The bear sniffed the air, sensing for the presence of an intruder. From the way it turned its ears and moved its head, Emmy knew it had not placed them yet.
She motioned to Sarah with her eyes and carefully began stepping backward, looking for a pathway for them to escape unimpeded.
When the grizzly turned its good eye away from her, she dropped her bundle and began running, whispering loudly, “Run, Sarah. To the camp.”
The beast turned and saw the movement. Bellowing, it dropped to all fours.
Sarah screamed in a high-pitched shrill that crescendoed over the low roar of the grizzly, which had begun rushing toward the fleeing women.
As it broke through the saplings over the ridge they had crossed, the women saw movement and a flash of light off to the right.
The bear shuddered from the pain of a bullet striking its shoulder. As the bear turned toward the flash, standing fully upright and roaring loudly, Emmy and Sarah continued running in the direction of camp.
When Emmy looked back, she saw Marano Levi fifty feet away from the roaring beast. He was hurriedly reloading his musket for a second shot.
But the bear, wounded and furious, leapt the short distance in four quick, bounding strides and knocked the man to the ground.
It bit into Marano’s jaw and head. The dull, crunching sound and screams of the dying man carried loudly through the forest.
Emmy and Sarah cried out in horror. This time the bear caught their scent and turned away from Marano. It charged after them, running parallel toward the river below.
Emmy broke through the trees on the river bank first and saw a canoe beached on its side.
“Get to that boat, Sarah!”
The bear came through the trees sixty yards upstream.
She saw it stand and sniff the air, catching their scent again.
Just as they reached the vessel, it roared and charged up through the shoals toward them.
They put the boat between themselves and the animal. The canoe’s gunnels were high enough that the bear could not cross over it and, as the animal started to move around the prow to reach the other side, they both leaped into the boat.
From the opposite side, the bear crawled into the boat as well, and as it did so, its massive weight swung the craft into the water. The canoe started downstream carrying the three of them with it.
As Sarah and Emmy, still screaming, started to jump from the boat, they heard two loud reports and saw the big bear suddenly drop headfirst into the water.
It did not move again, and its weight held the canoe fixed in the shallow part of the stream.
Two men emerged from the woods, each carrying a smoking fifty-caliber rifle.
It was Marté and Cull.
“Ze girls is playing hide and go seek with the big beast, eh?” Marté said.
Cull, making his way over to the bear with a drawn knife to finish it if necessary, exhaled a deep, coarse bass cackle at Marté’s joke.
Moments later, Jojo found them. As he silently approached the canoe, he surveyed the dead grizzly and then Marté and his companion.
Taking in the smug grins of the shooters and with hands on his knives, Jojo stepped between the men and the two women.
Marté smiled. Doffing his filthy fur hat, he bowed deeply toward Emmy as if he were mimicking the formal address to royalty.
“You are most welcome, madam.”
Brushing aside his sarcastic display, Emmy wondered to herself what this might cost them.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Jojo, Emmy and Sarah found Marano Levi’s broken body and spent the rest of the afternoon burying him in the cold, hard ground. Jojo put the Spanish Bible in the lonely man’s grave.
“This was not his lucky book,” Jojo said. “But it gave him some comfort in this life. Maybe it will help him find his way in the next one.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Sarah
She had wept bitterly as they buried Marano, even more so than when they had put her stepfather into the ground.
Isaac had left with a heroic reputation that would keep him alive for many, and that had comforted her. But Marano was a different kind of hero.
Sarah had developed a fondness for the lonely man that made her feel almost motherly. He had been such a lost soul, she thought, so misunderstood. No one had bothered to try to understand Marano Levi.
In his final act when he shot the beast, he was more focused than she had ever seen him during the short time he had been with them. And the teasing to which Jojo had subjected him sometimes was mean, but it seemed not to affect Marano. She concluded that beset as he was by his seizures, Marano, nevertheless, had found a place of peace in his life. It was a place in his mind where no insults could hurt him.
As they moved upstream, Sarah wondered how men arrived at what they became. Sometimes, she observed, there were signs or marks that gave the life tale away.
On the morning after they had buried Marano, she had come back to the camp and saw the Negro, Cull, working away at butchering the beast. He had stripped away his shirt, and she saw marks all over his back and chest that had to be the raised scars of repeated whippings.
They were old scars and, except for a few on his flanks, had merged together to form an indistinct rubbery mass of flesh. Some of it was dark, and some of it was whiter than her own skin.
And after that, she knew about Cull and suddenly was no longer afraid of him.
But she had never known Marano’s story, except for what Jojo had said about him—that he was not a priest and that tribes in the region did not believe in his magic or communion with his God.
That had troubled her. She had doubted Jojo’s pronouncement on that even
