Grizzly Fury

1

The first to die was a prospector. Old Harry, folks called him. Elk hunters were near his diggings and decided to pay him a visit. Everyone liked the old man. He could spin yarns by the hour.

His yarn-spinning days were over. They found Old Harry’s legs near his cabin. A blood trail led to an arm and more blood led to the rest of him. His head had been split open and his brains apparently eaten.

The tracks of the culprit were plain enough. Old Harry’s attacker was a bear. Judging by the size of the prints it was a grizzly. An exceptionally large grizzly, but then, large bears were nothing new in the mountains that far north.

The hunters buried the remains and went on with their hunt.

The bear was long gone and they figured they had nothing to worry about. They found elk and shot a bull and skinned it and dried and salted the meat. There were five of them with families to feed so one elk wasn’t enough. Four hunters went off the next day while the fifth man stayed at camp. The four returned toward sunset, worn and tired and hungry and empty-handed, to find their camp in a shambles and their companion missing. Their effects had been torn apart. The racks of elk meat had been shattered. They looked for their friend and finally came on parts of his body in a ravine. It was Old Harry all over again, only worse. Their friend’s head, too, had been split like a melon, and the brains devoured.

The hunters got out of there. They rode like madmen the twentyfive miles down to Gold Creek and told everyone what had happened. It was the talk of the town for weeks and then they had new things to talk about.

Bear attacks were common enough that the deaths didn’t alarm them.

Then one evening a horse came limping into town. It was lathered with sweat and bleeding from claw marks. Some of them knew the man who owned it. A large party hurried to his cabin four miles up the creek.

The front door had been busted in. Inside was horror. Blood was everywhere, along with bits and pieces of the victim.

That a bear was to blame was obvious. That it was the same bear occurred to them when they found that the man’s brains had been scooped out.

They realized the grizzly must have followed the elk hunters down. That was unusual but not remarkable. They thought they were dealing with an ordinary bear and organized a hunt to put an end to the man-killer before anyone else died.

Fifty men bristling with weapons rode out to wage battle with the beast. They used dogs to follow the trail, big, fearless dogs that had gone after other bears and mountain lions many a time. The dogs found the scent and their owner let them loose and for over a mile their baying showed they were hard after their quarry.

The men hurried to catch up. They were excited and confident and told one another that the grizzly was fit to be stuffed and mounted.

When the howls changed to yowls of terror, it stopped them in their tracks. They sat breathless and still as the screams and shrieks seemed to go on forever. When silence fell they cautiously advanced.

It was as bad as they imagined it would be. The dogs had been slaughtered. For half an acre the ground was a jigsaw of legs and tails and ribs and bodies. They tried to take up the trail without the dogs but they soon lost it.

For a few days Gold Creek was as quiet as a church. But these were hardy men and women, used to life in the wild, and gradually their lives returned to normal.

A couple of weeks passed. One day smoke was seen rising above a cabin along the creek. So much smoke, it drew others to investigate. The cabin was in flames. They yelled for the prospector who lived there but he didn’t answer. They reckoned he must have knocked a lamp over and they worried that he was still inside and had been burned to death. Then someone noticed blood and they followed it into the trees. The remains were like a trail of bread crumbs. Here an arm, there a leg, at another spot a foot. The torso was whole, which surprised them. The brains were missing, which didn’t.

A town meeting was called. Everyone agreed this was a serious situation. Four people and seven good dogs were dead.

They decided to send for the best bear hunter in the territory.

His fee was a hundred dollars but that was money well spent if they could be rid of the grizzly.

The bear hunter came. He brought his own dogs, four of the largest and meanest-looking hounds anyone had ever seen. He spent an evening drinking and boasting of his prowess and the next morning he and his mean-looking hounds rode off after the bear.

No one ever set eyes on the hunter or his dogs again. About a month after the bear hunter disappeared, two men going up the creek to their claim happened on a dead mule. Its throat had been ripped out. Its owner, or rather, parts of him, lay nearby. He had a hole in the top of his head as big around as a pie pan. And no brain.

Another hunt was organized. Every last man who lived in or around Gold Creek was required to report with a rifle and be mustered into what the town council called the Bear Militia. They took to the field with high hopes. Every square foot for miles was scoured. They didn’t find so much as a fresh track.

The hunt was deemed a success. They told themselves that their show of force had scared the bear off—that they were shed of it once and for all.

The next morning the parson rode out to visit an elderly woman and her husband. The woman was sickly and the parson paid daily visits to bolster her spirits. Their cabin was less than a quarter of a mile from Gold Creek. He knew something was wrong when he saw that the door hung by a hinge. Clutching his Bible, the parson made bold to poke his head in. He promptly drew it out again, and retched.

Yet another town meeting was called. Enough was enough, everyone agreed. The way things were going, pretty soon the grizzly would be breaking into homes in town. Something had to be done.

Gold Creek was prosperous. They had six hundred dollars in the treasury but they didn’t think that was enough. They took up a collection that brought the total to a thousand. The mayor thought that was piddling. They needed the best and the best didn’t come cheap. He reminded them of how many had lost their lives, and how many more might lose theirs, and called on everyone to do their civic duty and donate as much as they could afford. He also threatened to close the saloons until he had a large enough sum to suit him.

A week later the flyers went out. They were sent to newspapers far and wide, announcing that a five-thousand-dollar bounty had been placed on the grizzly that was terrorizing Gold Creek.

They even gave the bear a name.

They called it Brain Eater.

Skye Fargo came up the trail from Fort Flathead. He swung around Flathead Lake and followed Swann River to the mountains. Instead of crossing over Maria Pass to the other side of the divide, he took the trail that led north and in a few days reached Gold Creek.

From a distance it looked like any other boomtown except that most of the buildings were made from logs. At the south end stood an exception, a church with a steeple. There were a few houses, too, that boasted of the prosperity of their owners.

Flowing past the town from the north was the ribbon of water that accounted for much of Gold Creek’s wealth.

Fargo gigged the Ovaro down the mountain. A big man, he wore buckskins and a red bandanna. A Colt was strapped around his waist and the stock of a rifle jutted from his saddle scabbard. His lake blue eyes missed little as he passed outlying cabins and shacks and entered the town.

He was pleased to see so many saloons—six, by his count. It suggested to him that like many frontier settlements, the people of Gold Creek revered the Lord on Sunday and raised holy hell the rest of the week.

A portly man in a bowler was crossing the street and nodded as he went by.

“Ask you a question, mister,” Fargo said, drawing rein.

The man had florid cheeks and ferret eyes. He stopped and looked Fargo up and down and said, “Another one, by God.”

“Another what?” Fargo said, not sure he liked the man’s tone.

“Another fool after that damn griz,” the man said. “Or am I mistaken?”

“It’s not dead yet?” Fargo wanted to know. He’d hate to think he had come all this way for nothing.

The man snorted. “Mister, that bear is Satan incarnate. You ask me, the bullet hasn’t been made that will bring him low.”

Fargo bent and patted the stock of his rifle. “I aim to give it a try.”

“You and fifty others. Our town is crawling with bear hunters, thanks to that flyer we never should have sent out. My name is Petty, by the way. Theodore Petty. I own the general store. I also happen to be the mayor.”

“You don’t want the hunters here?”

“At first I did. I put five hundred dollars toward the bounty, thinking it was for the best. Had I known the kind of people it would bring I wouldn’t have done it. But enough idle chat. My advice to you is to turn around and leave. Five of the hunters have already died and you could be the sixth.”

“The griz has killed five more?”

“Actually, the total is eleven. But no. Only two of them were hunters. Another was killed in a drunken fight in a saloon and two more had a falling-out over how they were going to split the five thousand dollars and shot themselves dead.” Petty touched his bowler’s brim. “Good day to you, sir.”

Fargo digested the news as he rode to a hitch rail in front of one of the saloons and dismounted. Tying off the reins, he stretched. The saloon was called the Sluice. He pushed on the batwings. Although it was barely noon the place was crowded. He bellied up to the bar and paid for a bottle. Since he couldn’t find an empty chair, he went back out and sat on an upended crate and savored his first swallow of red-eye in more than a week.

“Well now, what have we here?”

Fargo cocked an eye over the bottle at a young woman in a gay yellow dress, holding a yellow parasol. Brunette curls fanned from under a matching yellow bonnet. She was appraising him as a horse buyer might a stud stallion. “Didn’t your ma ever warn you about talking to strange men?”

“She did, indeed,” the woman said. “But I always make exceptions for handsome men, and God Almighty, you are one handsome son of a bitch.”

Fargo laughed and introduced himself.

“I’m Fanny Jellico,” she said with a twirl of her parasol. “Let me guess. You’re here after Brain Eater?”

Nodding, Fargo said, “You too, I take it?”

Now it was Fanny who laughed. She leaned her back to the wall, closed her parasol, and surveyed the busy street. “It’s become a circus. I suppose I shouldn’t complain since we’ve got more business than we can handle but it’s almost as dangerous in town as it is out there in the woods with the bear.”

“We?” Fargo said.

“Me and a bunch of girls came all the way from Denver,” Fanny explained. “It was Madame Basque’s doing. She runs a sporting house. When she saw that flyer she knew there was money to be made. So she loaded eight of us into a wagon and here we are.”

“That’s a long way to come.”

“Maybe so,” Fanny said. “But we’re making money hand over thigh.”

Fargo chuckled. “The marshal and the parson don’t mind?”

“There isn’t any law,” Fanny revealed. “The town never got around to appointing one. As for the parson”—she gazed down the street at the church, then looked at Fargo and winked—“he’s as friendly as can be.”

“I hear there’s been a knifing and a shooting.”

“Hell, there have been twenty or more just since we came,” Fanny said. “The hunters spend more time fighting amongst themselves than they do hunting the bear. And I use the word ‘hunter’ loosely. Some of them couldn’t find their own ass if they were told where it is.”

Fargo was beginning to understand why Theodore Petty resented the influx of bounty seekers. Gold Creek had gone from a run-of-the-mill mountain town to a wild-and-woolly pit of violence and carnal desire. Just the kind of place he liked most.

“If you’re interested in a good time, you might look me up at the Three Deuces. Madame Basque made an arrangement where we use the rooms in the back. I’m there from six until midnight most every night.”

“I might just do that.”

Fanny brazenly traced the outline of his jaw with a finger. “I might just let you have me at a discount, as good-looking as you are.”

The next instant the front window exploded with a tremendous crash. Fargo sprang to his feet and simultaneously Fanny screamed and threw herself against him. Both watched a man tumble to a stop in the street and lie half dazed.

Through the shattered window strode a colossus. Seven feet tall if he was an inch, he wore a buffalo robe and a floppy hat. Tucked under his belt was an armory: two pistols, two knives, and a hatchet. He walked over to the man in the street and declared, “Get up and get your due.”

The man rolled over. Buckskins clad his wiry frame. He was getting on in years and had hair as white as snow. He had a lot of wrinkles, too. Propping himself on his elbows, he wiped a sleeve across his mouth, smearing the blood that dribbled over his lower lip. “You shouldn’t ought to have done that, Moose.”

“You say mean things, you should expect it,” the man-mountain declared.

Fargo pried Fanny’s fingers from his arm. “Hold this,” he said, and gave her the bottle. Moving out from under the overhang, he headed toward the old man. “Rooster Strimm,” he said. “It’s been a coon’s age.”

Rooster blinked and grinned. “Why, look who it is. Ain’t seen you since Green River.”

Moose didn’t like the interruption. “You know this feller?” he said to Rooster.

“I surely do,” the old man confirmed. “He’s a friend of mine. Skye Fargo, meet Moose Taylor.”

Moose turned. “Friend or not, you’d better back away. Rooster, here, was mean to me and I don’t like it when folks are mean. I aim to hurt him some and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Care to bet?” Fargo said.