CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  Her frantic eyes scanned the snow, the branches. She could almost see something. It was only a few feet away.

  Then, she heard moaning over to her right. It was the man with the ski pole. It had to be. It didn’t sound like he was more than twenty-five feet away.

  The animal was over to her left.

  Angie looked desperately around for something to fend off the attack. She saw a dead tree branch to her right, stumbled through the snow, and picked it up. She held it up like a bat, but it broke in half.

  Useless.

  It sounded like the man was dying.

  She heard the unmistakable “whoofing” sound of a very large bear. It was ten feet away, twenty at the most. But she couldn’t see it.

  Where was it?

  It made a low, deep burbling noise as from deep in its chest. Angie felt adrenaline coursing through her veins, could feel her arms and fingers tingling. She was out of breath. Her heart pounded hard in her chest. She was going to die, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Her entire useless life would be over in a brittle moment, all the hopes and dreams she’d ever wished for gone forever as though they’d never existed in the first place.

  As terrified as she was, she only wanted to help the man. The boy if he was still alive. She stumbled forward through the branches, and then almost fell onto him.

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped.

  The man lay in a thicket of branches and briars sticking up from the snow. His upper body was turned at an unnatural angle, his face and neck twisted to the right. His lower body, from his waist down, was turned almost one hundred and eight degrees in the opposite direction.

  The man was obviously paralyzed. Blood coated the white snow around him in a macabre mess. The man’s eyes darted around, but it did not appear that he could move his head.

  “Are you okay?” Angie said.

  The man’s eyes tried to move to the left to see her. Suddenly, he coughed a mouthful of blood out on the snow.

  He gasped, “The boy is dead. It killed him.”

  “Hang on,” Angie said. “Everything’s gonna be alright.”

  The man looked at her and his eyes said, No, it’s not. Nothing is going to be alright. Angie heard the animal moving heavily over the snow. She glanced back behind her.

  Where was it?

  She swung around and gazed through the thicket. The snow continued to fall heavily through the trees. She could see the bear. It was moving, and it was white. Angie stared for a moment that may have been forever, her ice blue eyes not believing what she saw. It looked almost like a polar bear, but she realized that it wasn’t. It was a grizzly, and it was covered with snow and ice.

  Before she could see it very well, it moved off down the hill. Angie froze. Her legs locked. She was in shock.

  The bear had been there, not more than ten feet from her. She staggered backward in the deep powder. She turned and saw the man on the ground. He was no longer breathing well.

  He was crying, lying there paralyzed and near death.

  “Momma,” he cried. “Momma.”

  His eyes moved around, but Angie could tell that he was only moments from dying. He just kept whispering over and over that he wanted his mother. He wanted his mom.

  The man was probably in his early thirties, and his cry was the powerless cry of an enfant, a child abandoned in the last moments of his mortality.

  Angie dropped to her knees beside him in the snow. She pressed her hand to his. She squeezed. His eyes looked up at her, but they didn’t recognize her. He seemed embarrassed that she, a stranger was seeing him like this.

  “Oh, God,” he cried. “Oh, God. I want my mom. I want my mom. Please. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  Thirty-eight

  The four horsemen entered town an hour before nightfall, when everyone’s panic was reaching crescendo. Governor Janet Creed had ordered the lockdown of Telluride and no one was to enter or leave for the next twenty-four hours. National Guardsmen patrolled the streets in militarized Humvees with machinegun turrets on their roofs, and the national news was practically having an orgy over the two new deaths and Creed’s perceived negligence for not shutting down the mountain sooner.

  Physically shutting the town down was not difficult to do, as there was only one roadway into the resort from the west. To the north, east, and south, the town was completely cut off by mountains, and by sundown, a tank and three Humvees were positioned four miles west of town at State Route 145. They’d been turning folks back all afternoon, and people were furious that they could not leave. Others were panicked.

  Creed’s reasoning had been twofold: one, she didn’t want people trying to evacuate a town over steep mountain passes in a blizzard and, two, she didn’t want people going anywhere until they got the bear situation under control.

  Angie had spent the afternoon consoling the families of the decedents: the nine-year-old boy named Herman Davies and the thirty-seven-year-old man Mitch Francis. Francis died holding Angie Rippard’s hand. They found the boy’s body thirty minutes later.

  From the front door of the New Sheridan Hotel, Angie stared out into the gathering darkness and unrelenting snowfall. She watched a military jeep race up the snow-covered street, and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the horsemen.

  A cold, hard wind whipped snow across the street in a cloud of white, and Angie leaned toward the window to see more clearly. It looked like four ghosts on horseback. They were coming toward the New Sheridan Hotel.

  “What in the world?” she whispered under her breath.

  Others gathered around the window and watched the horsemen coming up the street. No one could see their faces, but the men hitched up in front of the New Sheridan Hotel. They dismounted and walked toward the hotel entrance.

  It was noisy inside the hotel because of all the people, but the four cowboys entered and approached the front desk clerk. Everyone in town knew that all the rooms were taken.

  “Four rooms,” the head man said to the desk clerk.

  Angie stared at him. She couldn’t see his face very well, but she thought the man looked like Abraham Foxwell.

  The desk clerk said, “All the rooms are taken. All the rooms in town are taken.”

  One of the four men stepped up to the counter. “Four rooms,” he said.

  The desk clerk shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you guys,” he said. “We don’t have any rooms.”

  Suddenly, everyone heard the click of a revolver’s hammer locking. The crowd standing in the lobby of the hotel went silent. Most of them wore fancy ski sweaters bought in shopping malls. Others wore cologne and perfume. Most had driven up to the resort in Saabs, Volvos, and gas-guzzling SUVs.

  Everyone stared at these four cowboys in long trench coats, cowboy hats, and boots with spurs. Had they not been standing there dripping ice and snow on the hardwood, Angie would not have believed it. They looked like something out of a Sergio Leone picture.

  The one man lowered his revolver toward the desk clerk’s chest. He repeated, “Four rooms.”

  The desk clerk stammered, “I-I-I’ll see what I can do.”

  A lump in his throat bobbed up and down, and he turned and vanished behind a curtain. The four horsemen waited.

  Everyone whispered, pointed, asked and explained what had just happened.

  “He just pulled a gun on that man,” one said.

  Angie watched all this and waited to see how it played out.

  The desk clerk returned a minute later. He glanced nervously at the crowd in the lobby and adjacent restaurant area. He said to the men, “I can give you two rooms. It’ll require us to double up other guests, and I don’t know if they’ll do that just yet.”

  That was when the head man peered around him at the crowd gathered in the hotel lobby. Angie saw his eyes. They were ice blue, so light they almost appeared white. She knew then that it was Abraham Foxwell. The man looked rugged, his eyes crinkling up like crow’s feet. He looked at each p
erson standing there in the lobby. He looked at Angie but didn’t recognize her.

  He turned back to the desk clerk and said, “Make it so.”

  Thirty-nine

  The storm was unrelenting. Night clawed at the edges of buildings and the fingers of a cold wind lifted shingles from their roofs. Inside the New Sheridan Hotel, Angie Rippard waited restlessly for any sign of good news. None came.

  Every hour she would step out into the cold. She would do a lap around the downtown street block, trying to see if she could find anyone who knew anything about the bear or about when they could leave. Military jeeps passed her by, splashing snow and ice up towards the curb.

  She searched for Jonas, but didn’t find him. She searched for any of the others, but it appeared they’d all gotten out. She and the tourists were stranded in the hotel, stranded in the storm, and there was no firm news of when they would be allowed to leave. In the morning, perhaps, if the storm let up.

  Everyone seemed to know something, or to have heard something, but most of it conflicted and sounded like hearsay and rumor.

  It was on one such trip around the downtown Telluride street block that Angie saw the confrontation on the street. She turned the corner to where she could see toward the front of the New Sheridan, and for just a moment, the wind died down enough that the snow didn’t sting and blind her eyes.

  Someone was standing out in the middle of the street shouting toward the front door of the hotel. It looked to Angie like he was drunk. Suddenly, she saw the front door of the hotel open. Light poured out onto the sidewalk, a bright yellowish shine in the cold white snow.

  Angie was about fifty feet away.

  “Throw me out into the cold, will yuh?!” the man shouted.

  Standing outside the front door, now, were three of the cowboys. They silently stared at the man in the middle of the street. They wore their trench coats and cowboy hats, and their breaths steamed in the air.

  Angie glanced around hoping for some policing force to stop this. She knew what was coming—the man was going to get a beating or worse. These cowboys weren’t kidding around.

  “Where’s one of those jeeps?” she whispered to herself, glancing up and down the street.

  She stood still and watched the fight.

  The three cowboys stepped calmly down from the curb. They encircled the drunken man in the middle of the street. A cold gust of wind spat snow at them, and the man cursed and swung out at the air.

  “You think I’m a coward do you?!” the man shouted. “I’ll kill every last one of you cowboys!”

  The gunfight came as sudden as an animal attack. All three cowboys drew their pistols and opened fire on the man. He fell to the snow in the middle of the street.

  Faces filled the window of the New Sheridan Hotel, and the three cowboys placed their guns back in their holsters. Angie stared in shock.

  The man lay motionless in the middle of the street.

  Several people poured out of the hotel. They were pointing and shouting. The three cowboys eyed them. They came closer together and began walking back up toward the sidewalk.

  And then suddenly, from the far end of the street, Angie heard someone shouting.

  Several more people poured out of the hotel. They all looked at the dead man in the street. Then, they all looked up at the person running toward the hotel. The person was on the opposite end of the street from Angie, and he was shouting.

  “The bear!” he said. “The bear! I just saw it out on the lawn in front of the courthouse!”

  He was waving toward the people out front of the hotel. Angie began to run toward them.

  Forty

  The bear was in the shadows. It gazed out through the pouring snow at the strange and noisy creatures forty-five feet away. They were running around, shouting at one another.

  It was a discordant, strident sound. It bothered the bear’s ears, and it was all it could do to keep from roaring.

  The smell of death reached the bear’s nose. It lifted its head up in the darkness and sniffed the air. Something was dying. It could smell it.

  The bear’s eyes glinted in the darkness, and it took two lumbering steps in the direction of the odor of the dying man.

  Forty-one

  The man lay in the middle of the street. He could feel the life seeping out of him. He was dying.

  He turned his head and saw everyone running away from him. They were running up the snow-covered street toward the courthouse. Snow fell on the man’s face.

  He gasped, “Help.”

  But his voice was nearly breathless.

  The man tried to roll over onto his right elbow. He looked down at his chest and saw the blood-dampened shirt. He felt weak in the knees, but tried to roll over and crawl on his hands and knees towards the light of the hotel.

  He felt dizzy.

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  His head swung toward the people up the street. They were now out of sight. Why had no one helped him?

  He had always heard that nine out of ten people wouldn’t stop to help a dying man, but he had never imagined himself being the dying man. Now, he was. He tried to climb to his knees, felt dizzy, and sank back down into the snow. He was only five feet from the curb and sidewalk in front of the hotel.

  Everything began to spin around him.

  Oh, God, he thought. I’m going to die.

  He rolled over on his back and stared up into the snow-filled sky. Millions and millions of snowflakes fell toward him.

  Was this all his life amounted to? Didn’t he matter at all to anyone else? Why had he been born in the first place if his inevitable fate had been to die like this? To die at all?

  Why the hell did anyone have to live life?

  The man’s mouth became dry. He wanted something to drink. He lay very still.

  At least I’ll die in peace, he thought. To hell with them all. To hell with the cowboys! To tell with all those people who didn’t care!

  At least I’ll die in peace.

  It’s not so bad.

  That was when he heard the bear. It was about ten feet away. He heard it padding through the snow. He heard it make a cautious “whoofing” sound. The man’s eyes widened.

  His head turned to the right, and he saw the bear standing at an angle. Its head cocked to the left, and it looked at him.

  It sniffed the air.

  “Help,” the man gasped.

  It was huge.

  “Someone, please, help,” he said.

  The bear stepped over to him.

  Where were the people in the hotel? Why was no one helping him? Did no one care? Did no one see him?

  The bear sniffed at the man’s chest. Then, it licked.

  “Get away,” the man gasped. “Please!”

  The man’s arm swung up to bat the bear away, but the bear lunged forward and sank its teeth into his arm. The man felt bones snap. He screamed. And then the bear started shaking him.

  He felt the earth skid underneath him, and he slid across the snow. He came to rest for a second, but before he had time to react, he felt something powerfully heavy step onto his chest. The bear must have weighed seven hundred pounds, and the pressure crushed his sternum.

  He tried to scream, but no air came up from his lungs and throat. Then, he saw and felt the bear’s teeth sink into the side of his face.

  The bear ripped away part of his left jaw and most of the left side of his face. It raised its head for a second, chewed, and then lunged forward again. This time it sank its teeth into his chin and the upper part of his throat.

  All during this, the man clung to consciousness.

  The bear ripped away the lower part of his chin and his throat. The smell of blood filled the air. The man’s eyes were still intact, but most of his face and neck were ripped away.

  He flailed futilely with his arms, and he felt the icy fur of the bear. The ice felt as thick as armor.

  He heard people shouting. The bear’s head jerked up. It stepped away from him
. The man’s face was a bloody mess, but he sensed people running toward him, could hear their shouting.

  The bear stepped away from him, vanishing into the shadows beyond the curb and sidewalk.

  Forty-two

  They had no more than rounded the corner on the courthouse lawn, when they heard the man screaming. The lawn was coated in nearly a foot of powder, and Angie could see the steps leading up to the courthouse doors. The snow continued to fall heavily, but everyone saw the tracks.

  The man who had told them he had seen the bear, pointed and said, “It was over there, by that alleyway.”

  That was when they heard the screaming.

  “What was that?” someone said.

  “It sounds like it’s coming from the hotel,” someone else said.

  The three cowboys pulled their guns, and started back up toward the street to where they could see the hotel. Angie stayed at the edge of the courthouse lawn a moment more while everyone else ran up to see who was screaming.

  She scanned the darkened alleyway where the man had said he’d seen the bear, and she suddenly put it together.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  She realized the bear had gone up the darkened alley. It must have come out up near the hotel, and it probably saw the dying man in the street. Angie began running toward the street.

  She rounded the corner, and a cold wind swept snow at her.

  Everyone was gathered around the body in the street in front of the hotel, and sirens ripped across the night. Angie turned and saw headlights coming towards her up the street.

  A jeep raced by, heading towards the crowd out front of the hotel. Someone must have called the authorities. Someone inside the hotel. Perhaps the desk clerk.

  The crowd scattered, and Angie walked along the sidewalk. She was beginning to get cold, and then she saw the man on the ground.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  Another two jeeps raced up to the first one. All the men wore green National Guard uniforms, and they leapt from the jeeps and gathered around the body on the ground.