but he didn’t see how he could have missed at that range. He jammed the empty guns behind his belt and yanked his heavy hunting knife from its sheath. He wasn’t sure how much good the blade would do against a monster, but he would put up the best fight he could.
As he stood ready, the misshapen form wheeled around and lurched away, vanishing into the thick shadows of the night in a heartbeat.
It left behind something on the ground.
Preacher moved over to the dark, sprawled shape and dropped to a knee. He recognized the harsh, bubbling sound he heard as the sound of a man trying to draw breaths through a ravaged throat. He put out a hand, felt the hot wet stickiness of freshly spilled blood. Preacher rested his hand on the man’s chest and found a faint heartbeat, but a second later it grew still. The tortured breathing stopped.
The man was dead.
There was nothing Preacher could do for him. There never had been. The mountain man turned his head and bawled, “Somebody bring a light!”
Men were making their way toward the spot. Some of them had grabbed rifles from the wagons. One of them turned back to fetch a lantern.
The bullwhackers babbled questions as they crowded around Preacher. He said, “Hold on, hold on. I know you all want to know what happened, and so do I. Let’s wait for that light.”
Lantern light bobbed with each step as the man carried it all the way around the circle instead of cutting through the center where the oxen were milling around. A faster and certainly easier route. Preacher ordered, “Everybody step back and give him some room,” as the man approached.
He held the light high above his head as he came up to the scene of the tragedy. Startled curses came from the men as the flickering glow washed over the bloody corpse lying on its back. Lifeless eyes stared up from the man’s pale, bearded face.
Preacher recognized the man as one of the bullwhackers but didn’t know his name. “Who is it?” he asked in the stunned silence that followed the curses.
“His name was Hammond,” Leeman Bartlett replied in a stunned, hollow voice. “Ben Hammond. My God, what could have done that to him?”
The man’s throat was nothing but a raw, gaping wound. Blood had poured from it, flooding down the front of his shirt. Preacher was surprised Hammond had lasted as long as he had.
That wasn’t his only injury. Several deep gashes started on his forehead and angled across his face. One eye had been popped from its socket, and most of his nose was torn away. Similar gashes crisscrossed the luckless bullwhacker’s chest. His bloody shirt was shredded.
Roland and Casey had joined the others gathered around Preacher and the dead man. Casey made a horrified sound and turned her face away from the gruesome sight. Roland slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him.
“Are those . . . claw marks?” the young man asked, sounding like he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
Preacher had already figured that out. From the size of the shape he had glimpsed in the darkness and the way it had mauled Ben Hammond, there was only one thing the monster could be.
“Yeah, those are claw marks,” he answered Roland’s question. The fight between them seemed to have been forgotten. “The marks of a grizzly bear on a rampage.”
“A grizzly bear,” Bartlett repeated. “That hardly seems possible. They live in the mountains, don’t they?”
“Most do,” Preacher said, “but sometimes they start to roam, and you can find ’em just about anywhere west of the Mississippi.”
“You reckon that’s what’s been followin’ us?” Lorenzo asked.
Preacher nodded. “I know it is. Dog’s not scared of much of anything in this world, but even he’s liable to get spooked by a griz. Same goes for the horses. They catch even the faintest scent of a grizzly bear, they’re gonna get nervous. A bear doesn’t mind gettin’ wet, so that’s why it was out wanderin’ around durin’ that storm when I caught a glimpse of it.” Preacher got to his feet and shook his head. “It all makes sense now, and the only reason I didn’t think about a grizzly bear sooner is because like you said, Mr. Bartlett, you just don’t think about runnin’ into the critters out here on the prairie.”
“But what can we do about it?” Bartlett wanted to know.
Preacher nodded toward the dead man. “You can bury this poor fella. The griz is gone. I saw it take off for the tall and uncut after I took those shots at it.”
“Maybe you wounded it,” one of the men suggested. “Maybe it went off to die.”
Preacher shook his head. “Not likely. Even if I winged the thing, it’ll take more’n that to put him down. You can’t shoot a grizzly once or twice and kill it, not unless you’re a good enough shot to put a ball right through one of his eyes into his brain. Even then, he’s liable to stay on his feet for a little bit before he realizes he’s dead. And it don’t take long for one of those varmints to do a lot of damage. Looks like he swatted Hammond three or four times. Probably didn’t take more than a few seconds.”
“Everyone stay alert tonight,” Bartlett ordered.
As if he had to tell them to do that, Preacher thought wryly. All the bullwhackers were so spooked and upset by Hammond’s death they might not sleep at all.
“And stay together as much as you can,” Preacher added. “I don’t know what Hammond was doin’ over here by himself, but the bear might not have come after him if he hadn’t been alone and well away from the fire. He was just too temptin’ for ol’ Ephraim to resist.”
“Old Ephraim,” Roland repeated with a surprised look on his face. “The bear has a name? You . . . you know this bear?”
Preacher grinned humorlessly. “That’s just somethin’ mountain men sometimes call a grizzly. I ain’t rightly sure how it got started, unless one time a fella saw a griz that reminded him of a friend of his called Ephraim, and the
