The roaring went on and on pinning him to the ground, Anna to the tree and Joan to the tiny patch of earth her bonds had made her home for too long.
The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. Anna's arms were quivering, the rifle hard to hold. Thin whimpering percolated through the new-made stillness: hers, McCaskil's, Rory's, Joan's- it was impossible to tell.
The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. Anna leveled the Weatherby at the manifestation and waited somewhere beyond fear, just this side of insanity.
Ripples of gold unsettled the shadow, catching the imperfect light of the flash. Out of the woods padded the great grizzly, beside him the crying boy with the smile of a saint. On the bear's other side walked Rory, the same Rory whose screams had indicated he was snack food.
The spinning effervescence of a fairy tale snatched up Anna's brain. This bear was with them, of them, glittering gold protector of babes lost in the woods. A dozen stories of wild things become human, princes enchanted, curses fulfilled, were physically manifest and Anna was ensorcelled, charmed, turned to wood and bark like a recalcitrant wood nymph. Her limbs could not move. Her voice had locked itself away deep in her throat.
'Don't shoot him,' the boy said, as if Anna could have destroyed that much beauty even to save her own worthless hide. 'His name is Balthazar.'
'How do you do?' Anna croaked idiotically. To her amazement the bear raised a single huge paw to shake and she laughed, sounding, at least in her ears, a little on the hysterical side.
Recovering from the bear theatrics-given that Rory's skin was still whole and he was in it, that's what the roaring must have been-McCaskil crawled toward the enclosing ring of darkness. The bear's enormous head swung toward him and an echo of the bone-melting roar rumbled in his chest.
'Keep that goddamn bear off me,' McCaskil cried, his voice ragged from yelling.
'Balthazar doesn't like him,' Geoffrey said. 'When we were little he used to tease us something awful.'
We. The boy and the great bear had grown up together. Staggered by the unreality of the scene, Anna found herself wondering if they were brothers.
Enough of her training survived this onslaught of otherworldliness that she continued to watch McCaskil with one eye and half of a reeling brain. He feared Balthazar more than he feared her or the Weatherby.
'You can't let that bear come after me,' he said. 'That's illegal.'
Anna said nothing. Should the bear eat William McCaskil, her greatest concern would be for the animal's digestion.
Her head hurt, her knee was killing her, she was very tired. Overriding these fleeting discomforts was a bear of legend not ten feet from her. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, play with him, listen to the stories he might tell. It crossed her mind to let McCaskil go. His nerves shot, his rifle taken, he was of little threat to a party of five souls, particularly when one of them weighed over a thousand pounds and came from the factory equipped with an astonishing arsenal of edged weapons.
Ruick would pick McCaskil up in the frontcountry or the Montana state police would nail him eventually. Maniac turned craven, the man actually looked rather pathetic oozing toward the woods and temporary freedom. Being captured by a crippled-up lady ranger would only add to his humiliation.
That thought brought with it the tug of petty revenge that pulled Anna back to a sense of duty. 'Stay,' she ordered McCaskil.
'You can't shoot a man if he runs. Not unless he's a threat to life. I read that,' McCaskil said, but he made no move to test the theory.
'You qualify,' Anna said flatly. McCaskil had given up. Anna did not think she was fooled. She'd seen it enough times: the deflation as the tension of keeping up the fight, or the lie, or the act was given over. Still, she did not lower her guard. Cleverer people than she had been tricked, and died because of it.
Rory found the wire cutters and freed Joan. Joan held the flashlight and Anna the rifle while McCaskil bound his own hands and feet with more of the plastic disposable cuffs Geoffrey found in his pack. Balthazar, the great golden bear, sat on huge haunches, ancient eyes watching like a primitive god.
The sense of unreality was such Anna felt giddy and could not stop herself from being flippant and cracking jokes. Tension still on but terror fading, the others, with the exception of William McCaskil, caught her mood and the dark between the trees took on a mad-tea-party feel.
Checking McCaskil's bonds, Anna had to force her discipline, school her mind to pay attention to detail, to take seriously the business of catching and keeping a felon.
When their makeshift camp had been made as safe as plastic ties could make it, Joan righted McCaskil's stove and boiled water for hot drinks. Anna would have traded her boots for a good dollop of brandy to give her tea backbone but was grateful for the beverage even without it.
Given the homely activity of serving tea and cocoa, normalcy might have been expected to return but for the fact that a huge bear sat among them, his dark eyes following their puny movements, his pale golden belly round and Buddha-like under paws the size of serving platters.
We'll talk,' Anna said when the rushing of the stove was silenced and she'd once again checked on McCaskil, cuffed and chained to a tree with the links that usually served as Balthazar's lead.
'Your name is not Mickleson-Nicholson, but Geoffrey Micou, isn't that right?' she asked.
The boy sat with his arms around his knees looking weary and relieved and terribly sad. He wasn't as old as Rory, maybe fifteen. The silky brown hair was greasy, flattened against his skull by a ball cap that Balthazar had gotten hold of and was in the process of dismembering with delicate nips of his inch-long canines.
'I'm Geoffrey Micou. I just-just made up that other name.'
'Carl G. Micou was your dad?' Anna asked and he looked surprised. The line about old age and treachery winning every time came to her mind. Geoffrey was at an age where he could still believe each and every one of his thoughts was new, unique to the world. He had yet to learn that all the stories have already been told. What remains is to choose the story one likes best and live that.
'We found your truck and trailer-your dad's truck-' Anna explained. 'The tags were registered in the name of Carl Micou.'
'Oh.' Geoffrey sounded disappointed, magic losing its charm once the trick is explained. 'That was what we used to move Balthazar. Dad had it made over.'
'I know,' Anna said. 'The ranger found omnivore food in it.' She didn't add that, until recently, they hadn't known it was omnivore food. It served her purposes to appear omniscient. Besides, it was fun.
'He fucking stole him.' McCaskil dripped his acid into the circle. 'That bear's mine.'
Joan turned to him. In lieu of her traditional campfire candle, they had put McCaskil's flashlight butt-down in their midst, needing the security of watching their prisoner and, for Anna at least, the unending awe of watching the bear. In the dim fallout, Joan's face was hard, its customary softness hidden away from the man chained to the tree.
'Don't talk,' she said. 'We don't want to talk to you. We don't care what you think or feel.' Her voice was so devoid of humanity Anna was made cold. McCaskil must have jumped way over onto Joan's bad side when he took a shot at Rory.
McCaskil subsided.
'I did steal him,' Geoffrey said with a fond look at his monolithic companion. 'Nobody should own a bear like Balthazar. He's not just a thing.'
'You're my map boy, aren't you?' Joan asked.
Geoffrey blinked a few times, long dark lashes settling like feathers below wide-set hazel eyes. Then the sense of what she was asking came to him. 'Yes, ma'am. I thought if I knew where the food was, I could take Balthazar there and teach him to eat it.'
'Reintroduce him to the wild,' Anna said, thinking of the looting of glacier lilies, the mining of cutworm moths. 'Why the park? There're plenty of places in Canada and Alaska.'
'You don't let anybody shoot them in the park,' Geoffrey said simply.
'Ah.' The logic was indisputable. One does not take a friend to live where murderers are waiting to take his life.
