Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  He pushed off the pine trunk and stood. When he tugged on a rib, the bear’s spine and rib cage lifted from the leaves in a piece, surprisingly light and releasing a weak stench of rot. He considered the other bones lying on the ground, thinking he should choose one to carry back with him, add it to his collection in the office. The skull would be best, but the poacher had taken the head with the skin. He kicked around in the leaves and pine needles for a while, looking for a femur or some other large bone until he began to feel a distinct queasiness. It occurred to him that pilfering bear bones might not be altogether appropriate. He wondered why, but was no less certain for not knowing. Now that he acknowledged it, the old feeling of judgment was powerful, raising the hair on his arms. He glanced around at the thicket, half-expecting to see a black bear face peering at him. He told himself for the hundredth time that he wasn’t becoming superstitious so much as submitting to an undeniable blurring around the edges of so-called reality.

  He was pushing through the brush, headed back toward the fire road, when he first heard it: a thin, drawn-out cry behind him, far off, somewhere down in the canyon, down in the ancient forest. He caught his breath and listened, stilled his feet in the noisy leaves.

  Not a familiar sound. He waited, tried to replay it in his mind, but he had no idea what it might have been. He breathed, and cupped his hands behind his ears to help him hear. It had been a still day, and for the first time all afternoon the air began to move, a warm breeze on his face, lifting up out of the gorge like the exhalation of a god. It smelled of moss and decaying leaves, astringent pine and hemlock. The sound it made in the pine boughs was low and sad. It died, leaving behind a faint white noise from the waterfalls. Then the high falsetto he’d heard before, modulating into a second, deeper syllable—a hound’s mournful bay. Another, farther away.

  He tripped once on a cat’s claw vine, but laurel branches broke his fall and he pushed to his feet and ran on. The slope steepened, laurel and rhododendron thicket giving way to open pine and oak forest, and soon he was running too fast, out of control. He knew he should stop, lean against a tree, take a breath, and reimpose his will over his body, but his legs seemed to have achieved independent volition, as if he’d grown a secondary, sauropod brain in his lower back that had chosen today to stage its coup and now the rest of him had to go along.

  A fallen log appeared in his path, and he stutter-stepped and leaped over it, sailing in the air before he touched down again, sliding in the soft loam and fallen leaves, nearly falling. He regained his balance, stutter-stepped, jumped again, flying another ten feet, landing in a controlled slide. In this way he flew down the side of the mountain, contorting his body in midair to avoid the tree trunks that flashed past his face. He lost any sense of time or distance, though he knew he was approaching the forbidden heart of the preserve. The hounds’ voices were louder here, and over the crash of his feet in the leaves they echoed like sirens, screams of agony, now an underwater sound like whales singing. Finally, inevitably, his foot landed on a slick root hidden in the leaves and slid out from under him. He went down hard on his butt, bounced once, skidded and tumbled over and over until he slammed into the trunk of a hemlock.

  The impact knocked the wind out of him and he lay still for a moment, trying to breathe. The hounds had gone quiet. His ribs hurt where he had hit the tree, and something from his pack had poked him in the back, but nothing seemed to be broken, and he felt none of the lightheaded shocky nausea that came with serious injury. He sat up and hyperventilated to oxygenate his blood, and after a while his head cleared. The trees were big here, nearly as big as they were in the inner gorge, and the light was subdued, crepuscular, the air moist, earthy. The stream rushed somewhere farther down.

  His knee ached and his thighs quivered as he stood, turned to look around the other side of the hemlock, toward the sound of the water. There, ten yards farther, was the cliff, a leaping green distance falling away to thick forest in the gorge. He shambled weak-legged to the edge, peered over at sheer limestone, the streambed way down there, water in silvery skeins among tiny moss-covered boulders. This place was just upstream from where he and Sara had climbed down into the canyon. Butterfly wings tickled his gut as a giant hand swept him from behind, urging him forward, and he backpedaled away from the cliff, sat back down in the leaves. If he hadn’t fallen when he did . . . he saw himself running off the edge like a character in a cartoon, legs kicking and arms spinning windmills as he fell in a graceful arc. He might never have been found way down here. He would have died, broken on the rocks, and his carcass would have polluted the water for months, probably sickening the trout downstream.

  A red squirrel chattered nearby. His pulse quieted in his ears, but another rhythmic sound, off-kilter with his heartbeat, was coming from the slope behind. He turned. A dog peered at him from behind a tree trunk, panting with its tongue out and lips drawn back in a dog smile. It barked twice and started downslope toward him. A female with a wavy white-and-liver coat, she looked more setter than hound. She wore a collar with a red, fist-size cylinder waggling a short wire antenna. He called and she crept to him and rested her head on his leg. He stroked her neck, her soft white cheek splashed with chestnut. While he examined her collar and the transmitter, she sniffed daintily at his hands, his pants, his ears. The brass tag said Dempsey Boger, 221 Sycamore Creek Road, Wanless, VA. There was a phone number.

  “What the hell, Dempsey?” The setter looked a question at him. “Not your fault,” he said. He unbuckled her collar, not sure what he planned to do with it. There was actually a law against removing radio collars; he’d come across it during his research session at the Bean. It had been passed, he imagined, at the behest of some unholy alliance between bear and raccoon hunters on one side of the room and natty fox hunters on the other, each group trying to pretend the other wasn’t there.

  The setter perked her ears and turned upstream. A faint clamor of growling and barking, a pack of dogs squabbling somewhere off to the west. He stood and headed toward the noise, the setter quartering back and forth in front of him with her nose to the ground as if they were grouse hunting. Before long, they walked into bad air, a throat-closing stink, nastier than the usual carcass smell, decaying flesh overlaid with cloying sweetness. It was nearly visible, and he headed toward the source as surely as if he were following a plume of smoke.

  Two animals appeared from the right, black-and-tan hounds running with their noses high. They shied when they noticed Rice, but then they sat down to watch him. “Com’ere, boys,” he said. They wagged their tails. One bayed brokenheartedly. Three more lighter-colored hounds loped fast across the slope, nearly falling over the first two. They all ran off together toward the stench. All wore transmitter collars.

  Licorice. That’s what the sweetness was. He realized he was smelling bear bait. Dempsey had said the dead bears he’d found had been baited, and Rice had looked it up online: hunters would haul a sack of rotten food into the woods and hide nearby to shoot hyperphagic bears drawn by the stink of megacalories. He crouched behind a big shagbark hickory on the crest of a ridge and scanned the forest below. The growls and barking grew louder, and the setter hovered close by. She seemed slight and timid, and he wondered how she survived in a pack of bear hounds.

  There they were, a dozen hounds milling around, agitated by something hidden behind a small rise. In the foreground, an enormous cow head buzzing with flies and yellowjackets hung fifteen feet in the air, a dirty white Charolais with a short section of iron rebar driven through its eyes and suspended from a wire. It twisted slowly in the light breeze: left, right, left, as if searching for something in the canopy overhead. Directly underneath, deadfall logs and branches had been gathered into a loose square enclosure where three of the hounds scratched and snuffled in the bare dirt. Most of the dogs were farther uphill. He backed down below the crest of the ridge and jogged to the north, the setter following behind like a co-conspirator. They crawled up to hide behind a limestone outcrop
and watch the scene downslope.

  The dogs had quieted, and he wondered if they’d scented him, but none seemed to be looking his way. This time he saw it, past the cow’s head, a black bear carcass lay in a little clearing, the rest of the hounds gathered around.

  “Fuck me,” he said, and the setter gave him another look.

  “Not your fault. I guess.”

  One of the hounds, a huge, fawn-colored male with a black head, was biting and pulling at the bear’s ear, bracing all four feet and hauling backward, dragging the stiff carcass a few feet, stopping to turn and snap at any of the others that got too close. The dog looked as big as a steer and had the heavy skull and jowls of a mastiff. Another knot of hounds were worrying a second, much larger bear carcass another hundred yards or so past the first.

  Nobody was around, no humans with the hounds. He stood and walked down the ridge to the first carcass. The big yellow hound noticed him and woofed and stood glaring with his black head low, heavy lips like black curtains pulled away from his thick yellow canines. He growled in a voice so deep and portentous that the back of Rice’s neck actually tingled, the residual hairs lifting in a lame imitation of the dog’s spiky ruff that stood up in a ridge all the way down his back. They stared at each other, two mammals facing off at a kill, until one of the other hounds saw an opening and lunged at the carcass. The mastiff roared and bowled into it with his shoulder, sending it tumbling, but all in the same motion he whirled back to face Rice, apparently having decided the human was the primary threat to his possession of the dead bear.

  “All yours, big fella.” Rice walked past him, toward the other carcass. Several of the hounds slunk to him for attention, whining and rolling over on their backs, sliding downslope in the dry leaves. He scratched their bellies and removed their transmitter collars, which he stowed in his pack. A few of the dogs were Dempsey Boger’s, but most wore no ID tag at all. They all smelled faintly of skunk.

  Neither of the bear carcasses had been skinned, but the paws were missing and their abdomens had been slit open. Looked like they had been dead awhile, so the hounds had nothing to do with this. The second carcass was a big male, 350 pounds or better, and it might’ve been dead a day or two longer than the smaller one. The entry wound was high on the rib cage, consistent with a shooting vantage up in a tree. Rice opened his old Buck lockback and scratched at the wound with the blade, picking away the blood-matted hair. Some sort of white powder was mixed in with the dried blood, and the wound was a gaping X shape rather than the neat entrance hole made by a bullet. He tried to remember what the wound had looked like on the skinned carcass the mushroom picker had shown him, but he hadn’t even thought to look for it.

  He stood next to the carcass, the setter and three other hounds gathered round him. While he’d been out chasing buyers and bikers and redneck gangsters, someone had come on the preserve and killed these bears. He’d neglected his job, failed to meet his responsibilities.

  Inside the rough log bait structure, three hounds were snuffling up crumbs from some sort of pastry, smears of white sugar frosting, sticky residue of honey on packed dirt licked smooth. The licorice smell came from a dense, dark oil that had been smeared on several tree trunks about six feet off the ground, some of the smears gouged with claw marks. A hound stood up on his hind legs and gave a perfunctory leap in the direction of the cow’s head. Hung that far up, it was inaccessible and must have driven the bears mad. More searching turned up marks on an oak trunk from climbing spikes. They led to a thick horizontal branch, where the shooter had waited.

  The poachers must be using night-vision scopes or goggles so they could kill the bears in the dark with quiet crossbows, and they probably only came onto the property after midnight. Rice usually stayed out after dark but not all night. Not every night. That’s why he hadn’t seen or heard them. The equipment wasn’t as expensive as it used to be. In southern Arizona, the Border Patrol folks had military-grade night vision and drove around at night with their lights off hunting illegals. The better-heeled vigilante groups had civilian stuff that was nearly as good, and recently the narcos and some of the coyotes had it, too. Only the poor illegals and lower-echelon mules were blind in the dark. He and Apryl had been planning to buy a scope when they were arrested.

  He didn’t disturb the bait structure, and he used a stick to obscure his boot prints in the dirt underneath the cow head.

  The hounds seemed to have lost interest in the carcasses—live bears were presumably more fun—and they started wandering off. These hounds must have stumbled on the bait and the carcasses; they had nothing to do with the poaching, though he was sure some of the people running them were involved.

  Rice followed mindlessly for a while, walking along behind the setter. She led him upstream to where the cliff guarding the inner gorge wasn’t as high, then past a screen of chest-high laurel to a steep game trail. He clambered down after her to the stream, where a few of the others were already drinking.

  He lay on a flat boulder at the edge to dip his face in the current and drink, his teeth nearly shattering from the cold. Thick moss covering the rocks felt soft and cool on his belly, and the air was wet with spray from a small waterfall plunging a dozen yards upstream. All of the hounds—even the standoffish mastiff—had followed and were drinking with him now, as if the presence of a strange human absolved them of any further need to look for bears. Or maybe finding the carcasses had made the whole enterprise seem moot. Who knew? He rolled over on his back and stared up into the thick, dark tangles of hemlock arcing over the stream and, far above, green-gold poplar leaves brushing the blue roof of sky. The leaves up there seemed remote as stars, incidental to the massive trunks and branches supporting them.

  The setter curled up next to him, and the others settled in pockets of hemlock needles among the rocks. It was easy to lie there without thinking—the world was cool rock, rushing water, dogs panting. None of them were supposed to be down here, of course. He had to get the hounds out of the canyon and off the property. He got up and removed a few more of their radio collars and put them in his pack—if he couldn’t find the bear hunters, he could make them come to him.

  Twenty-Two

  He sat with a beer on the front porch steps, watching the driveway. The setter and five of the hounds lay in the shade, the others having run off with the mastiff on the way home. Rice had put out a bucket of water and he’d fed the dogs an old can of Vienna sausages he’d found in the pantry. Eleven radio collars lay interlocked in a pile at the top of the steps, silently transmitting their whereabouts. He’d left his .45 in the drawer by his bed, sticking to his gun policy even though an angry mob of bear hunters should be traipsing up the driveway any minute now. He hoped the three-mile climb from the front gate would take some of the starch out.

  He’d marked the bait station on the map in the office. It wasn’t close to any vehicular access, which puzzled him, and scuttled his assumptions about where to look for the bear poachers. The slope above the bait was steep and thick with deadfall in places, not suited for an ATV. On the other hand, it was a smart place for bait because it was close enough to the inner gorge to attract the bears that sheltered down there. The poachers could effectively hunt the most remote and protected part of the preserve without having to climb up and down the cliffs.

  To his right, the sun hung close above the lower flank of Turk Mountain, shooting out tiny rays like quills when he squinted. The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth’s rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun’s dark negative lingering on his retina.

  Jesus, did it move that fast all day long? He
imagined the sun rushing across the sky, trailing a tail of fire like a gigantic comet, and no one looking up, no one noticing. Out in the valley, the mountain’s shadow crept inexorably toward the Blue Ridge, a spreading blue shade that consumed the geometric patchwork of rolling farmland and woodlots. A crow he couldn’t see called from the woods in couplets. Caw-caw, caw-caw, caw-caw. Like some kind of code.

  Above the lodge, the resident chimney swifts whirled in a twittering gyre. Had to be a hundred of them, all roosting at night in the big stone flue. The juveniles were strong flyers now, and the birds would leave soon on their trans-hemispheric migration. The flock spun faster and faster. Rice imagined they were gathering centrifugal force, enough to hurl them seven thousand miles south to the Amazon basin. Feeling hopelessly provincial, he toasted the flock’s safe journey with the last of his beer, tossed the can toward the screen door behind him, and reached over to grab number two where he’d left it beside the railing post. Popped it open, still cold and sweating. He liked this time of day, the sun gone and the world in a melancholy bluish cast. The calendar said tomorrow would be the autumnal equinox, day and night in nearly perfect balance as this part of the world tilted farther away from the sun, ending the fecund riot of summer.