Preacher’s head with his left fist.
The blow knocked Preacher away from the wagon wheel. He watched as the bear lunged back and forth among Garity’s men, mauling them. The claws dug so deep into one man’s neck that his head was torn right off his shoulders. His body stumbled around for a second with blood spouting from the ragged stump of a neck before it collapsed. The head rolled into the fire and started to burn.
Cradling his maimed arm against his body, Garity dropped to his knees and fumbled behind the wheel for the knife he had dropped when Preacher broke his arm. He came up with the blade and leaped at Preacher again.
Jerking aside to keep from being gutted, Preacher kicked Garity in the chest and knocked the outlaw underneath the wagon. He would have dragged him out and finished him off, but at that moment, Casey screamed, “Preacher, look out! The bear!”
Preacher wheeled around and saw the bear charging toward him, leaving the bodies of Garity’s men in a scattered shambles behind it. Blood welled from a dozen wounds in the grizzly’s body, but it seemed as fierce and unstoppable as ever.
Far from being a totem animal that wanted to protect Preacher, like in the wild yarn he had spun to stall Garity, the bear was obviously out for Preacher’s blood. The only reason it had torn into the outlaws was because they were between it and the mountain man.
“What the hell did I ever do to you, you son of a bitch?” Preacher yelled.
The bear’s only answer was another earsplitting roar. Preacher dived under a sweeping blow from one of the massive, claw-studded paws. The claws were stained red from all the blood they had shed.
Preacher darted in close to the bear. The knife in his hand flickered in and out. Bear blood dripped crimsonly from the blade. The grizzly lurched after Preacher.
They were well-matched, he thought. Both of them more dead than alive. The bear had to be on its last legs, fueled only by its unshakeable, unfathomable rage.
Preacher wasn’t just fighting for himself. He knew if the bear killed him, it would likely turn on Casey, Roland, and the other prisoners next. Tied to the wagon wheels like they were, they wouldn’t be able to avoid the slashing claws and teeth. The bear would rip them to shreds.
So it had to end at long last. The bear wasn’t going to get away from him. Or, in another way of looking at it, he thought,
He wasn’t quick enough to avoid everything the bear threw at him. A glancing blow knocked him off his feet and left a set of claw marks on his side. Preacher rolled as the bear reached for him. Overbalanced for a second, it fell to all fours.
Preacher seized the opportunity. He leaped onto the bear’s back and locked his left arm around its neck. The grizzly reared up again, trying to throw him off, but Preacher hung on desperately.
He had been in that position before, when he was fighting the bear in the dry wash far to the northeast, but he’d had a pistol instead of a knife in his hand. He slammed the blade into the bear’s body again and again and again, trying to drive it as deeply as he could. The bear clawed at the arm around its neck and roared. Preacher roared, too, an inarticulate cry of rage that was as animalistic as any sound the grizzly made. Blood flew in the air, some of it Preacher’s, some of it the bear’s.
Preacher pulled himself higher on the bear’s back and plunged the knife into the side of the creature’s neck. He ripped it free, drove it home again. Blood spurted in a hot flood over his arm. Preacher struck again and again as the bear began to stagger back and forth.
Even in his berserk fury, a small part of Preacher’s brain was rational enough to realize he would be crushed if the bear fell on him when it collapsed. He reached around as far as he could, slammed the knife into the front of the bear’s throat, and then let go, leaving the weapon where it was. He dropped to the ground but lost his footing as he slipped in a puddle of blood. He fell as the bear turned toward him.
The grizzly let out one more roar, but the sound was a lot weaker. Preacher scrambled backward as the bear took a tentative step after him. It pawed futilely at the air as if striking at something only it could see.
Then, like a huge tree that’s rotted at the base, it began to topple forward.
Preacher got out of the way just in time. The bear crashed to earth right beside him, and Preacher would have sworn he felt the ground shake under him. He pushed himself along the ground until he reached one of the wagon wheels. Reaching up, he grasped a spoke and tried to pull himself upright.
Iron will could push a human body only so far, and Preacher’s body, slick with blood and leaking more of the precious stuff with every passing second, had reached its limit. He slid to the ground and fell onto his side. That left him looking directly into the face of the dead bear a few feet away. As he stared at the lifeless eyes, he felt a strange kinship, almost a sadness that the grizzly had reached the end of its trail at last, as someday he inevitably would, too.
“You and me, old son,” Preacher whispered. “We’re . . . a lot alike . . . ain’t neither of us . . . fit for anywhere except . . . the wild places . . .”
The world went away again, and Preacher was sure it was never coming back.
A gentle swaying was the first thing he was aware of. He was rocking back and forth a little as he lay on something soft. A pile of blankets, maybe.
Then he took the time to be surprised that he was still alive.
His eyes opened. He saw something white arching over him. The great vault of heaven? Maybe he wasn’t alive after all. Was he lying on clouds instead of blankets?
No, that wasn’t possible, Preacher decided. A rapscallion like him wasn’t going to wind up in heaven, and even if he did, he wasn’t convinced it would be like the psalm-singers said, floating in the clouds with a bunch of angels in robes who flew around playing harps. Not hardly! For a man like him, heaven would be a beautiful morning in the high country, with a good rifle, a good horse, a good dog . . .
That white thing above him was the canvas cover stretched over the hoops of a big freight wagon, he realized as he forced the crazy thoughts out of his head. He was alive, and he was in the back of a wagon.
Lorenzo leaned over him and said, “I knowed you was too damn stubborn to die. I just knowed it.”
