“If you come any closer to me,” Angie said, “I will run through gunfire to shove this knife into your heart. Do you understand?”
Foxwell stopped his advance. He looked into her crazed eyes, and he did not disbelieve her. He was fifteen feet from her, midway down the row.
“Put the knife on the ground, Dr. Rippard.”
“Back off.”
“I am raising the gun,” he said. “I will shoot your other leg.”
“You think you’re right,” she said. “You think that destroying the last remaining pocket of unprotected wilderness is the right way?”
Abraham looked at her. He couldn’t believe the conviction of her question.
“You are diseased,” he said. “Your mind is troubled. A governor who doesn’t even care about grizzly bears put you up to this because I scorched her early in her career. Do you understand that? Governor Creed doesn’t give a damn about bears. She only wants to stop me from financing an opponent that will beat her in the next election. It’s as petty as that.”
“But there are bears up there,” Angie said, thrusting the knife blade toward the mountains outside the mill. “Whether she cares or not, we found a remnant population of grizzlies in southwest Colorado.”
“We can move them to a better home.”
Angie stared into his ice-blue eyes.
“There were men like you,” she said, “a hundred and fifty years ago who said the same thing about the native people who lived in these mountains. We can move them to a better home.”
“You can’t possibly believe that building a ski resort has any base of comparison to moving Native Americans to reservations.” He looked soberly into her eyes. “Just put down the knife.”
“Put down your gun, first.”
Abraham stared at her and considered this option. “If I do that,” he said, “will you put down your knife and walk out of here with me? You’re going to go to jail. You’ve killed three men.”
“And what about the man that you killed?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The man in the street that your three boys shot dead.”
Abraham looked around him and kind of waved his arms as though the obvious should be clear to her. “Well, I guess justice has been served, Dr. Rippard. They’re dead.”
They stared at one another for a good while, until their silence became uncomfortable. Abraham held the gun out in front of him, crossways.
He said, “If I put this down, will you come out of there? We can end this now.”
Angie didn’t trust him.
He said, “We can ride back into town on the horses. Maybe we can find a doctor.”
Angie glanced down at her bloody leg. She held all of her weight on the other. She lurched forward a step, bracing herself on the shelf to her right.
Abraham began to back out of the aisle. He started to make like he would put the gun down on the floor. He knelt there waiting for some sign of compromise from her.
“What’s it gonna be?” he said.
She stared into his eyes and nodded.
He placed the rifle on the floor and stood back up.
“Kick it back in the corner,” she said, “and step away.”
Abraham’s eyes narrowed to two cold slits. If he did what she asked, he’d be at a disadvantage.
“The knife first,” he said.
Angie shook her head.
“Fine,” he said, “let’s see what you’re made of, Dr. Rippard.”
He kicked the gun back into the corner and stepped away from the end of the aisle. Angie lurched forward until she reached the end as well. Abraham now stood over near the mechanical wheel in the ceiling, and Angie knelt down and placed the knife on the ground. A tram car passed into the station house, slowly circled the wheel, and then exited.
“Let me help you,” Abraham said, offering her a hand.
“Stay back.”
“The horses are just across the yard,” he said, “in the stables. You’ll be alright?”
He stepped toward the exit.
“I’ll survive,” she said.
Abraham stepped out into the snow beyond the station house. He was only ten feet from her when the bear attacked.
It came from the darkness to the right of the aerial tram entrance, and it struck Abraham at the exact moment that a car started out of the station house up the mountain. The bear hit him, and they flew so hard into the car that Angie was sure Abraham was dead. Though the car must have weighed a ton, it shook wildly to the left on its cable.
The bear was stunned by the impact with the car, and Angie saw Abraham lying in the snow. He didn’t move, but a second later, the bear was over him. It mauled him.
Angie stood there in the station house ten feet from the door. The mauling only lasted a few seconds, but it was the most horrifying thing Angie had ever seen in her life. The bear’s head shook back and forth, and it made the distinctive roaring sound that Ursus arctos only makes in an attack situation.
It was pure ferocity.
Angie shouted, “No!”
The bear stopped. She clapped her hands and shouted at it to back away, to get away from the man. She stepped through the doorway, and the bear turned and looked at her. Its legs were straddled over Abraham Foxwell’s body. Foxwell did not look to be alive.
The bear took two steps away from him on the snow and raised its head up. It roared at her.
The two looked at one another for three full seconds, and then for seemingly no reason that Angie could understand, it stepped away from Abraham and vanished into the woods beyond the aerial tram station house.
Angie stared at the branches that shook where the bear entered the woods. Snow fell to the ground. She glanced at Foxwell.
She ran to him, knelt down, and listened for breathing. There was no sound for a second, but then a thin raspy wheeze came from the man’s throat.
Angie stared at the bloody mess that was his face.
And in the months that would follow, she would play over and over his last word, whether she’d heard him correctly, what he meant, what he might have been trying to say.
It sounded like he said, “Nature.”
Epilogue
Angie stood at the kitchen window, gazing out at the herd of caribou. They were in a river bed at the base of a valley, a quarter mile downhill from her cottage. The cottage stood on a hillside twelve miles from the nearest road in central Alaska.
It had taken her two days to backpack into the wilderness to find it, but the directions that a man in Anchorage had given her had proven true. She’d paid him with sexual favors, and he promised to tell no one that he’d seen her, met her, or knew anything about her. Should anyone ask.
She would wait out the rest of winter in the cottage, provided she didn’t starve or freeze to death first. A stack of wood and a pantry of dry food were her weapons against those elements. She had always proven herself a survivor.
She watched the caribou move north up the river bed. The ground was covered with snow. The late winter days in central Alaska were growing longer, but the sun only rose above the horizon for a few hours at a time.
It was the first clear day in seven, and McKinley was visible to the north. It stood like a giant white stone, heads and shoulders above the range around it. There was no mistaking McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America.
She’d lost touch with the world, but the last news she’d heard was that the FBI was now involved. They would find her. It would take time, but they would find her. Eventually.
She was a murderer, and even if the killings were justified, she’d stand trial. They’d send her away. Or worse.
She was thankful for this respite from the hell that had become her life. She could stand the isolation. She could stand being alone. Along as she was free.
The caribou moved on beyond her sight range, and Angie stepped out onto the small front porch of the lone cottage. A few minutes later, she saw the first wol
f. It was white like the snow around it, and had she not known what she was looking for, she would not have seen it at all.
She stepped back inside for a moment, retrieved her binoculars, and then standing once more on the small front porch, found the wolf through the lenses.
It was big, larger than most people imagined wolves to be. No amount of television or reading about them in books can prepare you for your first sighting of a great white wolf. They seem built more like a lion than a domestic dog, though a dog they’re closer related to.
It was the alpha female of a pack of six, and they moved up the river bed in the same direction that the caribou had gone. They were following scent.
Angie lowered the binoculars, and her breath steamed in the cold Alaskan air.
Things had not worked out the way that she had hoped.
There was a time when she was a promising wildlife biologist, a star on the rise, but those years were far behind her now. She was a fugitive, of no worth to anyone.
Luck and favor had not been kind, and life seemed to chew away at her, one day at a time, one unfortunate circumstance at a time. Until, over the course of years, broken dreams and shattered hopes manifested tragedy. She was the purveyor of misfortune, and the only salvation she had was that she was alone and free. For a time.
How can this be? she thought. I prayed. I built my career on a path that was right. Where did I go wrong? How could I have believed it would all work out in the end?
She truly believed, at one point in her life, that it would all work out in the end.
As she stood there gazing out over the last undisturbed wilderness in America, a cold reality came over her. She wondered how many lives were lived unsatisfied and ill-content. Everyone believed they could make a difference, until their lives passed them by, and they came to realize they hadn’t made a difference at all.
She was not beyond hope, but the light was all but dead.
• •
It rained on April 4th and it didn’t stop raining until the ninth. The rains were so intense at times, Angie didn’t think she was going to live through it. Her wounds were all but healed, and the rainwater washed away the snow on the hillside, leaving muddy grass that would grow three feet tall by the end of summer.
It was time to move on. Sexual favors couldn’t keep a man quiet forever, and authorities would eventually find their way to Anchorage. She’d been discrete as she rode out of Colorado, first to Juarez, Mexico where she performed surgery on herself cauterizing her wounds with a welding torch.
She’d keep the scars. They were a reminder.
Before she disappeared, she tried to follow the news. The bear attacks in Colorado were featured news stories for four days. Every story ended with some derivation of a quote from a park ranger saying how rare and unusual bear attacks were. Angie read one story that quoted Laura Metzenauer.
“Grizzly bears were thought to be extinct in southwest Colorado,” she said. “Perhaps this last one that was shot and killed in Telluride migrated from the north. Perhaps, it was part of a remnant population.”
Are there more? the reporters asked. Was this the last one?
Angie could picture Laura’s round face and guiltless brown eyes as she struggled to respond the best way that she could.
“It’s hard to say. There may be one or two. Things have quieted down in Durango and Telluride, and that’s the way that people like it.”
• •
One roadside convenience store stood beside Highway 1 in the town of Talkeetna, Alaska. It was a Mobil, and it operated as a general mercantile store and unofficial news hub for the wilderness area three hours north of Anchorage.
People often chatted, leaning one arm on a rusty truck bed.
On the morning of April 14th, Angie exited the woods on the opposite side of the two-lane highway and peered across at the Mobil. She saw three trucks in the lot, two at pumps, one parked over near a large white propane tank.
A Subaru raced by on the highway, heading north towards Denali. Tourists.
Angie considered the trucks in the Mobil lot, concluded that they were locals, and so crossed the highway in their direction. No one noticed her until she entered the store.
With the last four dollars and thirty-two cents that she had to her name, she bought a prepackaged ham and cheese sandwich, a bag of salt and vinegar chips, and a fountain drink Coke. She carried it outside and ate a picnic table at the edge of the lot, as the sun rose above the tree line burning the cold damp rain from the grass and leaves.
It was maybe the single best meal of her life.
Afterwards, she threw her trash in a garbage can, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and headed out to the highway. She walked south along the shoulder for a quarter mile before she heard the rumbling of a truck back behind her. She turned and saw it through the trees in a bend in the road.
It was coming toward her, and so Angie raised a thumb.
CLAWS 2 Page 22