My brain was racing. Problems, problems, problems…
The best-case scenario was an ending where Pappy was free to return to his cabin whenever he wanted. The worst-case scenario was one where he spent the rest of his life in prison. The middle ground was Mare flying up here every other weekend and hiking for miles and miles just to make sure Pappy had access to whatever prescription drugs he might be on for his high cholesterol, and then maybe finding him at the bottom of a cliff…or never finding him at all.
So the only real option was to make sure Pappy was able to go back to his old life.
CHAPTER NINE
I’m sure there was a heated discussion while I was changing, as Mare and her grandfather were actively not looking at each other when I reached the campsite.
“Ready for more hiking?” Mare asked me. She had changed into a short-sleeved shirt and hiking pants, and was rebraiding her hair with the same rough but precise movements she had used to pack up the gear, a long rope of red spooling through her fingers.
“Mare—” began her grandfather.
She turned to him, her face fierce. “We are coming with you,” she snarled. “You’ll show us this…this thing!...you’re protecting, and then we’ll decide what to do after that.”
Her glared at her, furious, and then turned and walked into the forest.
“C’mon,” Mare said to me, as she swung her pack up on to her back. “If we don’t follow him, we’ll lose him. I’ve never been good at tracking, and—”
I reached out and touched her arm. All I felt was the heat of her skin. “Mare,” I said. “It’ll be okay.”
She paused. I felt her implant flick on; emotions raced across her body—anger, fear, frustration, love—charging up and through my own. I caught that thread of love and held onto it, strengthening it, pulling it to the forefront of our minds so we both remembered why we were here.
“Families,” sighed Mare. “Too complicated.”
“No kidding.”
We headed into the woods. No animal trails this time. No, Pappy took us through a part of the forest which seemed…old. Old in the way of trees which had no time for the messy clutter of underbrush. As we walked, I caught Mare up on my conversation with Hungerford, and we discussed options.
We did this through the link, of course. Pappy stayed within our line of sight, and we knew he wouldn’t appreciate chatter. Especially chatter in which he was the subject of discussion.
Once we were caught up, I asked, “Where is he taking us?”
“I don’t know.” Mare’s mental voice was pure frustration. “He says he’s protecting something.”
Well, that was ominous. “The victim from his cabin?”
She shook her head. (That made me grin; conversations never happen on just one level. Even now, in a link which allowed us to hear each other’s thoughts and share our feelings, the two of us still relied on physical gestures.) “No,” she replied. “I still don’t know what happened to them. Pappy won’t say. This is something else. An object he’s trying to keep hidden.”
“Gold?” My mind went to the last time Pappy had gotten in trouble with the law. “Maybe he’s found a big deposit in the mountains.”
“Maybe,” admitted Mare. “But I asked him about that, and he laughed.”
Without more information, all we could do was walk. Pappy was kind to us: he stopped every half hour so we could rest and hydrate.
After a couple of hours of this, I noticed that Mare’s anxiety had taken on a new flavor. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She nodded towards Pappy. “He’s slowing down.”
This was news to me, as the pace her grandfather had set was destroying my calves. “Thank God.”
“No, I mean, he’s slowing down.” Sadness traveled across the link: Mare meant that her beloved grandfather was showing his age. “He’s taking breaks for himself, and pretending they’re for us.”
That boggled me. We were fairly deep in the mountains now, and had spent a lot of the last hour gaining altitude. At one point, Pappy had gone bare-handed up a sheer thirty-foot cliff, then waited, shaking his head and grumbling, while Mare and I took turns climbing and lifting our gear.
But now that she had mentioned it, I noticed it, too: Pappy made excuses to stop and rest. He had probably traveled most of the night to reach Mare at the lake, so he was exhausted.
I shook myself as I realized he had probably made this trip in the dark.
I decided to fall on the sword. The next time we took a break, I asked, “How much longer?”
“You can go home any time, city boy,” replied Pappy, as he helped himself to some of our granola bars. “Anchorage is fifteen miles to the southeast. A child could find her way out.”
I glanced at Mare, who nodded. Apparently back in the day, a child did find her way out.
“We’re curious, Pappy,” Mare said. “I trust you, but I’d still like to know where we’re going.”
We had stopped at the top of a steep hill. The view was excellent. The way we came spread down and out, a carpet of summer greens, with the haze of the city in the distance. On the other side was more green, but this was the green of a flowering meadow dotted in bright colors as it cut across the forest floor.
Mare’s grandfather stuck his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.
“Pappy—”
He nodded towards the meadow. “Wait for it.”
“But—”
“Just wait.”
Mare glared daggers at him, even as she folded her legs and dropped to the ground.
Time passed. Pappy took out a knife the size of his forearm and began to whittle. I found myself staring up at the clouds, listening through my implant for the songs of nearby machines. We weren’t far enough away from civilization to have lost cell service yet, but the usual discordant symphony of the modern world was muted by distance.
Ah, I missed that happy clamor.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Mare smiling down at me, and I turned so I could press my cheek against her fingers.
A sharp cough: Pappy pointed the business end of the knife at me.
“Honestly, Pappy,” Mare said.
“All in good fun,” he replied, are he pretended to draw the knife across his own throat, his eyes locked on mine.
“All right.” Mare stood to face her grandfather, her braid flying behind her. “Enough is enough. We came out here to help, and you—”
“Mare?” Pappy said, and pointed his knife again. “Look.”
The angle of the blade was different, pointing past my head and down to the meadow below. Mare and I both turned to see a large speck of white moving through the flowers. It was big. It was fast. It was—
I sat up, stunned. Mare leaned against me, using me for stability as she stared. “Pappy,” she said quietly. “Is that a bear?”
Yes. Yes, it was. A huge bear. An enormous bear, easily five hundred pounds and nearly five feet tall at the shoulders. White, stark white, with gigantic black eyes and claws. And—
“It appears to be coming this way,” Mare added, as she grabbed me around the neck and tried to haul me backwards across the ground.
“Hold your horses,” her grandfather said, as he let out another whistle. The bear slowed and readjusted its course, climbing towards our location on the hilltop.
“Oooh nooo,” Mare moaned quietly. “Pappy. Pappy. Pappy! Do you have a bear?!”
I didn’t say a word, but I very slowly took Mare by her hand. If I had to, I could throw her down the hill in the direction of Anchorage and…I don’t know…leap at the bear? Punch it in the nose? Kick Pappy at it and then run away?
(Well, not that. Mare would never forgive me for that. But for a moment while that bear charged us, I considered it.)
About fifty feet away from us, the bear hesitated, stopped, sniffed…
It spun in place and ran halfway down the hillside, making chuffing sounds. When it had put some distance b
etween us, it stopped again and paced back and forth, complaining.
“Meet Brenda,” Pappy said proudly. “Found her and her twin brother when they were babies. Not sure what happened to their momma, but I raised them up.” He paused. “Hunters took her brother last month. A trophy kill. They know she’s out here; they want her, too. But I’m not gonna let ’em get her.”
Mare and I exchanged a bewildered glance. She was shaking her head in utter shock. “Pappy—”
“What did I say, Mare-bear?” he snapped, and added, “Stay here. I’ll introduce you.” Then, he started walking down the slope, slowly, saying cheering things like: “Hey Brenda sweetie. Brenda girl. Come and meet my family.”
Now that the immediate danger had passed, I realized that I had managed to stand up sometime in the last thirty seconds. Also, sometime in the last ten seconds, my knees had turned to pudding. I let myself sink to the ground, breathing heavily.
“Oh my God,” whispered Mare. “He’s gone full Grizzly Adams.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know, Mare,” I heard myself say. “Wildlife in general is outside of my toolkit.”
She giggled. It was not an entirely sane sound. “Oh my God, he’s on a quest to save a bear. The Don Quixote of bears. Don Bearote.”
I could practically imagine the hunter’s trophy room, one white bear stuffed and mounted on a pedestal, a space on the opposite side just ready and waiting for Brenda. Yeah. Yeah, I could see it. Brenda was valuable in her own right, but if she was part of a matched set and the hunter already had the other piece, then she was priceless.
I’m not an animal person. I’m certainly not a fuck-all enormous apex predator person. The fact that bears had suddenly gone from an abstract concept which existed Somewhere Else to creatures which existed Right Here, Right Now was causing me no small amount of cognitive dissonance.
But…
Halfway down the hill, Pappy had reached the white bear. He approached her like she was an unfamiliar dog, speaking in low tones and moving slowly. The bear’s nose was working like wildfire. It was clear she recognized Pappy, and while he was acceptable, those other strange bipeds were not. Yet even while this unnervingly large creature growled and stomped around in front of him, he soothed her, calming her with his words. The bear gave the air one last sniff, and then pressed her head into his hands with a troubled sigh.
“There’s a good girl,” I heard him say. “Come meet my baby’s baby. You’re safe. I promise.”
I looked at Mare. She nodded. We didn’t need the security of our link to agree that we wouldn’t let a man break a promise to his bear.
CHAPTER TEN
Brenda’s eyesight was terrible. Her sense of smell, on the other hand, was excellent.
And her nose was very cold.
And Brenda kept shoving it into my ear.
“Could you ask her to move?” I was doing my best to keep calm and carry on, but Brenda was fascinated with me. Once we had reached Pappy’s camp, she had given me a thorough sniffing, and then draped one foreleg over my shoulder and planted her nose as deep in my ear as it would go. Considering her nose was twice the size of my ear, she needed to do a lot of extra shoving to make it work.
Pappy thought it was the best thing ever.
“She likes you, boy,” he said, chuckling.
“All the ladies like Josh.” Mare’s smile was wide and white in the light of the campfire.
“Don’t start,” I told her, as Brenda gave a low howl and let her head fall in my lap.
Mare slammed both hands across her mouth to keep from laughing.
I tried to squirm out from under Brenda’s giant head (and jaws and teeth!), but Brenda wrapped a paw around my thigh.
It was not as cute as it sounds. Bear fur isn’t soft or silky, and it’s thick enough to stab through a cotton t-shirt. Bears have fleas and ticks and other, weirder parasites, scattered around the usual nicks and scratches she acquired from living in the woods. Finally, while Brenda appeared to be an all-over white from a distance, she was just filthy. I mean, utterly filthy. You could tell everything she’d done over the last two weeks, and that included eating something extra-bloody.
(Also, don’t forget that a set of teeth longer and thicker than my car keys was mere inches away from my balls, because I sure as hell couldn’t.)
“Rub her behind the ears,” Pappy suggested helpfully. “She enjoys that.”
“No thanks,” I replied. My legs were already falling asleep from the crushing weight of Brenda’s head. I rolled to the side and slid from beneath Brenda’s great mass as carefully as I could. She made a few disgruntled noises, but allowed me to squirm away.
“Don’t sit next to Mare,” Pappy told me. “You don’t want Brenda to get jealous, do you?”
This time, Mare couldn’t stop laughing. She fell backwards, legs pounding on the ground as she howled.
I shook my head and went back to the big iron cookpot where my dinner waited. It was a shepherd’s pottage of a dozen indiscriminate ingredients, which Pappy kept covered and high in a tree during the day and brought to a boil every night. Animals, vegetables, fungus, all of it went into the pot. I had always wondered what pottage was. The best I could tell, it was beige. Beige in color, beige in smell, beige in taste. Beige, beige, beige.
I was hungry enough to eat a full bowl and go back for seconds, even as my stomach growled in protest. Getting back to a state of existence in which I was spoiled for choice in restaurants was becoming a gastronomical priority.
Halfway through my second helping, Brenda stuck her nose in my ear again. I sighed and sacrificed the rest of my meal to her, which she gobbled down, teeth and tongue rattling around the old enameled bowl. “All right, sir,” I said, cutting into his conversation with Mare. “Do you have any ideas on how to keep Brenda safe?”
He gave me a good glare for the interruption, and then relented. “None,” he admitted. “I’ve been keeping her away from hunters, hikers, any human presence. This gully—” he said as he gestured to the campsite, which was essentially a hidden crack in some rocks on the side of a steep hill “—isn’t pretty. Nothing to draw the Instagram tourists, and too easy for the heavy-duty hikers. Brenda and her brother used to go where they wanted, but after he died, I try to keep her territory close to here.”
Brenda pulled her head out of the bowl and gave a small sorrowful cry.
“It’s okay, girl,” Pappy told her. “Brandon’s in a better place.”
I’m sure that was true: wherever Brandon was at this moment was sure to be climate-controlled, with no mosquitos. The ones buzzing around my head were so large they could have passed for underfed sparrows. Mare looked up at me, a hand swatting at the tiny insect vultures swooping in for the kill, and nodded. Time to push on.
“Pappy, we need to know about the blood in your house,” she said quietly.
He stared at her. “Mare-bear, I told you, I’m fine.”
“Whoever was in there? They aren’t fine. They’re badly injured or dead.” Mare clapped her hands together to crush another mosquito. “There’s a stab mark in the floor that could only be made by your giant Bowie knife, and blood everywhere.”
I blinked. I was about as good at recognizing knifes as I was at guns, which meant if it wasn’t one of the most popular models, I’d have to look it up. But a Bowie knife? That was one of the most popular models. A classic. Timeless, really.
The big knife Pappy had been using to whittle wasn’t a Bowie.
Nobody carries two giant knives. Not when one will do. Pappy no doubt was carrying half a dozen smaller weapons, but…
“What happened to the Bowie?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Lost it a few weeks ago.”
“Lost it?” Mare’s eyes narrowed. “Pappy, you’ve had that knife since the war.”
“People lose things, Mare-bear,” he replied. “I’m getting’ old. It’s probably in my cabin somew
here.”
The last time you saw it?” I asked. “Was that before or after Brandon was killed?”
“After,” he said. “Been to town once since then. Lost it on that trip, so I picked up my spare on the way out.”
I stared at Mare, anxiety humming along our link. “Pappy?” she asked. “Did anyone attack you in your cabin?”
“You’re serious?” he asked. “You’re not joking? No. Hell no, Mare-bear! Haven’t been back there since the last time I went to brunch with your dad.”
“There’s evidence of a fight,” I said. “And it looks like it ended with someone’s death, but there are no bodies.”
“It looks like the survivor escaped into the woods and took the body with him,” Mare corrected me.
Pappy paused, and then said, “You mean it makes me look guilty of murder.”
Mare had come to the same conclusions I had. “It’s suspicious enough to trigger a manhunt.”
“Everybody in town knows you’re a bad-ass,” I said. “Nobody wants to tangle with you directly, not after…” I wasn’t sure if I should finish, but charged ahead anyhow. “The last time someone wanted something from you, you made an impression.”
He turned to stare at the fire. Brenda, sensing a dire change in his mood, popped her nose out of my ear and galumphed over to him to flop at his feet. Pappy reached down and began to scratch the crest on her head.
“I think she’s a Kermode bear,” he said quietly. “That’s a subspecies of black bear out of Canada. Some of them are white like this. Don’t know how she got here, but they don’t mature too fast. Brenda’s big but she’s still a kid. Keep hopin’ she’ll age out of the juvenile social streak and disappear into the woods. After that, if they get her, at least it won’t be my fault.”
“Probably doesn’t help that we’re here,” Mare said. She had been about to join Pappy in petting the bear, but she pulled her hand away. “We’re teaching her that other humans are safe.”
Pappy nodded. “This is bad, Mare-bear,” he sighed. “I don’t see a good way out of this for her.”
The Alaska Escape Page 5