Emory’s Gift (24 page)

McHenry.

“But I’m not personally motivated to chase the bear down, understand? For reasons I don’t understand, the only house he’s been at is yours. We get complaints he’s raiding bird feeders, we’re going to have to trap him, but if nobody calls, I got better things to do than try to track a grizzly up into the mountains with winter around the corner. Unless I get orders to the contrary, I mean. Gotta follow orders.” He glanced over at the IGAR man as he said this.

“Thanks, Herman,” my dad said softly.

“Don’t mention it,” Mr. Hessler said. He winked at me and returned to his table, still flipping his hat in his hands.

We sat still for a moment or two, and then my dad turned to me, holding his head as stiffly as if he were wearing a neck brace, and carefully said, “Let’s get up very slowly and leave. Just like we’re taking a break, going to the men’s room or something.”

“Okay, Dad.”

I followed my dad out of the courtroom at a slow dawdle, but when we got to the front doors we sprinted down the steps and dove into the Jeep. My heart was racing as we tore out of there. Nobody followed us, no one opened fire, but I still felt like I was a fugitive from justice.

My dad waited until the courthouse was long gone in the rearview mirror before he spoke, as if he was making sure we were out of range of listening devices. When he glanced at me, his eyes were a little wild, and I gained an instant appreciation for just how much he had joined my side against the world, back in that courtroom.

“Do you think Emory understands you? When you talk to him, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “He doesn’t really react one way or another.”

Sort of like you, Dad,
a voice continued unbidden in my head.

My dad drove in silence for a few miles. “Well, when we get home, you’re going to have to somehow convince him to run away. He gets up into the mountains far enough, no one’s going to bother him.”

I took a deep breath. My dad’s brown eyes found mine for a second before he went back to concentrating on the road. “There isn’t any other way, Charlie. They’re going to come out and shoot him.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

“He gets up in the mountains, he’ll be fine,” my father repeated. I nodded, feeling hopeful. Emory was going to be okay. He just needed to go hide.

Evening was falling when we pulled into the driveway. I hit the ground running and threw open the door to the pole barn. Emory was inside, lazily sitting on the old couch like me when I didn’t want to do chores.

“Emory,” I called. My father approached more slowly, halting just outside the barn to watch.

“You have to run away,” I told him. “It’s worse than last time. A judge said the police can come out and shoot you. You have to go far, far away, up into the mountains. Okay?” I wiped a tear away from my eye. It was so
unfair.
Seeing Emory’s blank expression made me want to fall to my knees and wail. Why did things like this keep happening to me? I made a shooing motion with my arms. “Emory.
Go.
”

Instead of leaving, Emory went over and sniffed at the big metal can that now held his dog food. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. Here I was terrified for his life and Emory’s main concern was that he wanted to eat.

The thing was, he could have knocked that trash can over and popped that lid off any time he wanted, but he waited for me to use a scoop to fill the big pan. It was like me being in charge of my own grounding—we could
trust
Emory; didn’t that prove something?

“We have time. He should probably eat,” my father told me.

So I poured the food into the pan and as Emory bent his head to feed I ran my hands up and down the thick, coarse fur on his shoulders. It was, I realized, the last time I would ever see my friend the bear. I kept sniffing back the tears—it helped that Emory didn’t seem too upset, just mainly hungry, as always.

When he was done and he’d lapped up enough water to put out a small fire, Emory lumbered out into the yard. I shut both doors to the pole barn with a bang, illustrating my point.

“Now go, Emory. Go away.”

With one final, impenetrable look, Emory went. As he descended the trail to the creek where the shadows had gathered to wait for nightfall, he never once looked over his shoulder at me. Didn’t I mean enough to him for a farewell glance of any kind? I stood at the edge of the yard and watched his retreating back until the gloom swallowed him up.

We were having dinner when the Fish and Game cars showed up. As my dad was raising a bite of food to his mouth his face lit up with red, pulsing flashes from the cherry lights. Mr. Hessler had his two buddies back, and they had their rifles at the ready, plus there were two sheriff’s deputies with heavy shotguns.

“Stay here,” my dad ordered me.

I stood in the front window to watch. I saw my dad have a brief conversation with Mr. Hessler and then walk over to the pole barn, the men with the guns on high alert. When my dad raised the door the men all flinched. The inside was well lit with headlights and clearly there was no sign of Emory, but Mr. Hessler still made a show of looking around, his team following him in silly, creeping steps, as if they expected the bear to jump out of one of the freezers.

My dad waited until the cars pulled out of the driveway before returning to finish his meal.

“He said his boss might make him come back in a day or two, but I told him the bear ran off to the mountains, and he seemed pretty satisfied with that.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, meaning “thanks for everything.”

“It’s okay,” my dad told me, smiling.

I was happy Emory was safe, but it was like giving away a dog—he was my friend. I crawled into bed worrying about him, hoping he was already miles away and looking for a den to hibernate way up where nobody would find him, but aching at the idea of him being all alone with no friends to comfort him.

And me, I felt alone, too. I pressed my face into the pillow until it was wet with tears, a familiar sensation.

I awoke with a start just before dawn. The light was gray-blue through my window, with a red flush building up strength in the east. Something had awakened me, some sound that shouldn’t have been there.

I strained to hear it, willing the noise to repeat, and when it did it was slightly louder. A high, shrill baying sound. I knew instantly what it was.

McHenry’s hounds.

chapter

TWENTY-FIVE

I KNEW that the hounds meant Emory was close by. He hadn’t run far enough away. McHenry was on his trail. McHenry, who probably had someone on the payroll who called him the second the judge handed down her decision. McHenry, who didn’t care that grizzlies were essentially extinct in Idaho. I had never despised anyone the way I despised McHenry.

I got out of bed and into my clothes as quickly as I could and ran down the hall. I pushed open my dad’s door and fumbled quietly for the key to the gun cabinet.

It was gone. Though it had been less than twenty-four hours since my confession, my dad had already relocated the key,
as if,
I thought furiously,
his guns had been the point of the story!

There was no time to try to find the key. My father slumbered under his covers, oblivious to the buglelike barking and baying from the woods. I went into the living room, wrapped a towel around my fist, and punched the glass in the gun cabinet. It shattered with a racket that sounded all the louder because of the morning quiet.

“Charlie?” my dad called as I pulled out the .30-06 and slipped a box of shells in my pocket. I felt the vibration through the floor as he jumped out of bed, but I was already at the back door. “Charlie!” he shouted, but I was running.

The gathering dawn lent a surreal glow to the path beneath me as I ran. I knew with absolute certainty where Emory was, where the dogs would find him. The old, abandoned hut.

The forest still clutched the night to itself, each tree trunk barely visible in the gloom. The climb was far steeper than the cross-country course, and I faltered, slowing, hating my body for failing me.

The rocky crest made for slow going, but once I was at the top I was out in the sunlight, actually above the Old Cabin, with a full view of the river and of McHenry and his hounds. I deliberately didn’t look behind me, for fear I’d see my father on the balcony of our deck, ordering me with hand signals to get home. The Old Cabin was visible, too, its mossy roof covered with a light frost.

Down in the river valley the dogs were thirty yards ahead of McHenry and pulling away fast, hitting the river with separate splashes. A man could pick his way across all the deadfalls and not get wet, but the canines scrabbled without plan, the current adding drift to their progress, their nails unable to find purchase on the slippery tree trunks, which they gripped with their forelimbs, dangling, before dropping back into the water. Under any other circumstance it would have been comical.

I didn’t see Emory at first. The door to the Old Cabin was open, and I measured the distance from the top of the sandy riverbank to that door, considering. It was at least thirty yards. I swung my gun up. Could I pick off four dogs as they crossed that gap? They’d be slow and probably exhausted from fighting their way up that steep bank.

I peered through the telescopic sight. The dogs were digging their way up the riverbank now, weighed down by the heavy sand, struggling but tantalized by bear scent.

Of course, if Emory wanted to get away from the hounds, he could find himself a tree. That was the point, anyway—bear hunters didn’t want their dogs tussling with a bear, just terrorizing their prey until it treed itself. The real threat came from McHenry, who had gained a few yards on his dogs while they thrashed around in the river; he held a large hunting rifle under his arm as he jumped from log to log, nearly across the rushing waters.

Could I shoot McHenry?

I was pondering this when I saw Emory move. He’d been standing in the trees, absolutely motionless, invisible in the weak morning light. He was watching the dogs approach, but now that they were most of the way up the steep bank he turned and headed for the Old Cabin, not running, calm as you please. Didn’t he understand what was happening?

I stood up and began making my way down. Emory disappeared inside the hut’s front door. A second later, the dogs surged up over the lip of the bank. They were so tired they barely managed to bay, but that didn’t stop them from charging after the bear.

I watched in utter dismay as they streaked across the flat grass toward the cabin. I would never have been able to hit a single one; it was worthless to raise my rifle now. All I could do was watch as they launched themselves over the threshold into the Old Cabin.

The second the last one had leaped through the open door, Emory came whipping around the corner of the hut, moving faster than any animal I’d ever seen. He must have climbed out the big back window and run around to the front of the building. He lunged for the front door and banged it shut. The dogs were now locked inside.

Immediately the tenor of the dogs’ barking changed; it became muffled and more distant sounding even as their distress pitched their tones higher. Emory eased himself back around the corner of the hut until he was once more hidden from view.

I kept walking, but more slowly, fascinated by what I had just seen. The rear window of the cabin was far too high for the dogs to leap through. They were trapped inside until McHenry arrived to let them out. Emory hadn’t yet done any running and could put a huge distance between himself and his pursuer while McHenry tried to figure out what had happened and got that sticky door reopened.

The man himself was just clearing the sandy bank and looked much the worse for wear, his ribs cranking like bellows and his face red, his mouth slack. He raised his rifle, though, visibly turning off the safety, his instincts telling him there was something wrong with this picture.

I squatted down in the brush so a chance glance wouldn’t find me.
Go, Emory. Go,
I thought to myself. I hoped he was already a hundred yards away.

McHenry cautiously approached the Old Cabin. “Hello?” he called out. Though it was clear that no one lived in the place, it wasn’t clear there couldn’t be someone hiding inside holding McHenry’s dogs hostage. He looked baffled, but he was taking no chances, his rifle held like a soldier, off his shoulder but at the ready.

He looked to his left and there was a blur to his right and he spun and Emory was
right there
. McHenry fired a single wild shot and then the bear was upon him, knocking him to the ground. He fell on his back and started to kick himself away, but Emory put his paws on McHenry’s shoulders and he was forced to lie still.

All of this happened in an instant. I abandoned my crouch and ran down the hill, now, slipping and stumbling in my haste, my own rifle held away from my body so if I fell it would land clear.

Emory laid bare his teeth and let loose with a thunderous roar so loud and fierce that the dogs inside the cabin momentarily fell silent. His fangs were just inches from McHenry’s face.

The man looked up, facing his own death, the terror draining all the color from his skin. I stepped out of the trees as the dogs started howling again, and that’s when I saw that Emory was bleeding.

The bear’s shoulder fur was sodden with blood and a trickle of it went down his foreleg in a steady pulse. McHenry had shot him; he had shot Emory. Emory gave vent to another roar, loud as a jet plane, and now I could hear the pain in it, the pain and the rage. And I, too, became enraged, and it overcame me like a fever. I fumbled for the box of shells in my pocket, still walking forward. When I jacked a shell into the chamber, Emory looked up.

Could I shoot McHenry
? Yes, yes, I could. A black hate was flooding through me, an unrestrained fury at everything that had happened in my life, the injustice of losing my mom, the unfairness of the courts, my lonely, awful life, and now seeing Emory get shot. I could shoot McHenry.