“There was…” Blake picked up a piece of cloth that Stu now saw was a scrap of clothing, its material not much different from that of the Great Beyond jacket he wore himself. Blake circled the Kubota, shaking his head, and finally pointed to a huge but vague imprint in a drier patch of earth. “Grizzly.”
“A bear?”
“Maybe more than one.”
Stu shuddered. “It broke through the safety cage?”
“It broke through a homemade door on a box full of stupid. Probably no tougher than you or me cracking open a walnut to get at the meat. My question is: Where the hell was his gun?”
Stu tentatively pushed the door wider and risked another look in the cab. There was no rifle or pistol. It was possible the driver had shot the bear and fled, but it was unlikely that it was the bear’s blood inside the Kubota.
“What the hell was he doing?”
Blake joined Stu at the door and pointed. “I think the answers to all our questions might be right there.” He pointed at the dash cam.
A pouch inside the cab contained spare batteries. Blake popped out the dead one and snapped a fresh one into the camera. Stu paced, watching the field, the .30-06 held at his hip. Blake stopped and turned to calmly push the barrel down toward the ground, then he hit play.
The screen was small, and the audio was tinny. They had to crowd together to watch as it played raw footage. The camera panned left and right across the field, then up and down the Y-shaped river. Stu winced as the male voice began to narrate. The camera swung to show a healthy-looking middle-aged man with a big smile. Middle-aged, Stu thought. My age. The man proudly described the modifications he’d made to his Kubota, “just as a precaution.” He explained that the Plexiglas was a half-inch thick, and the roll bars were steel. The doomed hinges went unmentioned.
“Obviously not a handyman,” Blake grunted. “Probably in school his whole life.”
As if on cue, the narrator introduced himself as a researcher with a doctorate in environmental studies. His first name was Thomas, his last something Irish that Stu didn’t want to remember. The shallow falls were an area frequented by bears, he said. The excitement in his voice when the first bear appeared was heartbreaking.
“They’re here!” he cried happily. “Aren’t they magnificent creatures?”
But food was thin this year, he explained. Not a lot to satisfy hungry bears fattening themselves up for hibernation. He babbled on about fat percentages in their diet, and when the big female came sniffing toward the Kubota, he greeted her, describing her investigative behavior with glee and remarking on how fantastic the footage would be. “What a stroke of luck!”
His concern began to show when she put her paws on the glass and snuffled his scent at the air hole. But it was the dramatized concern of a reality TV actor. He wasn’t really scared. Not yet. Then she started pushing, and the Kubota began to rock. The shaking of the camera testified to the violence with which she was soon rattling the vehicle, but Thomas’s voice didn’t crack until she found the seam in the door and slid her heavy claws into it. “She’s testing the door,” the Irishman said. Those were his last narrative words before Stu heard the hinges squeal and snap. The remainder of the sounds Thomas made were involuntary expressions of surprise and terror. And, finally, screams.
By the time Blake switched it off, Stu found that he was sweating.
“Are we in danger here?”
“If you live among predators for long, they will eventually eat you. But even you respected nature enough to bring a gun. We’ll be all right. But we should move along; at least one bear in the area has a taste for human flesh now.”
“Shouldn’t we find the body?”
“Naw. They ate him. Might have buried the leftovers around here, but I don’t wanna arm-wrestle them for ’em.”
“What about the video?”
“Might be worth something. Them reality TV shows aren’t above broadcasting some poor sap’s demise. They’d probably put this on one of those nature programs—America’s Most Ferocious or some such.”
Stu frowned, then cocked the camera to his ear and flung it into the river. “No, they won’t.”
Blake nodded respectfully.
They found Thomas’s camp. To Stu’s disappointment, there was no communications equipment. Blake salvaged the food, which Stu found ghoulish, but he left the money in a fat wallet they found inside the tent, along with Thomas’s identification and other minor valuables. Stu wondered aloud if someone might be coming to get the Irishman; the Kubota was obviously dropped in by helicopter. Blake told him he could stay if he wanted.
“You can stay in that flimsy, expensive-looking tent right there by the feeding grounds.”
They left soon after that and hiked in silence for a time. Blake still seemed intent on putting in his ten miles, despite the interruption. It was Stu who finally spoke. “Damned tragedy,” he whispered reverently, as though something needed to be said.
“No one forced him to come here,” Blake mumbled.
“He came to study them.”
“Bears are dangerous animals. One of the few things on the planet that thinks of us as food. You plop yourself down in the middle of ’em, you’re not studying; you’re testing yourself. Man against fucking nature.”
CHAPTER 27
It had taken two days to declare Stu missing. It took two weeks to declare the search over. And it had been two more trying months for Katherine since then. Clay explained that it could take up to seven years to declare a missing spouse legally dead, but she wasn’t required to sit around waiting to settle his affairs.
“In fact, you shouldn’t. It’s unhealthy. Besides, you don’t have seven years. You’ll be in your mid-forties if you wait it out, and that’s a bit old to start over.”
The odds Stu was alive were almost zero. She had come to grips with that reality. The Yukon Tours pilot had even volunteered to make another trip out after the official search ended. He’d come back with nothing, and his final flight served as the last nail in hope’s coffin for her.
Clay tried to take responsibility for Stu’s disappearance—the trip had been his idea—and it was tempting to place blame. But Katherine pardoned him. Clay would have gone along too if they hadn’t lured Dugan into a rushed meeting, and she could as easily blame herself for that. Besides, if she alienated Clay, she’d have to put her life back together entirely alone.
Katherine wandered through the house, packing up photos and emptying Stu’s closets. As the spaces opened up, the rooms looked different, and, without evidence of a man in the house, she wasn’t sure who she was. For two months she’d been a ghost, just drifting aimlessly, sleeping, eating, exercising, sleeping again. But that needed to end. She needed direction and purpose, an identity. Before, she’d always been Stu Stark’s wife. Now she would be …
Whoever I want to be.
Clay’s winning streak had continued during her mourning period, and she was eager to get back to the life he’d outlined for her. She craved his direct approach. It worked. He’d told her to mourn for a while—it was necessary and healthy. No big spending. No rebound man for comfort. And it had been the sort of lonely hell losing a spouse was bound to be. Cards, flowers, and backward-looking sympathizers only mired her in the loss, reminding her of it every day instead of helping her get past it.
Hello, so sorry for your tragedy; that must suck.
Clay had been supportive, calling at intervals to check in. He gave her time to grieve, but he also gave her permission to stop grieving. And, having done her time, she found herself actually growing excited to get back to life. Clay had assigned her a coming-out date, something tangible to look forward to, a specific night upon which it would be socially and emotionally acceptable to move on. And that night was tonight.
As the sun set outside, Katherine selected a burgundy dress. Not red. Too playful. But not black, either. Mourning was officially over, and the dress she wore on her first evening out would be her colorful line
of demarcation.
Wine tasting at the Arbor was a job for her tallest, most uncomfortable shoes—strappy, four-inch, open-toed sandals. Margery had left an invite for Katherine Stark and Guest at the door. Margery understood the need to dust oneself off and get back on the horse, and a night of casually elegant company and wine would be Katherine’s mount.
She missed wine. She’d laid off during the search; a depressant was just a bad idea in a time of crisis. But now I can drink. She was lonely, too; the compulsive masturbation had also taken a respectful hiatus, although she slept with her arms wrapped around a pillow, and sometimes her legs. There will be real men at the party.
But a guest?
Whoever she brought, people would talk. Clay, however, had a plan. He’d escort her to the party to “get her out of the house.” Once there they’d play it cool. No flirting. They’d almost ignore each other, like at the birthday party. She’d be free to mingle, perhaps even interact with other men at a level somewhere between friendly and flirty on the flirting scale. She would be available to test the waters, but at the end of the night, her safe date would be sure she got home without prompting any gossip. It was perfect. And it was all detailed in an instructive step-by-step text she’d received from Clay that morning.
Katherine examined the fit of the burgundy dress on the sharply defined lines of her body; she’d worked out compulsively since the disappearance—another Clay commandment. The dress’s padded upper gave her modest chest some shape, the midsection hugged her trim waist to form a dramatic hourglass, and her sculpted calves were visible below the hem. All very nice.
No. Not nice. Fucking fabulous.
She enjoyed using the word fuck, even if she was just thinking it. It was especially fun in an empty house with nobody around.
“Fuck,” she said to the mirror. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
She was flirting with herself, she realized. Beyond flirty. She considered touching herself again, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to the party spent. One thing was for sure—she was definitely ready to get back to life.
CHAPTER 28
Blake was slightly less unpleasant than Stu had at first thought. After the third day, he stopped threatening to leave Stu to die whenever Stu begged for a rest stop. And by day five, Stu was no longer slowing their progress. After a week, they started making up for Stu’s initial night of vomiting and first few slow days. And by the time they pushed open the door of Blake’s hand-built cabin, they were right on schedule. Just in time for the snow.
Blake’s cabin was not much larger than Stu’s roofless shack. And although there were tin eating utensils, salt, sugar, chicken broth cubes, soap, and a few other necessities, there was no larder full of food or propane stove. Stu had to admit, the place was not so very different. But after a week in the tent, the modest cabin seemed downright luxurious. After two weeks, it felt perfectly comfortable. And after a month it was home.
The division of labor was simple. Stu split wood and kept the fire going. Blake walked the trapline.
“What do you trap?” Stu had asked on the first day.
Blake tapped his temple, then listed all his prey in a single breath. “Beaver, coyote, arctic fox, red fox, lynx, marmot, marten, mink, muskrat, otter, rabbit, red squirrel, flying squirrel, ground squirrel, woodchuck, weasel, and the occasional wolverine.”
“What about bear?”
“You don’t look for bear. You avoid them.”
“Wolf?”
Blake nodded carefully. “Ah, yes, the wolf. I’ve trapped wolf before.”
“Why weren’t they included in your initial list? You rattled it off so assuredly that omitting them couldn’t have been an oversight.”
“You don’t miss a thing, do you, counselor?” Blake chuckled, but he walked out without answering the question.
When Blake returned from his rounds, he threw dead animals to Stu, who earned his keep by skinning and cleaning them. Most were small, martens and minks, but the beaver were bigger, and one coyote was the size of a dog. He only ruined one pelt, a mink worth “a half day’s pay” according to Blake. Stu’s host swore a blue streak but immediately threw Stu another and made him try again. With Blake standing over him watching every cut and pull, Stu had gotten that one right.
For the more distant traps on the line Blake was gone overnight. He built snow caves, which Stu found fascinating. Instead of fearing the snow, Blake punched it in the gut and slept right in its heart.
“Aren’t you afraid the thing will cave in and suffocate you?”
“Not if you build it right,” Blake muttered.
Stu immediately had to know how it was done. Edwin’s had a diagram, but after Blake marched Stu for a day into the hills to tend a distant trap and try it, Stu discovered that Edwin’s was missing from his pack. He had to try to build one from memory. They slept in his third attempt that night, and it neither collapsed nor suffocated either of them.
On their way back, Blake saw three deer and pointed them out to Stu. They were distant, and Stu sighted them in with the .30-06 scope. They moved through the frosted trees with a stiff-legged walk that belied their fluid speed when running.
“We’ll get one of those later,” Blake promised.
When they returned from the trapline, Stu found Edwin’s sitting in the middle of the bed with a note in Blake’s spiky handwriting tucked inside that said, I won’t always be there … Edwin.
They played cribbage on a worn cross section of pine log Blake had converted into a board by driving nail holes into it in two parallel spiral patterns. The pegs were red-headed and blue-headed wooden matches with their ends whittled to fit in the holes. Two of each color. They played with a tattered deck of cards with an Indian casino logo. The two of diamonds was missing, and the nine of clubs was torn so that it was always clear who had it. Several other cards were identifiable unless they were held tucked behind another card to hide their wear and tear. The quirks of the deck changed the strategy in a way that Stu found interesting, and they kept track of their wins and losses by carving notches in the wall with their knives. Blake jumped out to a large lead, but Stu learned quickly and soon was catching up.
On good days, they threw the hatchet at the woodpile, and Stu was surprised to find that the heavy head stuck nearly every time. The secret was to adjust the rotation with the distance. It took practice, but they had time. Blake carved point values into different logs in the stack so that it became a woodsman’s version of darts.
Stu found that even the rapidly shortening days felt long without meetings, phone calls, clients, a commute, and a chatty wife. Blake talked much less than Katherine, both because he was a more private person and simply because he was a dude. There was a lot more time in life than he’d ever thought, and Stu fell into a ritual to keep himself busy. Early fire. Morning coffee. A trip to the latrine. One game of cribbage. Fresh meat for breakfast, or they’d mix up powdered eggs and pancakes if Blake brought nothing back from morning rounds of the nearby small traps. It was always better when they got a rabbit. Their diet was largely lean protein. While Blake was out, Stu would read one chapter of Edwin’s. After breakfast Stu chopped wood with the full-size ax. He shoveled snow if snow needed shoveling. Then he broke the ice on the water barrel and topped it off by carrying buckets of water from the creek thirty yards away. Once a week he felled a nearby tree so it could dry out for use as firewood. Each tree he took down also widened the clearing around the cabin. The snow was deepening, and he shoveled paths around the cabin to keep them clear, or packed them down by walking them.
One day he was shoveling paths and just kept going until he’d shoveled the entire clearing. It took three solid hours. His arms were sore and his back was tired, but it felt good to do manual labor after a decade of life behind a desk.
When Blake returned, he’d stared, amazed. “Jeezus, man, how the hell did you do that?” he muttered. “Better yet, why?”
There was infrequent conversation. Mostly about trappi
ng or the unpredictable weather. Blake had a saying: “If you don’t like the weather here, wait twenty minutes.” The default discussion was whether they should play another game of cribbage; the answer was always yes, which avoided the need to find something else to discuss. Blake had stories about epic snowstorms, trapping tales, and a meticulous description of the building of the cabin, but he was comfortable with dead air, too. If he had nothing to say, he could sit for an hour without a word. One morning he took Stu out on his rounds to show him the trail of the deer they’d sighted. He pointed out tracks in the snow, broken branches, and scat. Then he put up a makeshift blind just off the path and went into meditation mode. Not to be outdone, Stu matched his silence, sitting motionless with the .30-06 cradled in his lap for most of the day. It was cold, but Stu was determined not to give up first. When the deer came, Blake simply nodded at him.
They had venison steaks for lunch. The deer was harder to skin than the smaller animals, but well worth it, and Blake was excited enough about Stu’s first kill to help him field dress it. The next day, Stu built a smoker. He’d been itching to try it since he’d read chapter seven in Edwin’s on preserving food. Then he began drying strips of venison. The key, he discovered, was to keep feeding the coals green chips, but not to allow flames to flare up, a delicate balance that he had to keep for twenty-four hours to get the meat smoked correctly. The first batch wasn’t too good, but the second was so delicious that Blake declared it a worthy ingredient for a pemmican trail mix he threw together with dried berries.
Soon Stu was walking the trapline with Blake, miles every day like it was nothing. And when Blake got sick for three days, he went alone.
For the first month Stu worried about what was happening back home, each day remembering bills that were overdue or calculating client deadlines he was missing, or speculating about when Katherine might presume him dead. He fretted to himself, mostly, but eventually mentioned it aloud enough times that Blake felt it necessary to weigh in.
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