Shadow Woman (48 page)

The bear sniffed the air and
smelled her fear. It took one step toward her, then another, tasting
the breeze. She could see its ears move back and its face elongate,
and she knew what was about to happen. There would be no chance to
run, no way to fight. Her only chance was the one that had existed
since the first Nundawaono woman and the first bear. Nothing had
changed. Those who lived, lived by their wits.

Jane knelt in the grass, slipped
off her pack, and watched the bear erupt into its charge. It surged
forward with growing speed. As she fumbled in her pack, she watched
the progress of his huge, powerful body across the field of dry
grass, and said aloud, “Is it the truth, Nyakwai? Are the old
stories true?” She whispered, “They had better be.”

Her hands shook as she tore open
the packets of honey and peanut butter, raisins and dried meat, then
dropped them into the plastic bag with the garbage.

The bear was almost on her when
she sprang to her feet. As Nyakwai always did in the stories, this
one reared back on its hind legs. It seemed to Jane to be eight or
nine feet tall as it towered over her, its thick, powerful forelegs
opened wide to grasp her in its claws and hold her while it gnawed
through her neck.

Jane flung the plastic bag of
food and garbage hard at the bear’s chest. As they always did,
Nyakwai’s lightning-quick animal reflexes clapped his big paws
together and caught the bag between them, his long claws digging
through it into the pungent mess it held.

Jane pivoted and sprinted for
the far end of the field. She judged it was a hundred yards of open
grass before the ground again rose into rocky outcroppings and
sheltering trees. By the time she had finished making her estimate it
was eighty…. Now it was sixty. She clenched her teeth and
pumped her arms, making her toes dig in and tear at the ground with
each stride. Forty…. Thirty. Just before the trees began, she
glanced over her shoulder, then kept running.

In the stories, the trick was to
get the bear to catch a small log, and then quickly swing a war club
down on the top of its skull. But this bear was still in the spot
where she had left it, peacefully rooting deep in the plastic sack,
lapping out the fatty meat and peanut butter, the sweet, sticky honey
and the crumbs of biscuits.

Jane took one last look at the
bear. “Stay right where you are, Nyakwai,” she whispered.
“Something is coming – something evil.”

Earl trotted down the steep
hillside after the dogs. Everything seemed to come hard to him this
trip, like the stiff north wind smacking into his face all afternoon.
He had run until he had thought he would have to stop, and then he
had at last spotted them on the bare ridge ahead. He had kept his
head and run on, trying to gradually shorten the distance and buy
himself the best shot. But he had seen the woman stop and turn
around, so he had gone low and used the telescopic sight of the rifle
to see what she was doing.

When he saw that she was holding
a pair of binoculars, he’d had no choice. The range must have
been a thousand yards. He had known that even though he was holding
the best sniper rifle that money could buy, he was aiming it into the
sunset at a receding target bobbing up and down over uneven ground
with a forty-mile-an-hour wind blowing at him. He had tried to hold
the man’s back in the crosshairs long enough, but it was a
ridiculous shot, and the round had gone high. When the gun had
settled from the recoil and he had found them again in the scope, he
discovered they had dropped to their bellies.

He had sprung to his feet and
run toward them, using the time to shorten the distance and get into
reasonable range. When they got up to run again, he had taken a
second shot to make them go down again, but the tactic had not
worked. Jane had obviously figured out that hiding while he moved
closer could only end one way.

She had dodged to the left,
moving across his field of vision to make his shot even harder, and
then scrambled down here into the gulch. The sparse smattering of
scraggly pines on the slope would not have provided cover from fifty
yards, but from eight hundred, the tree trunks had multiplied in the
scope’s optics into an impenetrable wall.

Jane was a clever bitch. She had
taken Hatcher from a mountaintop, where he’d stood out against
the sky, down into a narrow mountain pass the sun had not reached for
an hour and where enough soil had been deposited over the eons to let
thick, leafy vegetation grow.

This was the moment he had known
for days would come. Some runners would just keep running until they
dropped, and then lie there to get their throats cut. But Hatcher had
already shown that he wasn’t one of those. Linda had taken a
gun off him in Denver, and that meant he was the sort that would
probably make some lame attempt at fighting. Jane was a pro, so it
went without saying that when running got to be pointless, she would
still not concede that she had used up her options.

Earl took long, leaping steps,
almost flying a few feet and landing on both heels to stop himself,
then taking a running start and doing it again. When he reached the
bottom he moved out of the trees into a long, narrow meadow. The
light was fading quickly, and the sky above him had already dimmed
into that gray opaque surface that would turn deep later when the
stars began to show.

A shiver of anticipation began
in his spine and moved up to the back of his neck. He could feel that
they were straight ahead, waiting for him. He cocked the slide on his
pistol to chamber a round, then lifted the precious rifle across his
chest like a skeet shooter and held it ready. Then he turned his face
to the dogs.

“T-Bone,” he
whispered, and swept his hand to his right. “Rusty,” he
whispered, and swung his hand to the left. The two big black dogs
began to advance through the meadow on either side of him. He could
see they smelled something ahead in the meadow.

They stalked with their ears
pricked forward, their necks extended, and their bodies held low to
the ground. This was it, all right. He saw that there were bushes
growing in big clumps, like haystacks here and there in the open
field. Most likely the man and woman were crouched behind one of
them, or even in the middle. Hatcher would be clutching the one
little pistol he had bought that Linda hadn’t gotten, probably
sweating so much he could barely keep the grip in his hand.

Manhunting was all strategy, and
Earl had them this time. If they stayed put, the dogs would sniff
them out and Earl could lie prone out of pistol range and keep
piercing the bushes until he had bagged them. If the dogs flushed
them, they would have to run the whole length of this narrow valley
to get out of the open. Earl could fix them one at a time in his
flashlight beam and pop them at his leisure. It occurred to him that
he didn’t even have to do that. He could let the dogs run them
down and tear them up first, then shoot them on the ground.

T-Bone and Rusty both stopped,
stood stiff-legged, and began to growl. At first it was low, a sound
like anger building. But then they began to move forward again, still
low but faster now. He could see their muzzles contort to bare their
long, glowing teeth – not just the biting fangs this time, but
the big jagged grinders in the back for gnawing through bone.

Earl rasped,
“Fass!
Kill!” The word was more a cheer than a command, because
they seemed already to be in motion when it began, streaking forward
toward the big thicket ahead of him.

Earl chose a standing position
so he could sidestep quickly to either side. He held the flashlight
in his left hand under the foregrip of the rifle so that it would
throw its beam wherever he aimed. He pushed off the safety and
waited. The dogs tore into the thicket from both sides.

In the dim remnants of light
from the sky he saw T-Bone take a hard run forward, his teeth bared
to emit a sound that was half growl and half cry of joy. As T-Bone
left the ground, Earl knew he was leaping for a throat. At almost the
same time he saw Rusty dash in low from the other side of the
thicket, and he knew they were attacking the way he had seen them go
after the bloodhound – one for the throat and the other for the
hamstrings. Earl danced to the right, trying to create a better angle
in case the dogs had left one of the runners unoccupied.

Earl heard a sound that made him
drop the flashlight in his haste to push the switch. The air seemed
to turn thick with it, a noise that had a groan in it like the roar
of an enraged man, but a noise that had fangs and hair, far too loud
and deep to have come from a human throat.

Earl saw T-Bone fly through the
air, spinning a little to land in the tall weeds. Then Earl saw the
bear. It charged out of the thicket after Rusty, its maw wide open in
a crocodile gape as it tried to corner the dog.

Earl found his flashlight and
caught the bear in it. The head, a foot wide with a wrinkled snout
and tiny black eyes, turned to him in a snarl. The flashlight seemed
to have enraged the bear, but it had blinded Rusty. The bear’s
thick paw shot out, the black claws gleaming in the light like the
teeth of a rake, and swatted Rusty’s side. Then the bear, with
astonishing speed, disappeared behind the thicket again.

Earl thought he saw the bushes
move. He raised the rifle, fired, cycled the bolt, and fired again,
but the bear had somehow gotten ahead of him in the dark. The bear
found the dazed T-Bone and, in a second, reared up with his jaws
clamped on T-Bone’s throat, gave the dying body a neck-breaking
shake, then dropped the carcass and headed back toward Rusty on four
feet.

Rusty crouched, barking and
snarling as the bear trotted toward him, then seemed to realize that
he had finally met something he could not even injure, let alone
kill. Rusty wheeled and began to run.

Earl turned on the flashlight
again. In the rifle scope he could see the bright reflection in the
dog’s eyes. He could see its long tongue hanging out, and
bright, honey-thick slaver dripping from it. Behind Rusty, the bear
was methodically building speed, bounding along now, first both
forefeet, then both hind feet, its close-set black pig-eyes gleaming.
Rusty was running for his life now, to the only place where he would
be safe. His idea of sanctuary was leading an eight-hundred-pound
bear right back to Earl.

Earl steadied the rifle and held
the running animal’s head in the scope. He placed the
crosshairs between the two rust-brown spots above the eyes and fired.

Rusty’s forelegs crumpled
and he collapsed, dead before his muzzle hit the ground. The bear
stopped, gave a quick swat with his claws, and made sure the dog was
dead.

Earl quickly switched off the
flashlight and crouched, holding the scope on the big black shape.
The wind was blowing from the bear’s direction. Earl made no
noise. As he watched the shape of the bear he tried to remember. He
had fired once at Pete Hatcher, then once more. He had fired at the
bushes twice: four. Then one for Rusty: five. But was he really sure
he had started with ten rounds? Old hunting stories came back to him.
People had shot grizzly bears ten or twelve times in places that were
supposed to be fatal and they had not even slowed down. Earl kept his
eye in the scope, slowly and quietly released the box magazine from
the rifle, found the full magazine in his pocket, and clicked it in
place.

He knew that if the bear
charged, there was no way he could outrun it. He had to kill it
before it reached him. He went to a prone position with his
flashlight against the foregrip again, and waited.

As he waited, the third
possibility, the one he had almost forgotten, occurred. The enormous
dark shadow seemed to rise and grow as it lifted its snout from
Rusty’s carcass and turned its head toward Earl. It had
finished feeding on the dog. It sniffed the air, turned, and slowly
walked away.

Earl
lay curled up on the top of the ridge, sheltered from the wind by a
rock outcropping. It was cold enough to snow now, and he was almost
sure the flakes would begin to fall before sunrise. A man could
easily freeze to deam up here with no sleeping bag, no tent, no tarp,
no… He decided not to make a list. All of the gear was on
Lenny’s back right now, somewhere behind him on the other
trail. If the dogs had been alive, he could have lain between them
and used their body heat.

The slaughter of his dogs was
the very last offense that Earl was going to suffer. He knew who had
done that. Jane had fed the bear something to keep it in Earl’s
path. She had known that the bear would kill the dogs and probably
Earl too. Great upwellings of rage came out of his chest with each
breath like convulsions, making his head pound with anger.

About now she would be certain
Earl was either being eaten or clinging to a tree limb someplace down
in that valley waiting for the bear to go away. A woman like her
would be too smart to try to make her way north down there in the
dark, through a forest that had never been cut. She would have to
travel up here where the vegetation was almost nonexistent and she
could take a step with some confidence about what was going to be
under her foot when she put her weight on it. She would have felt the
change in the wind and the drop in the temperature too, and she would
want to be out of the mountains before the snow hit.

Earl lay still and kept his eyes
focused on the long expanse of bare ridge ahead. When he heard the
first sounds below the heights, he held his head up a few inches and
listened, trying hard to pick out the noises he had sensed were
different. Their footsteps were slow coming up, as though they were
picking their way with difficulty. No, it was caution. Jane was that
smart. She knew that if Earl was alive it was because he had backed
away from the bear, staying downwind and heading for the heights,
where there was nothing for bears to eat, so he wouldn’t repeat
the encounter.