He talked to Sara on the phone every few days. She was keeping an eye on the news, checking D.C. websites for any hint that Delgado’s body had been found, though they both doubted something like that would even be reported. Delgado had been missing for a while, and the more time passed without incident, the safer they were.
He hid Delgado’s phone in the attic, and planned to have a look at it someday when he was ready, maybe get someone to help him translate any texts that might be on there.
Two weeks turned into three. The cabin was almost ready for Sara to move in.
Then he found the newspaper clippings in the mailbox. He called Sara for directions and drove straight to Blacksburg.
She came to the door in gray and maroon Virginia Tech sweats, looking alarmed. They stood in her kitchenette while Sadie inspected the living area, daintily sniffing everything she could reach. They watched her the way adults will watch a child to avoid awkward interaction. Finally he took the rolled-up Philadelphia Inquirer sections from his jacket pocket and flattened them on the counter.
“What is it?”
What it is, he thought, is me owing Alan Mirra a great big ol’ favor, and someday he’ll come a-calling.
She read. A hit-and-run motorcycle accident left one dead, reportedly a member of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang. The more recent clipping described a gang shooting, an attack by the same OMG on a rival meth lab that went sideways, the bikers walked into an ambush, one guy shot dead, the second was in the ICU.
“These are the guys who raped me.”
He nodded.
“How did you do this?” Her voice had jumped in pitch. Sadie, curled up on the shiny oak strip floor with her back pushing against Rice’s foot, raised her head to watch Sara.
He started to say he hadn’t done anything, but that would’ve been a pure lie and now she was crying anyway, trying to stop but the tears were rolling down her cheeks and catching in the corners of her mouth before she wiped them with the back of her hand. She didn’t make any noise. Should he hug her? That might be presumptuous. He never knew what to do with a woman who cried. When he was younger he would go off and try to fix whatever it was that had made them cry. Except when it was him. He couldn’t always fix that. His mother hadn’t cried much. Apryl had been too goddamn tough to cry, and she’d only done it once, when they’d seen the first jaguar picture from their trail cameras, down in the Pajaritos. She’d refused to talk about it afterward, but he thought he understood.
He wasn’t sure what to do with Sara. Wasn’t sure what else he could do. He’d done more than he was telling her, more than he would tell her.
“You need to get out of here so I can cry by myself.”
That worried him but she smiled and wiped her face with her sleeves, said she was fine. He would be back in a few weeks to help her move anyway. She pushed him out of the kitchen. He let her. Sadie got up and followed.
At the door, Sara reached up and kissed him quickly on the mouth, her hand on his elbow as if to make sure he held still for it. Not a passionate kiss, but not sisterly either. More like an old girlfriend, familiar enough to go for the lips but not trying for anything more than what they’d already had.
On the morning after the first hard frost he knelt in the driveway on a greasy square of plastic tarp and sharpened the bush hog blade, yellow-white sparks showering from the grinder, bouncing off the steel housing of the mower and down onto the gravel. Six five-gallon cans filled with diesel waited in a row along the wall inside the shed. Tomorrow he would start the slow circumnavigation of the upper meadow in low gear, standing at the steering wheel to watch for fallen branches, rocks, torpid rat snakes not yet gone to their hibernacula.
That night the quarter moon was waxing, and he hiked up the fire road at dusk with Sadie ranging ahead of him, a darting ghost in the pale moonlight. They walked all the way to the Forest Service pole gate at the back boundary, then swung west across the saddle another three miles over to the high eastern slopes of Serrett Mountain. Climbing irritated the knee he’d injured falling down the cliff nearly a month ago, so he rounded the mountain on a contour and dropped down a steep ridge south toward the Dutch River. Walking downhill wasn’t much better than climbing, and by the time he got to the river his knee was sore and a little swollen. He waded into the cold water. The heavy push and swirl felt curative. He lay on his back and let the current take him. Sadie whined once and then understood, followed along the bank, sniffing for muskrats and the last of the bullfrogs. A mile or so downstream they would come to an old ford and an overgrown road that led back to the driveway and the lodge.
Soon he was shivering. The steep dark mountainsides rearing up north and south of the river framed the Milky Way and made it seem unfamiliar and preternaturally bright, like something in a Hubble telescope photograph, or what you would see if you were looking out the window of a spaceship. A few bats jerked and swooped against the stars, echolocating bugs. They should be hibernating by now and he wondered if they were sick with white-nose disease, staying out too long, desperate to build up calorie reserves that might or might not see them through the winter. No other creature perceived the world through echolocation in quite the same way as these microbats, and when they were gone, their umwelt would disappear forever. A universe snuffed out of existence.
This depressing thought triggered a memory spilling suddenly into his consciousness, a gift from those mysterious days in the forest before Mirra finally showed up: an early morning, peering into a tiny feral eye inches from his face, then a dream, or a vision, when he flew out over the gorge and knew everything, all at once. It had terrified him at the time, but now in the remembering it gave him a frisson of glass-half-full optimism, something that ran decidedly counter to his nature.
He suspected he had retained some of that morning’s extrahuman perception, though it might be more sane to call it hallucination. Just for example, a bear sometimes followed him in the forest, a very large particular bear that Sadie never noticed, which Rice took to mean the bear wasn’t real. It was there now, he knew, watching from a bluff just above the river.
The bear’s bright eyes shone in a scarred face: a mask, expressionless. He watched, but he always kept his distance. He was strong, fast even with the limp, the missing left forepaw.
“Must have lost it in a trap or something, huh?” Rice said.
Sadie paused at the sound of his voice, but she realized he wasn’t talking to her. She splashed softly along the shore, keeping pace as Rice floated shivering down the cold river and talked to ghost bears. He slid with the current over smooth stones, watching bats feed overhead in alien light.
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to my amazing agent, Kirby Kim, and the rest of the pros at Janklow & Nesbit. Besides wise counsel and the agenting miracle of finding the perfect publisher, Kirby—along with Brenna English-Loeb—provided transformative editing that made Bearskin a much better book than what they’d plucked from the slush pile.
Thanks to my equally amazing editor, Zachary Wagman, whose insights and suggestions quickly brought this book up to another level . . . and I don’t think he has stopped to rest since. Thanks also to Dan Halpern, Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Meghan Deans, Emma Janaskie, Sara Wood, and Renata De Oliveira. Special thanks to Andy LeCount and the entire HarperCollins sales force. It’s a surreal and humbling experience to work for years on a story, and then suddenly there’s this smart editor and a whole publishing house who believe in what you’ve made and they’re going to a great deal of trouble and expense bringing it into the world as a book. You all have my bewildered gratitude.
Thank you, Evelyn Somers, Speer Morgan, and others at The Missouri Review for giving Rice’s story its first home, and for crackerjack early editing along with encouragement and affirmation when it was needed most.
Over the years I had important technical help from a number of knowledgeable, talented, generous people, only a few of whom are named here, and none of whom are respons
ible for my errors of fact and/or judgment: Wildlife ecologist Dr. David A. Steen. Elite federal agent Matt Boyden. Writer and naturalist William Funk. Cousin and renowned forest ecophysiologist Dr. Samuel B. McLaughlin. Author and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith. Poet, stonemason, and aboriginal skills teacher Alec Cargile. Attorney and multithreat know-it-all Paul Moskowitz. And cousin Peter McLaughlin, brilliant musician and part-time desert rat who first introduced me to southern Arizona.
Thank you, Dabney Stuart—favorite poet, mentor of several decades, generous reader, inspiration. Thanks, Michael Knight, for the years of unflagging support and smart reading, and the humbling demonstrations of how it’s done by a real writer. Thank you, cousin Gee McVey, who provided Bearskin’s origin anecdote (among others) and more than a half century, and counting, of the best of friendships. And a mountain-size debt to my lifelong friend Taylor Cole—business partner, conservationist, and expert on all things rural Virginia. Thank you.
My family looked after this unpromising late-born and gave me good books to read early on. Most importantly you were the guides and companions with whom I first experienced and was captivated by the vast world outdoors. Thank you, LeeBo, Nancy, Ginky, Ham, Nelle, Dr. Busch, Rosy, Eric, Uncle Roy Hodges (1912–1994), and Ed Carrington (1944–1986).
They say you’re not supposed to mention four-leggeds in your acknowledgments. Yeah, screw that. Thank you, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Big Fred, Barney, Habanero, Toso, Eight, Sam, Winifred, Odin, Little Bear, and Roman. I could not have persevered without you.
Nancy Assaf McLaughlin: Partner, co-adventurer, editor, best friend, wife. I will try, but I can never properly thank you for your patience and love and faith and support.
And thank you, Rosa Batte Hodges McLaughlin (1919–2016). You would have been proud, and you would have kept this book on the coffee table even though I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have liked all the cussing, because your love and generosity always surpassed understanding.
Thank you, all.
About the Author
JAMES A. McLAUGHLIN holds law and MFA degrees from the University of Virginia. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Portland Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. He grew up in rural Virginia and lives in the Wasatch Range east of Salt Lake City, Utah.
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Copyright
Portions of Bearskin appeared in The Missouri Review (Summer, 2008) and Salt Lake City Weekly.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BEARSKIN. Copyright © 2018 by James A. McLaughlin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
COVER DESIGN BY SARA WOOD
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: BEAR © MICHAEL FRANCIS PHOTO / AGE FOTOSTOCK; TREES © SHUTTERSTOCK; BIRDS © SHUTTERSTOCK
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McLaughlin, James A., author.
Title: Bearskin / James A. McLaughlin.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034531 (print) | LCCN 2017043411 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062742810 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062742797 | ISBN 9780062742803
Subjects: LCSH: Bear hunting--Fiction. | Poaching--Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C5755 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.C5755 B43 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034531
* * *
Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274281-0
Version 05072018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274279-7
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