Pathways (9780307822208) (10 page)

Bryn selected a silvering spruce carcass, and the shadow it cast into the silver blue waters, as a likely hiding place for a rainbow trout, and placed her fly directly over it. She had a bite within seconds. The fish ran, trying to take the line beneath the safety of the old tree, but Bryn pulled the rod up and walked with it, trying to set the hook and bring it out at the same time. In another minute the fourteen-inch fish was flapping and flipping over on the hot, dry stones, his mouth opening and closing as if hoping he could get one more ounce of the ice-cold water. “Sorry, buddy,” she mused, crouching and pulling the hook out. “You’re going to be dinner.”

At least she hadn’t forgotten everything her father and Eli had taught her about fly-fishing, regardless of the fact that it had been five years since she held a rod in her hands.
Still got it, Bailey
, she smugly told herself. If she caught any more, maybe she could invite Eli over for dinner. Or build a smoker and dry the meat for another day. Or maybe borrow Ben’s old nets and try that method again. She grinned. She felt alive and vital again, as if every pore on her skin was
open wider, every nerve a bit more aware, her eyes bigger, her focus sharper.

She put more oil on the fly and worked the area for another twenty minutes, but the fish she had caught appeared to be the only one under the old tree. Bryn walked upstream, fishing all the while, but still there was nothing. After twenty minutes, she climbed over a logjam and stopped suddenly. Nerves she thought were awake turned into an electrical system carrying live voltage.

Straight ahead was a mother grizzly. Swallowing slowly, as if the bear could hear even that, Bryn froze. Her eyes moved to the right, where a cub played in the shallows of the river with a flopping, not-quite-dead trout. “Only three kinds of bear will attack,” Eli had said once, “a sow with a cub, a bear with a kill, or one with a bad attitude.” She was considering where to go, what to do, when Eli’s low voice sounded behind her. “Stay absolutely still. Don’t look back. Keep your eyes at her feet.”

But his arrival alerted the mother bear. She stood up on her hind legs, a frightening eight feet tall. She raised her mammoth head, sniffed the air once, and then without further warning charged.

She came fast, impossibly fast, and Bryn’s first instinct was to turn and flee. Only Eli’s command to stay right where she was kept her feet frozen in place. “Eli,” she cried under her breath, watching the bear rush them as if she was in a movie theater and none of this was real. But it was real.

“Duck and cover your head and neck,” he said quickly. “If she attacks you, play dead. Remember, play dead. Do not move.”

“
Eli
,” she cried again, as if he could stop the oncoming bear. When the grizzly was twenty feet away, Bryn curved into a ball and covered her head and neck, feeling as if she were in third grade, doing
an earthquake drill at school.
If only I had a desk to protect me
, she thought, her mind spinning wildly. They were going to die, die there together on an old riverbed of Summit Lake.
Duck and cover. Play dead. Stay still
.

But Eli was not still. He had taken off over the rounded rocks toward the far bank. Shouting and waving his hands to draw the sow’s attention and make her chase him. Protecting Bryn. It worked. The bear quickly changed direction and charged after Eli. The confused cub cowered for a moment by the logjam and then tentatively lumbered after his mother.

It was quickly obvious that Eli could not outrun the bear. In horror Bryn watched as the grizzly took him down with a swift rake of her huge paw. Eli plunged to the grassy bank, disappearing behind her massive brown form.

“Eli!” Bryn screamed, starting to run toward them and then hesitating. What could she do? “
Eli!
” she screamed again.

T
he bear moved to his side, and Eli turned and hit her full in the face with pepper spray. The bear backed off, mewling like a newborn cub and rubbing her eyes with a furry brown arm. Eli rose and sprayed her in the face again, yelling wildly, and the combination of disorientation, confusion, and lack of sight made the sow turn and run, her fat cub close behind.

Eli sank to the ground, his face a grimacing mask of pain. It was then that Bryn saw him cradling his ankle and the bright red trail of blood seeping down his jeans. “Eli!” she yelled. “I’m coming!”

When she reached him, she pulled up his pant leg to expose his leg. His ankle was already swelling, probably sprained, and there were multiple, deep lacerations in the flesh where the bear had raked her claws across him. “We have to get you to the cabin. I can treat you there.”

Eli only nodded as he accepted her help up, and they began making their way back to his canoe.

“That was an incredibly brave, incredibly stupid thing to do,” she said, huffing with exertion. Eli’s arm was around her shoulders, and he winced with each step. She could almost feel the pain herself each time he dragged his leg across the stones.

“Told you I was a bear magnet. Lucky for me I had a doc to save,” he said through clenched teeth. They were close to Eli’s canoe,
but he was losing a lot of blood and was growing weaker. “Think I’ll have to call you that, after you stitch me up.”

Bryn’s mind was not on nicknames. “What do you weigh, two, two-twenty?” she pretended to complain.

“Two-twelve,” he answered softly.

She looked up at him, studying his eyes, the sickly pallor of his skin, the sheen of sweat that coated it. “Eli? Gonna make it?”

“Going to … make it,” he said with determination. He stood up a little straighter as if to take weight off her shoulders, stepped forward, dragging his left leg behind … and immediately fainted. He was too heavy for Bryn to catch, and she stumbled forward when he fell. Worse yet, his head hit a rock on the way down. She shuddered as she heard bone meet granite.

“Eli!” Quickly she turned him over and grimaced as blood rolled down his face and into his eye. Wanting to cry, she looked up at the sky and yelled, “What do you want from me? A little help! I need a little help!” Her eyes ran from Eli’s canoe, just twenty feet away, down the lake to the north end and Ben’s cabin. He was out in his canoe, already paddling hard toward them, apparently having heard her cries. “Benjamin!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “
Ben!
Hurry! I need help!”

She turned back toward Eli, opening first his left eyelid and then the other. She fought to remember all her medical training. The pupils looked good. It was dangerous if one was larger than the other. But Eli’s were both normal.

“Bear attack,” she said through her tears, when Ben finally reached her side. “We were trying to get back to his canoe when he passed out.”

“Easy, easy,” he said to her tenderly, looking Eli over for himself.
“It’s not too bad. I’d bet that wound at the head is mostly superficial.”

“I don’t know, Ben. He’s still out. I was hoping he’d rouse by now.”

“All right. You’re the doctor. What do we do next?”

Bryn took a deep breath and surveyed Eli as if he were a nameless patient in the teaching hospital. She assumed he was suffering from a concussion. Her next concern was the blood he was losing down his leg. “If we can get him to my cabin, I can stitch him up.”

“Done,” he agreed.

Together they moved Eli in a woolen blanket that Ben had in his canoe to Eli’s wider, more stable vessel. Working quickly, she wound an extra T-shirt around his leg and tied it as tightly as possible to help stanch the flow of blood. Then they climbed in and started paddling for Bryn’s cabin, the closest shelter. She had medical supplies there—a full kit of bandages and medicines. Even some emergency surgery necessities she had brought with her from the hospital. Bryn was thankful for her mother’s insistence that she be prepared for “the worst.”

By the time they neared the cabin, Eli awakened as if from a nightmare, disoriented, his forehead dripping with sweat.

“Eli! Eli, it’s okay,” Bryn soothed, turning to talk to him while Ben kept paddling.

Eli grimaced and groaned lowly. They soon made it to shore and carried the man up to the front room. Ben stoked the fire while Bryn attended to Eli, first cutting away his jeans to expose the entire lower half of his leg. “I think your ankle is just sprained, Eli.”

“Better stitch those wounds fast, girl,” Ben directed.

Bryn cut off the top of a small plastic bottle of saline and began irrigating the wounds. Then, with trembling hands, she covered
them with Betadine. Eli winced at her first touch, and she pulled back.

“Go on,” Ben coached. “He can take it.”

Bryn’s eyes flew to Eli’s face, clenched in pain. He opened them briefly and nodded at her. “Go on,” he agreed. Bryn swallowed hard and quickly cleaned the long, deep lacerations and soon moved to inject twenty cc’s of lidocaine along the gashes.

It took her an hour to put in the sixty stitches, and she was actually relieved when Eli passed out again after watching her poke and pull the 3-0 Silk as she sewed the gashes shut. She paused to check his pupils with her penlight.

“He’s fine, Bryn.”

“Appears that way,” she responded. “Just passed out again, I guess.” She cast a worried glance in Eli’s direction and resumed her stitching. Before long, Eli was sleeping fitfully, on top of an old bearskin rug—appropriate, Bryn mused—and covered in a Hudson’s Bay blanket.

“Think we ought to radio for a helicopter to take him out?” Bryn asked.

“Nah. He’s survived worse. Besides, you’ve given him better care than old Doc Towne would’ve.”

“We could have him sent to Willow instead of Talkeetna’s clinic. He’d get good care there.”

“No. I tell you, he’s been through worse.” Grunting from the effort, he went down to his knees and gently, quietly pulled Eli’s shirt upward. There, at Eli’s side, were four foot-long scars, red and angry even though they were obviously several years old.

Bryn gaped. “What happened?”

“Year after you and your dad left last. Eli and I were out hunting,
and the griz came out from nowhere, charging us. Eli got off a round, hit him right between the eyes.”

“That didn’t kill the bear?”

“One of the thickest formations of bone, right there,” Ben said, gesturing between his eyes. “It just made him madder.”

“Eli shot him again?”

“Yep. Hit him in the shoulder, but he just kept coming. To make matters worse, I missed too. He was on top of us before we could say lickety-split.”

“What are you two doing checking out my chest?” Eli teased with mumbled words, suddenly coming to.

“Giving you a further exam,” Bryn tossed back. “Didn’t know you had other bear wounds.”

“Stitched the boy up myself,” Ben said proudly.

“That’s why the scars are so ugly,” Eli muttered.

“That’s why I knew you couldn’t do any worse,” Ben added. “Didn’t take me near as long though,” he teased her.

“Why didn’t you take him to town?”

“You learn to do for yourself in the bush. Basic survival medicine. If it’s bad, really bad—for instance, when your life is hanging in the balance—that’s when you call for help. Not before.”

“Bush code of honor,” Eli mumbled, already drifting back to sleep.

Ben moved to sit on a chair again. He nodded at her, lifting one brow in appreciation. “You got the right stuff, girl. Not many women could’ve done what you just did.”

“I guess I can rise to the occasion.” Still shaky from the whole experience, she found pride in the moment. “I’d still feel better if Eli was seen in a hospital.”

“We’ll ask him when he comes to,” Ben said, settling the matter. “I’d say that it’s his call.”

“I’m his doctor,” Bryn said, lifting her chin a little.

“That you are,” Ben said with a smile that said he was remembering their last summer together.

“That … what Eli and I had is over, Ben. We’re just friends.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We—oh, think what you like. I’m telling you the truth.”

“Right. Better go and fetch my canoe before the breeze changes direction and I have to paddle upwind again.” He rose to go. “I’ll check on you two tonight.”

“Aren’t you … aren’t you afraid you’ll run into that bear again?”

“This is bear country more than it is my country. Been living side by side with them for decades now. You surprised that sow, I’d wager.” He grinned and raised his hands. “You don’t surprise them, you don’t threaten their cub or their dinner, and they’ll never lay a paw on you.” He looked her over. “Don’t let this bad time keep you inside, Bryn. Summit has a lot to show you.”

She was mute, thinking how scary it would be to go back to that riverbed and wondering what Ben’s words meant. What would Summit teach her? Was it that obvious, her dissatisfaction with life? Her casting about for direction? For happiness?

The shutting door awakened Eli again. “Ben go?”

“Yeah. Said he’d be back tonight to check on us. Eli, I think we should get you to town. To Willow, where they can check you out.”

“My head okay?”

“I think so. I’d guess it was a mild concussion. As Ben thought, the wound above your eye seems mostly superficial. Freaked me out
with all the blood coming down. I didn’t even have to do stitches there. A few butterfly strips and it should heal all right.”

“And my ankle?”

“Think it’s probably a bad sprain.”

“Then that settles it. Not much more they could do for me in town. And it gives me a chance to see if you’re going to be as fine a doctor as I always thought you’d be.”

She turned away and poured herself a cup of tea, then sighed. “First sign of infection, I’m radioing for help. Animal wounds can be nasty.”

“Deal.”

“I want to keep an eye on you, so you’ll be here for a few days. Need to let … anyone know?”

“I’ll radio my office. Cancel my flights for a week.” He didn’t mention Sara Cussler.

Bryn checked her watch. “Another hour and I’ll give you more Tylenol. How’s the pain?”

“Been through worse.”

“When?”

“Car accident, Denali, when I was seventeen. That broke my arm in three places. The bear attack with Ben. He stitched me up and then hauled me out on a stretcher over very bumpy ground. Took us eighteen hours. Ripped up this wrist water-skiing in Illinois,” he said, raising his right hand. “And when I was eight, a neighbor kid shot me in the thigh.”