This is how it works, he told himself.
Change of plans.
He laid the loop of rope at the base of the second pole.
What about the left?
I can’t trust that side.
What else am I forgetting?
Stop, he told his heart.
Stop.
He crept into the cave, the tip of the spear dead center on the sleeping mass.
There was a moment.
A moment to think and to have thought too much.
He felt it coming. He’d known it before at other times and knew it was best to stay ahead of such moments.
He drove the spear hard into the mass.
An instant later it was wrenched out of his hands as the bear turned over. He heard a dry snap of wood echo off the roof of the cave as he retreated back toward the entrance.
For a moment, the Boy took his eyes off the bear as he slipped the loop about his wrist and grabbed the spear, making sure to keep the trailing end of the parachute cord away from the end of the pole.
In that moment he could hear the roar of the bear. It filled the cave, and beneath the roar he could hear her claws clicking against the stone floor as she scrambled up toward him.
When he looked up, following the blackened tip of the spear, he found the grizzly’s head, squat, flat, almost low beneath the main bulk of her body. She roared again, gnashing a full row of yellowed fangs.
He jabbed the spear into her face and felt the weapon go wide, glancing off bone.
He backed up a few steps and planted the butt of the long pole in the ground.
The grizzly, brown, shaggy, angry, lurched out onto the ledge. It rose up on its hind legs and the Boy saw that it might, if it came forward just a bit, impale itself on the pole if it attacked him directly. He adjusted the pole right underneath the heart of the raging bear.
The bear made a wide swipe with its paw smashing the pole three quarters of the way to the top.
In the same instant that the pole was wrenched from the Boy’s grip, and as if the moment had caused an intensity of awareness, he felt the slipknot, its mouth still wide, float from off his wrist.
He’d heard that before.
His back foot, his good leg, planted at the edge of the cliff, the Boy raised the final pole.
The bear on hind legs wallowed forward.
The Boy checked to make sure the parachute cord was really gone.
It was.
The moment that hung between the Boy and the bear was brief and startlingly clear. To have questioned what must be done next would have been lethal to either.
The Boy loped forward and rammed the pole straight up and into the chest of the bear.
‘There is no other way but this,’ he thought in that moment of running.
‘No other way but this.’
He felt the furry chest of the bear meet his grip on the pole.
He pushed hard and felt the arms of the bear on his shoulders. He felt a hot breathy roar turn to a whisper above the top of his head.
His arms were shaking.
His eyes were closed.
He was still alive.
He backed away from the belly of the bear, letting go of the pole as the bear fell off to one side.
He was covered in a thick, cold sweat.
There was no other way.
Chapter 16
In the moments that followed the death of the bear, routine took over, ways the Boy had known his whole life.
Bleed the animal.
Don’t think about how close you came to her claws.
The knife at his back was out as he stood over the carcass, finding the jugular, his good hand shaking, and then a quick flick and blood was running out onto the granite of the Sierra Nevada.
Don’t remember her hot breath on top of your head when there was little you could do but go forward with the pole.
Next he made a cut into the chest. Working from the breastbone up to the jaw, he cut through flesh and muscle. When the cut was made he took out his tomahawk, adjusted his grip once as he raised it above his head and then slammed it down onto the breastbone several times. Soon he was removing the organs. Heart, lungs, esophagus, bladder, intestines, and rectum.
My hands are shaking, Sergeant.
It is cold out and getting colder, which will be good for the meat, but I still have much work to do.
Walking stiffly, he descended the mountain and returned to camp. He gathered his gear and when that was done, he began to coax Horse to get up one more time.
Horse seemed stunned that the Boy would even consider such a thing, but before long, whispering and leading, patting and coaxing, the Boy had him up and on his legs.
“I’ll carry everything, you just follow me. We’re going someplace warm.”
Late afternoon turned to winter evening as he led Horse up onto the mountain. Halfway up, as they worked side to side across the gray granite ledges, snow began to fall, and by the time they’d reached the top, the Boy was almost dragging Horse. Never once did he curse at the animal, knowing that he was already asking too much of his only friend. And for his part, Horse seemed to suffer through the climb as though death and the hardships that must come with it are inevitable.
At the top, the Boy dropped Horse’s lead and began to collect what little firewood he could find. Soon there was a small fire inside the cave. He led Horse into the cave, expecting more protest than the snort Horse gave at the scent of the bear.
The fire cast flickering shadows along the inside of the cave and though there was a small vault, the cave was neither vast nor deep.
The Boy put his blanket over Horse, who’d begun to tremble. He fed Horse from a sack of wild oats he kept for the times when there was nothing at hand to crop.
Horse chewed a bit and then seemed to lose interest.
That’s not good.
The Boy left the sack open before Horse and returned to the carcass of the bear.
Snow fell in thick drifts across the ledge as the wind began to whip along the mountainside.
‘It has to be done now,’ the Boy thought to himself.
But I’ll need wood. The fire has to be kept going.
In the dark he descended the mountain, working quickly among the howling pines to find as much dead wood as possible. Every time he stopped to look for wood in the thin light of the last of the day, he felt his weak
