed lightly from the driver’s seat, saying, “What’s the matter, Trip? A little jumpy?”

  “Yeah, just a bit on edge, boss, not knowing where that thing is out there.”

  “I getcha. That and even knowing WHAT that thing is out there.”

  “Uh-huh, that, too. But this fog certainly doesn’t make it any easier. It’s like the mist is helping this thing stay invisible and move about unseen. As far as we know right now, it could be standing five metres from us in this fog, and we’d never know it. It’s like it doesn’t really exist since nobody’s actually seen it, yet.” Trip hoped the supposition he’d just stated regarding the beast’s current location was incorrect. Nevertheless, he swivelled his head back and forth, looking intently into the fog as Austin slowly drove through the main gate of the resort.

  Austin added, “Nobody that’s lived to talk about it, that is.”

  “Exactly, nobody except maybe for that that Wilson kid last night at Frostbite Fred’s, and maybe the guy we rescued, Jerry. Any word on him yet?”

  “Last I heard, he was still heavily sedated, but you just made me wonder how Christine was making out with that casting of the print from the campsite yesterday. I hope she’s had some word by now.”

  Austin pulled the truck around to the back of the resort to access the service road leading up to the avalanche control platform at the back half of the resort. As he turned the corner, a familiar amber trouble light strobed faintly away in the mist ahead. Out of the swirling vapour, Christine Moon’s blue Ram 3500 appeared, parked next to a rusty, battered garbage dumpster.

  “Well what do you know, I guess you can ask her right now,” Trip said as Austin stopped the vehicle.

  ***

  Christine Moon backed up a bit farther, trying to get a better shot of the dumpster, but the fog wasn’t cooperating. “Damned clammy crap!” Even at a distance of three metres, the visibility was cut in half by the swirling mist, and she was getting nothing of any clarity. She ha
d to be satisfied with a series of close-ups of the various spots of interest near the dumpster.

  When the breakfast crew had shown up for work early this morning, a mess had been discovered near the dumpster. Thinking it to be just a bear problem, the staff contacted Bill Watkins, who had called Christine’s office asking if someone could come up to the resort to check on a bear problem.

  As soon as she looked at the bin when she arrived, she knew it had to be the work of the valley’s newest, (or oldest) resident, depending on your point of view, Angustidens Arctotherium. Definitely not ‘just another bear problem’, that was for sure. Christine stood and stared for a moment. The lid was sitting at such a weird angle; it looked like something straight out of an M.C Escher print. An entire corner of the cover was curled neatly back like something enormous had been fishing snacks out of it -- as if the sheet steel lid were nothing more troubling than the cardboard lid to a box of Crackerjacks and it had been digging for the prize.

  She tried backing up a little bit farther, still trying to get a better shot, but she could see it was now impossible, as the fog seemed to have decided it wanted to foil her photographic endeavours completely. “Dammit!”