Brian's Hunt

THE HUNT

He left the canoe but he took the dog, his knife, the bow and his quiver, light moccasins, a plain dark T-shirt and a lightweight, dark green pullover.

He took matches and one small aluminum pan. He did not know how long this would take, only that he would not stop until it was done, but he wanted to travel as light as possible.

When he waded the shallows and went to the main shoreline he stopped and used dark mud to streak his face and neck, then slid into the foliage following the bear’s tracks. He would lose them later, he knew — they were very old tracks anyway — but in the meantime they would help him to further understand and know the bear and he would hold them as long as he could.

Initially the bear moved along the shore, working in the soft mud, following the canoe with Susan until the wind blew it away from him; then he turned and went up, away from the lake.

Here the tracks were muddled in the soft pine needles and harder to follow, although the dog seemed to have been paying attention to Brian and moved ahead with her nose down. At first Brian was dubious — he still did not know dogs that well — but again and again when he lost the tracks and followed the dog he would come upon the tracks once more and after an hour of on-again off-again tracking he began to trust the dog completely.

It was like having another sense, not to mention a kind of early-warning radar. The smell was old and the bear long gone, Brian could tell that by the relaxed attitude of the tracking dog. They moved well together, and Brian learned more about the bear.

He was lazy. He did not climb hills but worked around the base of them instead, turning logs, ripping stumps, and he had distinctive paw marks. One claw was gone on his left front paw and one broken in half on his right. In mud or soft dirt it was easy to read him, know him, and just before dark Brian came on a place where he had lain to rest or sleep.

In some deep grass the bear had matted down an area to make a bed. Brian felt the ground, not sure what he was looking for, a touch, a feel of the bear, but there was nothing. The grass was cool, and had dew forming on it and the dog was still not nervous so Brian moved off to the side and made a small fire and heated water and chewed on a piece of jerky he’d found in the cabin.

Then he drank, put the fire out, moved back into the brush and settled in to rest. He did not think of sleeping, not yet, but halfway through the night even the mosquitoes weren’t enough to stop him and he trusted in the dog’s warning ability and dozed enough for his mind and body to rest.

Before light he was moving again, still following the dog when he couldn’t cut open sign, but by midday he decided that following the meandering track of the bear would not be fruitful. He figured he was perhaps four or five miles from the lake where the attack had happened and the bear was clearly not moving in any pattern, was just wandering, looking for food.

He would stay in the area and Brian could accomplish more by getting to what high ground the terrain afforded and hunting downward, trying to get ahead of him, knowing the bear hated to climb hills, and he left the scent trail and climbed a nearby low ridge.

For a moment the dog hesitated, standing on the scent trail, whining softly; then she seemed to shrug and follow Brian up the ridge, dropping into position just in front of him, ears perked forward, nostrils flared to take in the most scent.

And they worked that way most of the day, hanging to the tops of ridges, moving slowly. Brian would take a few steps, stop, listen, watch the dog’s back hair and ears — how had he lived so long without a dog, he wondered again and again — and they saw bear.

Three times he saw bear, one small female, two even smaller yearling cubs, but they all moved away from him and the dog when they saw him and when he moved to where they had left tracks he knew they weren’t the bear involved in the attack.

He knew the attacking bear’s tracks, how his right front paw toed in slightly, along with the missing claw and broken other claw, like a signature.

And no new sign all that day. Not until evening.

They had moved across a ridge that led up a small hill and somehow, hunting along the ridges, he had come back to a hill he’d moved across before.

He did not know it at first, not until he crossed the top, the dog moving just ahead of him, and he saw a place where they had stopped to listen and rest. He recognized a scrub oak tree he had leaned against because it had a twisted, bent fork about four feet off the ground.

“Well,” he whispered, his voice sounding strange to him, “we’ve come around. . ” He stopped because the dog had changed. She had been smelling the ground and her back hair suddenly stood on end and she growled.

“What. .” Brian moved to where the dog stood, looked at the ground, but it was thick with humus and grass. He could read nothing. He held his breath, as the dog did, and they listened together but he heard nothing and he looked back to the ground and did not see anything until he had gone three yards farther along his own old track and there, where the grass had been worn by a white-tailed deer scraping, there was soft dirt and smack in the middle of the dirt there was a perfect print.

Large, huge, missing claw, perfect sign and very, very fresh.

It was the bear.

The Bear.

And it was following him, tracking him.

Hunting him.

Hunting him.

And for just that second, that long, long second, Brian went from predator to prey, felt a coldness on his neck, felt as a deer must feel when the wolves pick up its scent, as a rabbit must feel when the fox starts its run. . cold, no breath, everything stopped. No thinking. Just that long second of something even more than fear, something very old, very primitive.

The bear was hunting him.

Then it was gone. The coldness, the fear were gone and replaced by something even more pure, more primitive, as he thought of what was coming, what the bear’s tracks actually meant.

He did not have to hunt the bear any longer. It was hunting him, it would come to him, and it would be soon, soon.

Dusk now, he thought, dark in an hour, if it takes an hour. I passed here, what, three hours ago, and if he’s moving on my trail, how fast? Faster than me, certainly, he could be close, very close. In that split second he happened to be looking at the dog, saw the dog’s head turn to the left, and he dropped and turned at the same instant, heard brush crashing as he fell, brought the bow up, tried to pull the broadhead but too late, all too late.

The bear was on him, rolling him, cuffing him. The bow was knocked out of his hands, flying ahead, arrows spewing out of his quiver, the bear strangely silent, pushing, pounding him as he first rolled in a ball and knew that wouldn’t work, not now, not with this bear. This bear had come to kill him and he was going to kill him and there wasn’t a thing Brian could do about it. He tried for his knife but the bear knocked it out of his hands, knocked his arms sideways, grabbed his left arm in his jaws and flung Brian back and forth the way he would worry a small animal.

I’m not going to make this, Brian had time to think. He’s going to win again, he’s going to kill me, and then he heard the ripping growl of the dog and it landed on the bear’s back and grabbed and the bear turned to hit the dog, knocked it sideways twenty feet where it lay, stunned, and then the bear turned back to Brian.

But there had been that second, two seconds, and Brian was lying on the ground well away from his bow but the arrows that had flown out of his quiver were all around him and he grabbed a broadhead with his right hand — his left hung useless — and dove, following the arrow, into the center of the chest of the bear.

He was amazed at how easily it slid in and he saw only six inches of arrow showing and thought, There, that’s it then. .

But it wasn’t. The bear snapped at his chest, at the arrow, broke it off, and Brian tried to get away in that instant but the bear wasn’t done and grabbed him by a leg, pulled him back, and as he slid over the ground he came across another arrow and he grabbed it and turned and jammed it up into the middle of the bear and it still wasn’t enough and the bear cuffed him, slammed him alongside the head, and he went down and the last thing he saw was an enormous wall of fur coming over him and he thought, All right, this is how it ends.

This is how it all ends.

And everything tunneled down to nothing but a point of light and then that went dark and there was nothing left.

• • •

Sounds, soft whimpering sounds. For a second, he thought, That’s me. Everything was still dark, he was being crushed under some great darkness and then he smelled the bear, on him, around him.

And heard the sound again. It was the dog, licking his face, pulling at his shirt. The bear was on top of him, lying still, dead where it had fallen. The second arrow had, finally, brought death.

Brian pushed, pulled at the ground and the bear and finally got free. It was dark, though not pitchblack, and in the early light, limping and holding his left arm in, he found wood and got a fire going.

With the light he looked first to the dog. The original stitches had held, unbelievably. But she had a new wound about four inches long across the top of her head. There didn’t seem to be any other obvious injuries and with the dog settled Brian turned to himself.

Bites in the arm, on his leg, but not great tearing wounds. His left shoulder seemed to be dislocated and as he tried to raise his arm he heard a pop and it snapped back into place with a burst of pain that put him on his knees and brought splashes of color to his vision.

“Oh man. .”

But no other serious damage. He didn’t quite believe it. Not at first. The bear had seemed to be all over him, hitting and biting, and he’d thought the wounds would be much more serious. .

He turned to the bear. The dog had walked around the carcass, her hair still up, growling with bared teeth, but when the bear hadn’t moved, and was obviously dead, she had moved closer, peed on the bear’s leg, back-kicked dirt onto the body and walked away to sit off to the side licking her left rear leg where she had a small cut.

The bear lay dead and Brian tried to find some feeling of triumph, as the dog had, some sense of victory, but all he could think of were David and Anne and the great loss that Susan and her brother and sister had in their lives now. He had thought there would be more. He even hoped that he would feel more. But there was nothing but the loss of his friends.

And a dead bear.

Not a villain, not an evil thing. Just a dead bear. Like any other dead animal that he might have hunted. Killing the bear did not bring back his friends, did not ease the pain for Susan and her brother and sister.

It was just what it was, a dead bear.

And he would have to clean it now, skin it, pull the carcass down to the lake and get his canoe and take it back to camp and use what he could, not waste any more than he had to because in the end it was as wrong to waste the bear as it was to let it live after what it had done.

In the firelight he found his bow and arrows and knife and small aluminum pot. The pot was dented but he pulled the edges apart and made it serviceable. It was not far to the lake and he brought water up and boiled it and gave some to the dog and drank some himself. Then he boiled mud and put it on his cuts and the dog’s head to keep morning flies away and then took the knife and turned to the bear.

There was much work to do.