On his next turn the rider brushed past Rice’s rhododendron on the uphill side, so close, his face lit red by the headlamp. Rice didn’t know him. Not a Stiller, not the skinny guy Jesse. It wasn’t the gall buyer from beneath the bridge. This guy was younger, bigger, nearly Rice’s size. Trim beard, light skin and dark hair, deep-set dark eyes, chiseled cheekbones. Serious-looking. Military rucksack on his back, a crossbow with a quiver and a big night scope strapped on top. He’d lashed what looked like a contractor’s heavy-duty trash bag to a vertical U-shaped metal bar behind the seat. The bag looked full but it couldn’t be very heavy—stale pastries and popcorn for the bait station.
Rice was invisible, even in the glow from the headlamp. The guy didn’t glance at him. As he passed, Rice reached out and touched the metal bar, the backside of the trash bag brushing slick against his cotton glove. He felt an upwelling of power, the undeniable, intoxicating power of invisibility, of the unseen hunter. His whole body quivered from it.
The rider turned again, and Rice turned with him and followed, stalking thirty yards back, moving in a wavy downhill line bisecting the bike’s wider zigzag path. The stinking exhaust from the engine caught in his throat. They were closer to the inner gorge now. Three more turns, Rice guessed, and the rider would reach the top of the cliffs, where he would have to head down-canyon to reach the bait station.
Without knowing he’d decided to do it, he lifted up onto his toes and sprinted downslope in the ghillie poncho, his feet quiet, barely touching the ground, a dark formless monster flying over the moon-dappled forest floor.
Thirty-Two
The distant growling noise came again. He tried to wake up. A pleasant weight of fatigue lay on his chest like a sleeping housecat, holding him down. This was a soft, comfortable place but the thing making the sound was getting closer. He forced his eyelids open. He was in his bed, the room bright from the open window.
He squinted at the white ceiling, vague shadows cast by curtains moving in the breeze. His head hurt, and he had some trouble lifting it from the pillow. Adrenaline began shooting into his bloodstream.
Tires on gravel, coming up through the lower meadow.
He rolled and put his feet on the floor, opened the drawer in the table, pulled out the .45. He started his press-check drill but something was wrong with his hands. The fingers on his right hand wouldn’t close all the way, and he couldn’t make his left hand grip the top of the slide. He laid the pistol on the wool blanket beside him.
Cocked and locked.
What the hell was wrong with him? He sat on the edge of the bed. He was dressed in loose canvas pants, filthy and torn, stained with mud and something darker splashed on the tops of his thighs, blood maybe, a ripped green T-shirt, funky wool socks. What he’d slept in.
His ghillie poncho lay in a lumpy tangle on the floor next to his pack. That was stupid. He shouldn’t have brought it inside. He glanced at his pillow, the pillowcase smeared with dark dried blood, soaked through and still wet-looking in a couple of places.
Boots, over by the door. When he tried to stand, his right knee gave way and he stumbled forward to land on his hands in a hunched push-up position but his left palm split open and he collapsed to his elbow.
Frustration edged toward panic. Left knee to chest, pushing with the right hand, he stood up on the left leg, testing the right, reaching down, feeling the knee swollen and spongy, glancing at his palm, weeping watery blood and plasma from a single deep cut. The right hand wasn’t much better, knuckles swollen and scraped, part of his thumbnail torn off. New pain signals arrived from other parts of his body, ribs on his right side firing up, something burning under his left arm, nausea and a headache kicking in now, a headache that made him wonder if he’d ever had a real headache before. The pain was almost audible. A convulsive retch snaked through his torso but nothing came up.
He squinted out the window, bright sunlight gouging like fingernails at the backs of his eyeballs. Dust rose in the still morning air, light flashing off a windshield, driving fast. He limped out the back door in his socks, carrying the pistol in his hand, registering the bright sun, the warm humidity, the birdsong and insect buzz. He knew his dreams had been vivid and disturbing but nothing specific came to him.
He walked past the shed toward his hiding place at the back of the cabin, but Sara’s Subaru was suddenly there, pulling into the parking area. Her brakes locked and she skidded in the gravel. Sara in big sunglasses looking at him through the windshield with her mouth open.
The pistol. He reached it behind him, pushed it under his belt in the small of his back, ice on his skin. Limped to her car.
“Good morning,” he said, but “good” barely qualified as a whisper, and “morning” was more like a groan. He must not have used his voice for a while. When he tried to smile, the skin under his jaw stung, flesh tearing there, another wound reopening. He touched it with his fingertips, wet, a smear of blood.
Sara stared, the engine running. Then she shut it down and got out, closed the door and leaned back against it, the engine ticking, heat coming off the car. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. Squinted at his face, made a move like she was going to lift her hand up and touch him, stopped and folded her arms under her breasts.
“Jesus, Rice.”
He looked down at his grimy shirtfront, his left hand hanging at his side, watched with dreamy detachment as he rubbed his bloody forefinger dry against his thumb. Blood oozed from the cut in his palm and ran down his pinky finger. A drop fell to the gravel. He leaned to the side, trying to see his reflection in the car window, and there he was, distorted, dark with smeared carbon and mud, the remnants of his homemade camo face paint. He had a beard. He felt his chin to confirm, yep, a beard, which he didn’t grow all that fast. Felt like several weeks’ worth. Some of the darker streaks on his face looked more like blood than burnt cork.
Sara was watching him, no longer amazed, more analytical now. He tried to smile again, tried to claw his way out of his self-fascinated stupor.
“Rough night,” he said.
“Rough two and a half weeks, I guess.” She seemed irritated by this.
“It hasn’t been that long.”
Another lengthy pause. Studying him. “Starr asked me to come check on you. Apparently you two had an interesting conversation the other day.”
He frowned, shook his head.
“Do you remember talking to her?”
“Um.” His mind was pretty much blank on that score.
“Rice, what the hell happened? What’s with the pistol? Did you find the poachers? Is that it?”
He saw a bearded face in the red glow of a headlamp passing within arm’s length. There was the low-throated growl of a muffled engine. The stink of exhaust in his face. He tipped forward and flew, fast and silent, an owl dropping on its prey. This made him dizzy and he staggered, the right knee starting to fail, but he caught himself.
“Rice?”
“I don’t know. I think so, maybe. The pistol’s not . . . I don’t carry the pistol up there.”
She shook her head. A detached observer in his brain noted the thin screech of a red-shouldered hawk somewhere nearby. Perception of the world around him came and went, and like a wave washing over him he felt again the hot sun pressing down, heard the background trill of crickets. Sara’s light blue eyes had gone from alarmed to worried to aggrieved in less than a minute, but as he watched, some of the usual humor crept back in. She blinked in slow motion.
“They didn’t let you take their picture, did they?” Her mouth stretched into a grin but stopped short of smiling. He appreciated the way she was handling this. It occurred to him that she’d been through some shit herself, enough very serious shit that more of it happening wasn’t much of a surprise. He liked that about her, it was something they had in common.
“Did you get beat up again?” she asked.
At first he wasn’t sure what she meant by “again,” but then it came to him, the old bear h
unter whacking him with the firewood. He must’ve told STP about it.
Then she did smile, though she remained in that disapproving pose, resting against her car with her arms crossed.
“Starr thought you were tough. It’s why she hired you.”
He shrugged. “You should see the other guy?” He made it a question.
Her smile got stuck, turned rueful. She sighed.
“Did you hurt somebody this time?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so.”
“I think I ran away.”
They stood without speaking. He gathered she was disappointed in him. A blue jay screamed like a hawk at the edge of the forest. Probably harassing the red-shoulder, mocking it.
“You smell like a goat,” she said.
He gave himself a sniff. Nothing. Must have got used to it.
Sara breathed another sigh, possibly enjoying this a little bit. “Starr said you weren’t altogether coherent—her phrase—when you talked on the phone.”
“I bet.”
“Are you on something, Rice? Something serious?”
“Coffee and honey. Serious sleep deprivation. I think I did shrooms last night.”
A skeptical look, but playing along. “Where’d you get those?”
“The mushroom picker.” The patent absurdity of what he was saying tickled him, and he grinned and said “Who else?” but Sara’s expression didn’t change. “The guy who showed me the bear,” he added.
“You saw him again?”
“I think so.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
He thought about that. He tried to remember, but concentrating made him woozy.
“Not really,” he said.
Thirty-Three
She insisted on driving him to the quick-care medical clinic in Blakely. They knew her there and would bill the Traver Foundation. Before they left the lodge, he stood at the bathroom sink and washed the blood and mud and cork black from his face, applied deodorant, changed into cleaner dirty clothes. His whole body hurt but he dozed in her car on the way, sleepy in the hot sun, half-dreaming surreal snatches of what felt like memory from the night before: the mushroom picker offering him drugs, bears wrestling underneath the hanging cow head, the red glow of a headlamp moving through the forest. A man he didn’t know buried a knife in his side and he lurched awake with a yell. Sara looked over but didn’t comment.
At the clinic, a nurse led him to an exam room and got him into a gown, started an IV. She made notes on Rice’s injuries, asking questions he couldn’t answer. He said he didn’t remember much about what had happened, and repeated the somewhat far-fetched story he and Sara had cooked up, that he’d been collecting samples on a steep rocky slope, using a sharp knife to cut away tiny pieces of a rare plant for analysis. He’d fallen and must’ve cut himself on the way down, hit his head on the rocks. He felt unaccountably content as he dozed off, thinking they must’ve put something in the drip.
A couple of hours later he was ready to leave, and when he’d dressed he found Sara in the waiting room, working on a small laptop computer. He felt stronger and more clearheaded now, so much so that he’d commented on it and the nurse said IV rehydration was the closest thing in medicine to a miracle cure. His palm had been stitched, as had his jaw—they’d shaved a patch out of his beard—and a deep cut in his left latissimus dorsi. There was a new abrasion on the side of his head and he’d suffered a mild concussion. The old wound from the guy with the firewood had mostly healed, though it should’ve had stitches and would leave a scar at his hairline. He’d bruised some ribs, but no fractures. His knee was bruised and sprained and he should make an appointment at the orthopedic clinic if he still couldn’t put his weight on it after a day or two. Other than that, he was severely dehydrated, anemic, and fatigued. They sent him home with a handful of Tylenol 3 and told him to eat something and go to bed. To stay hydrated, to force liquids and keep his urine clear. He and Sara stopped at a deli in a strip mall on the outskirts of Blakely and she bought him two turkey sandwiches, which he ate on the way back to the lodge. He got in bed and fell asleep listening to her on the phone with STP, relaying a version of events that made him seem dedicated to his job.
When he woke the first time, he found a note from Sara on the kitchen table saying she had to get back to teach, but to please call her, to use the telephone that she had left plugged in and sitting on the desk in the office. There were smart-ass instructions on how to operate the rotary dial, how to hold the handset. She also noted that if he didn’t do this, she would have to drive all the way up from Blacksburg again tomorrow, which she didn’t have time to do; in fact if she did have to drive back here she would miss a deadline for a grant proposal for their study of the inner gorge, so if he had any respect at all for her work, he would pick up the goddamn phone and call her or Starr or both. Also, he should think about a trip to the grocery store because he was completely out of food.
He called and talked to Sara’s answering machine, told her he was fine, that he was getting some rest, drinking his water, pissing clear.
Everything hurt, much worse than before: head, ribs, back, knee. All three cuts throbbed like they were alive. He shook three of the prescription Tylenols into his fist and washed them down with a big glass of water. He got back in bed and lay there listening to far off thunder, and after a while heavy rain came drumming on the metal roof, sifting through the screen window to fall on his face like sea spray. Sleep crept up on him, and along with it the beginnings of a dream, a scarred, ancient bear standing in a patch of moonlight, right in front of him, close enough to smell, to touch. He jerked awake. Sat up and tossed his sheet and blanket aside. Cool air smelling of rain-wet grass washed across his bare back and shoulders.
He couldn’t remember what had happened in the forest. Something serious, serious enough to short out his memory. Certainly a violent encounter, and a mental episode of some sort, maybe a psychotic break. Fragments came to him but he couldn’t tell what was hallucination and what wasn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees, hung his head, closed his eyes and focused, thinking back, digging for the last thing he could remember with any clarity.
Nothing but a vague smear of being in the woods, feeling invisible and amorphous, not quite human . . . whatever that meant. He strained to clasp a memory, something he could hold, some coherent thread of narrative, but he got nothing but vivid, untethered sensation. For a long stretch, who knew how long, he’d wandered the forest day and night in his ghillie camouflage, and his head had grown quiet. He seemed to have lost for a while the incessantly talking presence that he had thought was himself. Then, clearer than before, a sequence from last night: the mushroom picker, the kestrel, the mushrooms. The gathering bears, their invitation to join them, his mysterious transport to another part of the gorge, the poacher on a muffled trail bike passing close, the exhilaration of his wild swoop down the mountain. Then it shut off. Nothing. He could almost see the blank white screen, hear the broken end of the film slap-slap-slap in the film projector.
He got up and shut the window, wiped the sill dry with a towel. The codeine had kicked in and he lay back, feeling pretty good, and drifted off. A man with a knife lunged at him through a patch of moonlight and he woke up again with a start. The same image he’d seen in Sara’s car. He thought about that. It was vivid, real; it corroborated a snatch of memory that he pulled into focus now, just a second, half a second, a crouched dark form thrusting fast, catching him in his left side, not a knife but an arrow, a crossbow bolt with a nasty black four-blade broadhead on the tip. That explained the wound under his arm. But he thought of the white powder he’d found in the entrance wounds on the two bear carcasses. They hadn’t run far. Why wasn’t he dead?
Thirty-Four
The rain had stopped the next time he woke. A dim light outside, felt like early morning. If he’d dreamed again, he didn’t remember it. No
more memories from the other night came to him. He showered and shaved, careful of the stitched cut on his jaw, and in the kitchen he turned on the radio long enough to hear the weather forecast. The line of thunderstorms that passed through yesterday was just a taste of what was coming—a Class 3 hurricane named Julia had made landfall on Florida’s panhandle and was already drenching north Georgia, the mountains of North Carolina. Flood warnings had been issued for the entire mid-Atlantic region. It was Tuesday, October 7. He’d slept for a day and a half.
He checked the fridge and the cabinets, but Sara was right, he was out of food. In the freezer a crumpled paper bag with the last few ounces of coffee. He was out of milk so he drank it black. The wild honeycomb in the freezer was gone. He wondered what he’d done with it. No way he could’ve eaten it all. Could he?
The coffee went down more easily than he’d expected, the caffeine helping him to focus. On the front porch, sitting on the steps where Sara had sat with her notebook, he finished his cup and watched the gray predawn. He still felt a neurotic pull to be up on the mountain looking for the poachers, and this afternoon he would hike up there and walk around near the bait station, try to jog his memory, decide what to do next. First, though, a trip into town for supplies. A list started to form, a trick he’d used in school: imagining a crumpled envelope, seeing his hands flattening it out on a table, then a pen in his hand, writing down what he needed to remember. Whatever he wrote down would be there in his head, as sure as a paper list in his pocket. Before he left he checked the cabin, where the floorboards he could barely remember stacking were still waiting to be laid. He swept up, reordered his tools and inventoried his supplies, added a few things to his mental list.
Bearskin Page 18